The state’s top law enforcement officer, Attorney General Henry McMaster, is leading two other high-profile Republican state officeholders as a potential candidate in the 2010 governor’s race, according to a recent poll conducted by a local political consulting firm.

McMaster leads Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer 53 percent to 43 percent and leads U.S. Rep. Gresham Barrett 63 percent to 37 percent, according to the poll of 700 South Carolinians likely to vote in the 2010 GOP gubernatorial primary.

None of the three politicians have said they are running for governor, but each has said they are considering it.

The poll was conducted in late January by the Columbia-based firm Richard Quinn & Associates, according to an executive summary of it obtained by Free Times.

The firm’s owner, McMaster campaign consultant Richard Quinn, acknowledged that he wrote the summary but said the poll findings were not supposed to be public.

It was originally intended to be a poll about McMaster’s job approval rating as attorney general, in case he decides to run for another term for that office, Quinn says. But because McMaster is also considering running for governor, the firm added questions about him as a possible gubernatorial contender.

“We found … that McMaster has a job approval rating of 63 percent,” the summary states, “which is unusually high for any public official in today’s environment. His disapproval rating was only 5.6 percent.”

The poll found McMaster enjoying “a significant advantage” over Bauer and Barrett.
Although the GOP primary for the 2010 governor’s race is 17 months away, more than half of the sample polled said they were ready to make a decision now.

Virtually all of Barrett’s support in the poll came from the 3rd Congressional District he represents, giving him a “serious statewide name identification problem,” the summary states. He trailed McMaster by 26 percent.

Some language in the poll might have skewed the results against Barrett.

When respondents were asked if they wished their congressman had voted for or against federal bailouts of banks and other financial institutions, 74 percent said they opposed the bailouts. “Barrett’s vote for bailout legislation is certain to be a major problem for him if he seeks to run statewide,” reads the poll summary.

Jim Dyke, a political consultant from Charleston who is working for Barrett, calls the language in the poll a “pretty good tactic” by those who conducted it. “But I think history has proven polls [like this one] not to be an accurate predictor,” Dyke says.

As for Bauer, although he has made serious efforts to appeal to senior citizens through programs in the Lieutenant Governor’s Office on Aging, the poll says McMaster still leads him 58 percent to 42 percent among respondents older than 60.

The survey summary concludes that if McMaster decides to run for governor he will enter the race with broad name recognition and a 60 percent to 4 percent favorable/unfavorable ratio. “McMaster begins with a very clear advantage,” the poll says.

It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.8 percent.