Alex Mooney’s campaign is refusing to release details of a poll it floated earlier this week.
The poll, conducted by Public Opinion Strategies, shows Mooney, the Republican candidate in the Second Congressional district of West Virginia, at 40 percent, the Democrat Nick Casey at 28 percent, the Independent Ed Rabel at 8 percent and the Libertarian Davy Jones at 5 percent.
The poll found 19 percent of voters polled were undecided.
The poll also found that among independents, Mooney leads Casey by a 26-point margin, 47% – 21%.
The Mooney campaign refused to release details about how Rabel, the Independent, and Jones, the Libertarian, did among independents.
For its part, the Casey campaign, fearful of Rabel’s impact in November, issued a statement saying — “no one believes the third-party candidates have double-digit support.”
But Casey’s campaign refused to release its own internal tracking polls.
“We have done polling and it produced a very positive result from our perspective,” Casey campaign spokesperson Mark Polen told the Charleston Daily Mail. “However, we did not feel the need to release it to dispute his poll, which we believe to be without merit.”
Rabel is running a campaign highlighting his opposition to mountaintop removal mining and fracking.
Both Casey and Mooney support mountaintop removal mining and fracking.
Casey’s campaign has taken in tens of thousands of dollars from oil and gas interests, including over $15,000 from executives at EQT Corporation, one of the largest natural gas producers in the Appalachian Basin.
The Mooney and Casey campaigns have each raised more than $1 million, the vast majority of it from PACs and large contributors.