SALEM, Va. (WSET) - The latest poll from Roanoke College finds Democratic candidate Ralph Northam is leading over Republican candidate Ed Gillespie by six percentage points.

The poll show Northam has 50 percent of likely voters, while Gillespie has 44 percent of likely voters.

The poll shows that both candidates are viewed more favorably than unfavorably by voters.

According to the poll, Northam leads among ideological moderates (61 percent - 28 percent), and holds an insignificant lead among political Independents (45 percent - 42 percent).

It shows Northam has the support of 94 percent of Democrats, while Gillespie is supported by 93 percent of Republicans.

“Northam continues to lead in the race for governor, but in sports parlance, Gillespie keeps ‘hanging around,’” said Harry Wilson, director of the Roanoke College Poll. “Republicans have closed well in the last weeks of the campaign in the 2013 gubernatorial contest and in Gillespie’s challenge to Sen. Mark Warner in 2014. Republicans came up short both times, but the results on Election Day were closer than most, if not all, polls had predicted.”



Fifty-eight percent of those polled disapprove of the way President Trump is handling his job, and just over a third approve, which officials say is statistically unchanged since September.

The poll shows 64 percent of Virginians think the country is headed in the wrong direction.

Roanoke College's Institute for Policy and Opinion Research continues to track political anxiety, and found 88 percent of likely voters trust the federal government to do what is right only some of the time or never.

They found 57 percent think ordinary citizens can do a lot to influence the federal government.

Overall, 87 percent of those polled continue to see the country as divided among important issues.

A total of 607 likely voters in Virginia were interviewed between October 8 and October 13. Telephone interviews were conducted in English and Spanish. The sample was drawn from a list of registered voters compiled by L2 Political. Participants were sampled from that list, which has phone numbers associated with approximately 60 percent of the registered voters in Virginia. The list included both landlines and cell-phones. Cell-phones constituted 38 percent of the completed interviews.

Questions answered by the entire sample of 607 residents are subject to a sampling error of plus or minus approximately 4 percent at the 95 percent level of confidence. This means that in 95 out of 100 samples like the one used here, the results obtained should be no more than 4 percentage points above or below the figure that would be obtained by interviewing all Virginia likely voters who have a home telephone or a cell-phone. Where the results of subgroups are reported, the sampling error is higher.