Georgia: Governor's Race Tight, Senate Race Diverges by Pollster

Georgia's two statewide races are producing sharply different pictures this week, and the split shows up even within the same pollsters' work. In the governor's race, InsiderAdvantage's September 23 survey gives Republican Rick Jackson a 48% to 46% edge over Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms, a gap inside the margin of error. Big Data Poll, fielded the same day, found the race dead even at 50% apiece among 712 registered voters. PollingSource rates the contest a toss-up, and little in either survey suggests that label is wrong.

The Senate race, surveyed by the same two pollsters on the same dates, tells a different story. InsiderAdvantage has Democrat Jon Ossoff ahead of Republican Mike Collins by eight points, 50% to 42%, and Big Data Poll shows an even wider 51% to 40% lead. That race carries a Likely D rating, a full tier removed from the governor's toss-up designation.

The divergence is worth sitting with. When two firms field surveys on identical days in the same state and find one race within two points while the other shows a high single-digit or larger lead, it signals that a meaningful share of the electorate is prepared to split its ticket — or that one race is drawing a different composition of voters to the poll than the other. It could also reflect candidate-specific dynamics that generic partisan lean doesn't capture: Jackson and Bottoms may simply be running closer to parity in name recognition and favorability than Collins and Ossoff are. Without crosstabs on independents or self-identified swing voters, it's not possible to say from the topline numbers alone which explanation carries more weight.

What is clear is that the gap is consistent across both pollsters, not an artifact of one house's methodology. InsiderAdvantage and Big Data Poll agree, within a few points, that the governor's race is a coin flip and that the Senate race leans toward Ossoff. That consistency lends the divergence more credibility than if only one firm had picked it up. It also raises a practical question for both parties' turnout operations in the closing weeks: if ticket-splitting is real and durable, down-ballot strategy in Georgia may need to be built race-by-race rather than around a single top-of-ticket message.

Georgia's status as a perennial battleground means both races will draw outsized national attention through November, and the contrast between them is likely to sharpen rather than resolve as more pollsters weigh in.