Late-deciding voters could decide NC’s next attorney general, WRAL News Poll shows

The race to become North Carolina’s next attorney general will likely be decided by voters still making up their minds in late October, according to the results of a new WRAL News poll.

Democrat Jeff Jackson leads Republican Dan Bishop 44% to 42% in a poll of 853 likely voters conducted between Oct. 23 and Oct. 26. SurveyUSA conducted the poll on behalf of WRAL. The narrow margin is within the survey’s credibility interval of 4.1 percentage points.

A credibility interval is similar to a margin of error, but takes into account more factors and is considered by some pollsters to be a more accurate measure of statistical certainty.

But the poll found that 14% of voters have not yet decided who they will vote for in the race to become the state’s top law enforcement officer. The survey found that nearly one in four registered unaffiliated voters were still undecided. Jackson and Bishop are running to replace current Attorney General Josh Stein, a Democrat running for governor.

“The undecided voters there, they either don’t want to vote at all or they just want to stick with their partisan affiliation,” said Chris Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University. “When it comes down to it, if they don’t know much about the two candidates, it’s going to be generic Republican versus generic Democrat.”

If so, Jackson could hold a slight edge: 12% of registered Democrats say they are undecided, compared to 8% of Republicans.

“While the people who live and breathe this might think it’s crazy that someone couldn’t know who Dan Bishop is at this point or who Jeff Jackson is at this point, a lot of voters don’t,” Cooper said. “So they’re just going to use their partisan lens to cast the final vote.”

Jackson and Bishop are current members of the U.S. House of Representatives representing Charlotte-area districts and have previously served in the state legislature.

More than $30 million has been spent in the race by the candidates and outside groups, including a flurry of television ads on both sides. Jackson has taken to calling it the most expensive AG race in the nation’s history. The last five attorneys general have run for governor, including current Governor Roy Cooper, who was AG from 2001 to 2017.

The state’s voters have not elected a Republican attorney general in more than 125 years, although a Republican was briefly appointed to the role in the mid-1970s.

Jackson has led in two previous WRAL News polls, leading 43% to 36% in September and a 41% to 40% lead after the March primaries. Other latest opinion polls have found a similarly close race with Jackson with slim wires.

More than 3.1 million voters — more than half the number of people who voted in 2020 and nearly 40% of all registered voters in 2024 — have already cast their ballots in North Carolina as of Tuesday afternoon.

As the campaign enters its final days, Bishop said he just wants to keep getting his message out.

“If you want your family to be safe, if you want your children, your grandchildren to be safe, there’s a way to do things differently,” Bishop told WRAL earlier this month. “Woke crime policy is not the answer. The evidence is in. We can restore law and order to North Carolina.”

Jackson told WRAL earlier this month that he would spend the final days asking voters to give him a chance to earn their support.

“If you listen to what I have to say about what I want with this job, if you read a little bit about my record, how I’ve spent my life soldier, prosecutor, I think you’ll see that I have the qualifications ,” Jackson said, “but also that I bring the temperament that we really want from a state attorney.”