The Kari Lake campaign highlighted some new polls on Friday showing her race against Ruben Gallego for the U.S. Senate is neck and neck. There are 20 independent polls which show that the race is averaging less than two points apart, with Gallego barely in the lead.
The campaign noted that the results correlate to a new poll Rasmussen Reports issued last Wednesday, “the pollster that called Donald Trump’s 2016 victory when no one else said he could win.” In 2023, after the election problems began so Rasmussen’s polls were “wrong” in 2020 and 2022, the political poll aggregator site 538 still rated the pollster a respectable “B” for accuracy.
After ABC News bought 538 from political analyst Nate Silver in 2023, the media organization removed Rasmussen’s polls. Silver, no conservative, denounced the move, stating that Rasmussen’s polling was no more biased than other pollsters. Rasmussen is not affiliated with any politician or group.
Lake’s campaign cited their own internal polling, which showed her ahead, 44 percent to Gallego at 43 percent. A National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) poll showed her tied with Gallego at 46 percent each. A poll from the Club for Growth Action Committee has Gallego ahead by two points, 48 percent to 46 percent. CNN and AARP, no right-leaning entities, both have her behind in their polls by only three points.
The mainstream media publishes articles about surveys from partisan pollsters showing Gallego significantly ahead of Lake. However, those polls often use questionable methodology, such as oversampling Democrats and college-educated voters, and surveying merely registered voters instead of likely voters.
Arizona began trending substantially more Republican around 2020. Between 2020 and 2024, Republicans increased their lead over Democrats from approximately 3 percent to 5.77 percent. In Maricopa County, Republicans increased their lead even more, from 4 percent to 7 percent. This reflects a trend around the country. On the national level, a new Gallup poll found that 48 percent of voters surveyed either identified as Republicans or lean Republican, while 45 percent of the voters identified as Democrats or lean Democrat.
Unfortunately, most polls do not release the full extent of their methodology. Almost all of the latest polls in the Senate race compiled at 538 do not reveal the breakdown of Democrats versus Republicans surveyed. For example, a poll released on September 21 from The New York Times/Siena College that showed Gallego ahead by 6 points contained an extensive section on its methodology, but no indication of the breakdown between the numbers of Democrats versus Republicans surveyed.
The Pew Research Center found that polls of likely voters favored Trump more than polls of just registered voters. “LV polls – those surveys based only on the views of ‘likely voters’ — are generally reporting higher levels of support for Trump than general population polls,” the pollster said. However, most polls don’t bother surveying likely voters.
The Federalist noted about the 2016 presidential race, “Not a single media-sponsored poll called Trump’s Wisconsin victory in the two months before the election, and only one called Michigan correctly. Even more pertinent, the site said “Vox found that Republican Senate candidates overperformed their polling averages by 3 points in 2016, 2.5 points in 2018, and a full 5 points in 2020.”
Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance told Tucker Carlson on his show earlier this month that “a lot of these polls are designed not to measure opinion but to shape it.” He said, “The purpose of these polls is actually manipulation of both the public themselves, but also, of course, elected officials.” There is “a voter suppression dynamic here where you try to get people to get depressed and to drop out of the democratic process.”
Vance said, “Standard media poll(s)” are “fake. They’re absolutely fake.” He said “they have a group of people that they go to again and again and again. If you actually look at the good pollsters, they’re telling you a radically different story because they’re talking to a representative sample of the United States.”
The Lake campaign noted, “In 2016 and 2020 there were 69 Senate races. In 68 out of 69 races, the result of the Senate race mirrored that of the presidential. The lone exception was Sen. Susan Collins, who had a 30-year track record of being the most bipartisan member of the Senate.” The campaign pointed out that in contrast, Gallego is very partisan, “voting with Biden & Harris 100% of the time.”
Trump is ahead of Harris in Arizona according to most polls. He is also leading in most battleground states.
Gallego and his supporters have spent tens of millions of dollars on attack ads against Lake. The pair are set for their first debate on October 9.
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Rachel Alexander is a reporter at The Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Follow Rachel on Twitter / X. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Ruben Gallego” by Ruben Gallego and “Kari Lake” is by Kari Lake.
