Arizona Senate Odds: Can Conspiracy Theorist Kari Lake Upset Congressman Ruben Gallego?

One of the key Senate races this fall is in Arizona, where failed Gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake is trying to beat Democratic House member Ruben Gallego for the open Senate seat. With Donald Trump and Kamala Harris as tight as they are at the top of the ticket, does Lake have a better chance than Arizona Senate odds are giving her?

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Arizona Senate Odds

Hail To The Faux Governor?

Lake is most famous for being a sizable favorite in the Beltway Discourse to win the 2022 Arizona Governor’s race for fairly dubious reasons that never actually made sense. Lake was a slight polling favorite who lost because the polls underestimated Democratic strength, likely in an attempt to compensate for 2020’s polling miss. She was viewed as a big favorite beyond it because the press made a big deal about Katie Hobbs, the now Governor, not debating.

Lake lost respectably, outrunning the Senate candidate by 4% and coming within a point.

She then proceeded to declare the election stolen, claim she was the Governor anyway, and sue everybody and their mothers based on lies.

Since then, her campaign has been moribund, with Gallego leading by 8% on average right now. The question remains, however, whether that big gap between polling for the Senate and the Presidency will survive first contact with actual results.

Presidential Politics

Arizona is potentially Harris’s hardest state to win these days. The combination of a 0.3% win by Joe Biden in 2020 and the fact that Harris is weaker than Biden with Hispanics makes the hill she has to climb bigger. A recent NBC-commissioned poll solely of Hispanics had Harris only winning them by 14% nationally, which is 8-10% lower than Biden’s margin in 2020 (depending on the estimate). If that’s true, then Arizona, whose electorate was 18% Hispanic in 2020, will be a tough lift.

The countervailing wind that is helpful to Harris is the suburban shift. 60% of the vote is going to come from Maricopa County, a left-trending county that makes up Phoenix and many of its suburbs and exurbs. Harris will likely do worse in more heavily minority inner Phoenix. However, the whiter suburban neighborhoods around Phoenix will move left due to abortion rights and January 6th—two things that lost Lake her race in 2022.

The polls show a tight race, with polls seemingly shifting back Harris’s direction. This trend started after the Times/Siena and Suffolk/USA Today both had Trump up handily. There’s a polls-based case for both candidates, especially in a state where polls were quite accurate in 2020.

Unlike much of the Rust Belt, blithe dismissals of the polls “because 2020” don’t work here.

Could This Be A 2018 Repeat?

If anything, there’s a chance that the polling error looks more like 2018. That year, Democrats were underestimated in the polls in the Sun Belt. Democrats beat their polls in 2018 by a point in Arizona, but more broadly, polling underestimated Democrats with Hispanic voters. The reason Jackie Rosen won by 4% more than the polling average in Nevada, why Beto O’Rourke came closer than expected, and that Democratic House candidates across Texas did better than their district polling is the same.

There’s no guarantee this will be true again. That said, Democrats beat their polls in Nevada in 2008, 2010, 2012, 2016, and 2018 for a reason. This argument failed in 2020, but COVID-19 was an anomalous factor.

If the polls are slightly underestimating Democratic strength with Hispanics, especially as Democrats run a Hispanic Senatorial candidate, then Harris will win the state comfortably, and Lake will get destroyed. 

Or Could This Be Wisconsin 2016?

The case for Lake would best be described as the Ron Johnson. Johnson was a one-term Senator in Wisconsin who was down 10 all cycle, closed the gap slightly in October, and then rode the wave of a Republican win at the top of the ticket to a narrow win. The broad outlines for this are clear - Lake’s deficit is mostly caused by Trump voters being undecided Presidentially, Trump’s winning Arizona on average, and two very good pollsters have Trump romping home in Arizona. However, the problems with the comparison show why she’s dead on arrival.

Lake isn’t an incumbent like Ron Johnson was. Ruben Gallego is breaking 50% in the polls with some regularity, making it harder to leapfrog him. But most of all, Democrats were the ones running a has-been ex-loser in 2016. Russ Feingold was a bad candidate who barely tried.

Gallego is doing everything he can to win. Lake’s the one with the loser stench, the election denial weirdo label, and no money.

Arizona Senate Odds Prospects

Gallego is going to win. Full stop.

This is one of the few times this whole cycle that I will actually say that definitively. Kari Lake will not be heading to Washington. It will not happen.

Best of luck with Arizona Senate odds!

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