Russia's First Deputy Prime Minister and presidential candidate Dmitry Medvedev, who is also chairman of Gazprom, speaks during a visit to the Volokolamskaya compressor plant outside Moscow February 11, 2008. REUTERS/Dmitry Astakhov/RIA Novosti

MOSCOW (Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin’s preferred successor, Dmitry Medvedev, continues to dominate Russia’s presidential election race with 62 percent support, an opinion poll showed on Tuesday.

Medvedev has declined to debate with any of the three other candidates but enjoys strong backing from both Putin and state-controlled media.

He leads the field by over 50 percentage points, three weeks before the March 2 vote, according to state-owned pollster VTsIOM.

Medvedev’s rating was down one percentage point from the last VTsIOM poll published a week ago, but still far ahead of his nearest challenger, Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov, whose support gained one point to 8 percent.

Nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky was in third place with 7 percent and Andrei Bogdanov of the small Democratic Party fourth with 1 percent.

The survey was conducted on Feb. 9-10 among 1,600 Russian voters in 46 regions and has a 3.4 percent margin of error.