Republican Bobby Jindal has an 11-point lead over Democrat Kathleen Blanco in the race for Louisiana governor, an independent poll has said.
The runoff election is on November 15.
Jindal has 49 per cent compared to Blanco's 38 per cent in the poll by Verne Kennedy of Market Research Insight of Pensacola, Fla.
Jindal for Governor
It is the first independent survey outside the party camps showing Jindal with a clear lead that is outside the 4-point margin of error inherent in polling data.
Kennedy has been polling Louisiana since the late 1960s and has a reputation for accuracy. He has polled for both Republicans and Democrats in 22 states. In Louisiana, he has been polling the gubernatorial race all year for a group of wealthy businessmen, who include Jindal and Blanco contributors.
He has discussed his data with both camps. The poll of 600 people who voted in the October 4 election likely reflects the fact that Jindal's heavy television campaign never stopped after his 33 per cent showing in the primary, during which Blanco left the airwaves almost exclusively to him while she regrouped and raised money, analysts said.
The candidature of Bobby, born as Piyush, Jindal, is striking in that the outgoing Republican Governor Mike Foster has endorsed it and at 32 years he has already been a senior official in the Bush administration.
The Rhodes scholar, whose family immigrated from Punjab before he was born, is credited with having turned the state's medicare deficit into a surplus while he ran the system as secretary of Department of Health and Hospitals.
Louisiana's small Indian American population has supported Jindal's campaign as has the wider Indian-American community. "Forty per cent of his donation came from out of state, and many of those were from Indians," a party observer said.
Jindal has raised about $2 million, significantly more than any other candidate, he said.
