Poll: Most South Carolina voters don't want Graham to run for president

Most South Carolinians who are Republicans or lean Republican, 56.5 percent, do not want U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham to run for president, according to a new poll from Winthrop University.

The poll found 34 percent of the same group think Graham should run for president, while 8.2 percent aren't sure and 1.3 percent refused to say.

The survey comes with the Republican presidential field still emerging and almost a year before South Carolina's first-in-the-South presidential preference primary.

Among South Carolina registered voters, Republican or not, 65.3 percent oppose a Graham presidential campaign, according to the poll out Wednesday.

Graham has been raising money and visiting two early-voting states, Iowa and New Hampshire, as he explores a run for the White House just four months after South Carolinians handed him a third term in the U.S. Senate.

Graham spokesman Kevin Bishop declined to comment on the results.

An NBC/Marist poll released last month found 58 percent of registered voters in South Carolina did not want Graham to run for president, with 35 percent saying they did.

ABC's George Stephanopoulos asked Graham about that finding during a recent interview on "This Week."

"Why are the people who know you best weighing in against a run?" Stephanopoulos asked Graham.

Graham replied, "Well a lot of them are Democrats who probably don't want a Republican running for president. At the end of the day, if I didn't think I could win my home state, I wouldn't be doing this."

Of the 877 registered voters surveyed by NBC/Marist, 17 percent picked Graham as their favorite to win the South Carolina primary.

That was enough for Graham to lead a field of 11 potential GOP presidential candidates mentioned in the poll.

But the majority who didn't want Graham to run no doubt spread their support over the 10 other choices, said Scott Huffmon, a Winthrop political science professor who directs the university's polling.

And some voters who said they wanted Graham to run didn't pick him as their favorite in the primary.

"Put another way," Huffmon said. "Even though he got the most votes of any single potential candidate, 83 percent did not choose him."

Winthrop said its telephone survey of 1,109 South Carolina residents took place between Feb. 21 and March 1. It has a margin of error of 3 percent, plus or minus, at a 95 percent confidence level.

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