Congressman Joe Walsh told the Chicago Sun-Times today that the campaign’s internal polling numbers show his race against Democrat Tammy Duckworth in a dead heat, though the campaign has not released those numbers.
Meanwhile, Walsh said financial numbers due out later this month are likely to show he’s raised $300,000 in the last quarter, meaning Duckworth has outraised him about 5 to 1.
Outside spending is another story, however, with a SuperPAC having pumped more than $1.7 million into Walsh’s campaign in the form of a series of attack ads against Duckworth.
The internal polling disclosure comes in a week of wildly varying polls — from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee showing Duckworth up by 10 points to a We Ask America poll showing Walsh up slightly with 47 percent of the vote vs. Duckworth at about 46 percent.
“Why is this election so close? She’s had this district drawn for her,” Walsh said, referencing the fact that the incumbent’s district had been sliced up and redrawn to benefit Democrats.
When asked why he believed the race was so close when other polls — aside from We Ask America — had shown Duckworth with a large lead, he pointed to the campaign’s own polling.
“Our internal numbers say this is a dead heat, it’s really close,” he said.
The race has become one of the most closely watched in the nation.
This week, Duckworth released numbers showing that she raised $1.5 million in the last quarter.
“It will be amongst the highest for challengers for congress in the country,” said Anton Becker for the Duckworth campaign. “$1.5 million is an enormous amount.
It just shows how grass roots our campaign is.”
The campaign reported this week that nearly 95 percent of the individual contributions Duckworth received were for $100 or less and the average individual contribution was $53.17.
Numbers are due later this month, but Walsh on Friday said he believed his campaign had raised around $300,000 in that same time period.
However, there has been an enormous infusion of cash into Walsh’s campaign by an outside SuperPAC called Now or Never.
