The campaign for Arizona Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake announced Tuesday that the populist firebrand is tied with Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) in internal polling and that she has a “higher ceiling” to expand her support than Gallego does.
The announcement came in a joint polling memo from Lake’s team and pollster McLaughlin & Associates in the early afternoon. While the specific numbers were not disclosed in the memo, it reports the candidates are tied. This is on par with recent polling that has shown Lake and Gallego, who are expected to be their parties’ nominees, in a statistical tie.
A New York Times/Philadelphia Inquirer/Siena College poll published last week had Lake three points behind Gallego among likely voters, inside the ± 4.3 percentage-point margin of error (MOE). A Nexstar Media/Emerson College poll published on April 30 found Lake two points behind Gallego, within the ± three percent MOE.
The internal polling indicates that “Lake has a higher ceiling to expand her vote among key voter segments.” Biden’s disapproval rating registers in the high 50s in the survey, and half of the respondents say Gallego “is too much like Biden,” per the memo. Moreover, two in three participants say America “is off on the wrong track.”
Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) (Tom Williams/Pool via AP)
Lake’s campaign makes the case that she has a strong opportunity to pull undecided voters, three in four of whom disapprove of Biden’s presidential performance:
Among the all-important undecided voters, Joe Biden has a 74% disapproval rating and Gallego only has a 35% unfavorable rating among those voters. Once voters know that Gallego has been a rubber stamp for Biden, those undecided voters will coalesce behind Kari Lake. Not to mention, the generic Republican leads in the ballot, 48%-45% and among the undecided they prefer the Republican, 55%/36%. These undecided voters are more Republican and they vote for Donald Trump, 55%/26% which means the undecideds should be significantly more inclined to vote for Kari Lake.
The memo highlights that Trump is dominating Biden in Arizona polling. As of Tuesday, the RealClearPolling average had Trump at 49 percent, 5.2 points ahead of Biden at 43.8 percent. He led all six polls included in the average by a margin of four to seven points.
Lake’s team emphasizes that in the last two presidential elections, voters in every state applicable elected senators from the same party as the presidential candidate who won the state that year, except for the 2020 Maine Senate race where Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) won reelection despite Biden winning the state in the presidential race.
“There is no Senate candidate in the country that is more closely aligned with President Trump than Kari Lake,” the memo states.
Former President Donald Trump embraces Arizona Republican Kari Lake, at a campaign rally on October 9, 2022, in Mesa, Arizona. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)
The memo did not include field dates, sample sizes, or an MOE.
