Race for Iowa U.S. Senate seat in 2014 wide open, poll indicates

Iowa voters will want to brace themselves for a barrage of advertising as a field of largely unknown candidates seeks their support for what pollsters find to be a wide-open U.S. Senate race in 2014.

The race, according to a Quinnipiac University Poll released Friday morning, “at this point features a bunch of candidates who are unknown to most Iowa voters.”

That's not the case with the field of potential candidates for president in 2016. If the election were today, Iowa voters would back former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over Republican Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida or Rand Paul of Kentucky.

However, Paul, who visited Iowa earlier this month, would top Vice President Joseph Biden. Rubio and Biden are tied in Iowa at this time, Quinnipiac found during live interviews of 1,411 registered voters from May 15-21.

Quinnipiac called land lines and cellphones. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.6 percentage points.

In the race to succeed retiring U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin in 2014, Quinnipiac found that the decision by better-known candidates – U.S. Reps. Tom Latham and Steve King, for example -- not to seek the seat “leaves a group of potential candidates so unknown to voters that more than half don't know enough about any of them to have an opinion.”

The best-known among them is 1st District Rep. Bruce Braley, a Waterloo Democrat – and the only candidate to have formally entered the race and who is actively campaigning.

Braley, a trial attorney, is viewed favorably by 27 percent of Iowa voters and unfavorably by 14 percent. A majority, 57 percent, don't know enough about him to form an opinion, the poll found. Even among Democrats, only 41 percent have a favorable view of the fourth-term congressman and 52 percent said they didn't know enough about Braley to form an opinion.

On the GOP side of the ballot, the percentages of Iowa voters who don't know enough about them to form an opinion of Matt Whitaker, Joni Ernst, Matt Schultz, David Young and A.J. Spiker ranges from 81 to 94 percent.

“Iowans can look forward to a lot of television ads as all these candidates try to introduce themselves to the folks who have no idea who they are,” said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. “Braley is clearly better known than the Republicans, but he too is an unknown to a majority of Iowa voters.”

Schultz, a first-term secretary of state, is the only one of the Republicans to hit double digits in his favorability ranking. But he hit just 13 percent among the GOP polled and the percentage of Republicans who said they didn't know enough to form an opinion was higher – 84 percent – than the percentage of all respondents who don't know him – 81 percent.

On the other hand, Quinnipiac found the unfavorability ratings for the GOP field ranged from 2 percent to 7 percent.

For more information, visit

http://www.quinnipiac.edu/polling