Arizona Senate race shaping up to be ‘political science experiment’ as Sinema’s next move unclear

Arizona Senate race shaping up to be ‘political science experiment’ as Sinema’s next move unclear

Kari Lake says she’s actually the rightful governor of Arizona, but she’s eyeing a U.S. Senate seat as a consolation prize.

Ms. Lake would be running to unseat Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, a first-termer who won in 2018 as a Democrat but has since ditched her party and turned independent. Then there’s Rep. Ruben Gallego, who has the inside track for the Democrats’ nomination and whose fiery liberalism would be a big step for the changing state.

But the GOP is not lacking for drama. Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb already is in the race, and the party’s two big losers from 2022 — Ms. Lake, who was defeated in the governor’s race, and Blake Masters, who failed in his bid for the state’s other Senate seat — pondering their options.

It all makes Arizona’s Senate race the “ultimate political science experiment,” said Kirk Adams, a former state representative and former chief of staff to ex-Gov. Doug Ducey.

“Arizona is sort of like the gathering spot for all these political trends we are seeing across the country and everything happening all at once,” Mr. Adams said. “You have the populists versus the traditional conservatives in the Republican Party, the rise of the progressive left, and a growing number of people that don’t identify with either party.”

Perhaps no other state has seen the sort of political shift that Arizona has experienced over the last five years. It has gone from reliably red in presidential races and having two GOP senators and control of most statewide offices, to having backed a Democrat for president, elected two Democratic senators and split the top state offices, with Democrats now holding the governor, secretary of state and attorney general posts.

Republicans still hold both chambers of the state legislature. But the statehouse has seen drama too, after the House booted Republican Rep. Liz Harris several weeks ago. She had arranged for a woman to testify — without any proof — before a legislative committee that Democrat Gov. Katie Hobbs and other elected officials and judges had taken bribes from the Sinaloa drug cartel and committed other crimes.

“From a national perspective, Arizona was a sleepy ruby-red state and now has become the epicenter of all things politics — from high-octane Senate races to election audits, to the land of the weird in politics,” said Mike Noble, chief of research for Noble Predictive Insights, an Arizona-based polling firm.

Historically, it’s not that Arizona has lacked its share of characters.

Arizona voters sent both Sen. Barry Goldwater, a father of modern conservatism, and Sen. John McCain, an iconoclastic Republican, to Washington.

Now they’re represented in the Senate by Mark Kelly, a rather bland former astronaut and husband of former Rep. Gabby Giffords, and Ms. Sinema, a bisexual marathon-running fashionista who sprang from left-wing anti-war politics of the early 2000s, won election to the U.S. House as a Democrat in 2012, then ditched the party last December.

Her move sets up a likely three-way race with the winners of the Democratic and Republican nominations.

Ms. Sinema hasn’t announced her own reelection bid, but her calculations likely hinge on her ability to chart a path between a Democrat running far to the left and a Republican candidate running far to the right.

“I think most Americans in this country are hungry for something new and different and they want to see a reduction in the partisanship,” Ms. Sinema said in a recent interview with KTAR News 9. “I hope that is what I’m offering, not just to the folks in Arizona, but to folks around the country, is to show a different path.”

The incumbent, who had over $9 million in her campaign account at the end of March, said she does not have a timetable for her reelection push. Her office declined to comment.

The Democratic race is fairly lackluster at this point. Mr. Gallego, a Marine Corps combat veteran and outspoken progressive, announced his bid in January and raised nearly $4 million over the first three months of the year.

“While Senator Sinema has abandoned the people of Arizona for her rich and powerful donors, I’m focused on fighting for the families that have been left behind,” Mr. Gallego said.

Republicans, meanwhile, are still trying to sort out messes from 2020 and 2022, in which former President Trump’s stolen election claims continue to reverberate with some party voters.

Ms. Lake, for example, contends that her 17,000-vote loss to Democrat Katie Hobbs was stolen.

She has argued in court that ballot problems disenfranchised GOP voters. Those claims have been rejected by judges, and she is nearly out of legal avenues for appeal, leaving her to ponder what comes next.

She said earlier in April that she is “seriously considering a run for Senate.”

“I’m so dangerous to the status quo and this rotten swamp that they’re willing to steal an election to stop me and our movement,” she said. “I’m not letting them get away with that. We’re not going away.”

The prospect of a Lake rerun is stirring fears she could dominate the primary race and then lose the general election. For Republicans, that would be a nightmare scenario, after watching Trump-backed candidates drop winnable races in the 2022 midterms.

“Kari Lake has a significant uphill battle to win a competitive general election — particularly in a presidential cycle where the turnout is much different and will lean more Democratic than 2022,” Mr. Adams said.

Some Republicans hope that Mr. Ducey will run. Karrin Taylor Robson is also considering a run after losing to Ms. Lake in the 2022 GOP gubernatorial primary despite spending millions of her personal wealth.

The Senate race will be playing out down ballot from President Biden’s reelection push. Mr. Biden carried the state by less than 11,000 votes in 2020.

The Cook Political Report, a non-partisan election tracker, rates the race for Ms. Sinema’s seat as a “toss-up.”

Tate Mitchell, a spokesperson for the the National Republican Senate Committee, the campaign arm for Senate Republicans, said the seat is ripe for the taking.

“Arizona is a top battleground in 2024 and we are committed to doing everything we can to elect a Republican who represents the values of Arizona,” Mr. Mitchell said. “While Arizona Democrats are fighting a civil war, Republicans will be focused on flipping the Senate and bringing relief to hardworking families.”


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