the candidates vying to replace the embattled senator have been in a slug fast for coveted County organization lines on the GOP side South Jersey entrepreneur Curtis Basha on Tuesday won his fourth so-called party line after Somerset County Republicans endorsed him in the primary beating out menden burrow mayor Christine Serrano Glassner and former New Jersey 12 reporter Alex zadan and while the broad Statewide County Line support is considered a major victory a new poll from Monmouth University out today finds most Republican voters have never heard of the candidates on the Democratic side first lady Tammy Murphy appears to be the most well-known among those candidates for more on the poll results I'm joined by Patrick Murray he's director of the Monmouth University polling Institute Patrick Murray always good to talk to you so uh we of course in the news have been very focused on these uh nominating convention s but what does your latest poll tell us about how much the primary voters are paying attention to all these candidates yeah I mean the electorate as a whole is is not doesn't know a lot about these candidates even those with higher name recognition such as the first lady or the congressman uh there really isn't a lot that they do know about them and I one of the reasons why we did this poll is it's a bit of a reality check um for those who are following this closely is that this is an Insider contest right now as as you mentioned it's it's about meeting those Party leaders those committee members it's not about you know bringing your message out to the larger public right now Andy Kim has slightly better favorable ratings than Tammy Murphy does including among Democrats but there's a lot of unknown it's one of the things that I think was really interesting to me is that even though Tammy Murphy has the highest name recognition overall of of anybody that we pull democrat or republican uh that that's running for Senate she has a huge number of people who say well you know what I really don't have an opinion of her I know I've heard her name but I don't know really what I think of her yet so that that gives her even though there's some negatives there it gives her a lot of room to introduce herself to voters when we get into the actual primary season and does this Pat translate to uh who primary voters will cast a ballot for in June is there any way to connect the two no and and unfortunately that's you know kind of an addiction that uh the media has is that they need horse race numbers or they can't understand what's going on and it's kind of interesting because I you know I saw a report on the poll that we put out that said well the way the questions are wording limits the conclusions you can draw well if we had asked the horse race question uh that's you know the typical head-to-head question there would have also been a lot of limits to the conclusions you could draw at this early stage when voters don't know a lot about these candidates as we've shown in this poll but the media generally wouldn't mention that uh so we're going to wait until we get get to an actual set of official candidates after the filing deadline we know who's running on what line exactly who's going to be on the ballot where then when these candidates start actually really introducing themselves to voters because that's who they'll need to win their nominations that's when we start asking questions about who you're going to vote for historically I'm thinking about some of these opinion gaps um and when voters like you mentioned really start to pay attention focus in on the campaigns um how much does that matter as we head into the primary and then of course the the the general election when you have these gaps in opinions should we glean anything from that well that that's exactly what we should look at is is is those gaps uh tell us what the starting point is for any of these candidates how strong is opinion about them and for none of these candidates they have particularly strong opinion uh that so even with Andy kimman and uh Tammy Murphy it's not that's something that's written in stone Tammy Murphy can has a lot of ground that she can make up with the unknowns Andy Kim could lose his positives once you get into an actual campaign and what we know is that there's going to be a smaller subset of Voters Who come out in June even though it's a presidential election year as we know the primaries are basically done so by the time we get to New Jersey's Primary there won't be a presidential election at the top that's going to draw voters out it's going to be this race uh that draws voters out so it's not going to be a huge number of Voters so we need to hone in on those voters but then after we get past the nomination one of the things that we've seen and one of the things I've seen in um nearly 30 years of polling here in New Jersey in Jersey elections is that voters forget who those candidates were after the primary they kind of go into a summer law and they have to be reintroduced to those candidates all over again when September rolls around uh so I'm I'm sure we're going to see something similar to this again it's part of the reason why it is always election season in New Jersey Patrick Murray is the director of the mammoth University polling Institute to thanks so much Patrick my pleasure