Fox News Poll Shows Election Denier Kari Lake Getting Destroyed in Arizona Senate Race

AP Photo/Alex Brandon

Two new polls — including one from Fox News — show Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) walloping his Republican opponent, failed gubernatorial candidate and election denier Kari Lake, in the race to be Arizona’s next senator.

Lake narrowly lost the 2022 Arizona governor’s race to Democrat Katie Hobbs, and since then has paired her support for former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of fraud in the 2020 election with her own unfounded accusations that her election was stolen from her as well. In reality, a post-election analysis showed that Lake lost in large part because tens of thousands of Arizonans cast votes for other Republicans but not her.

The past few years have done little to temper Lake’s enthusiasm for election conspiracies, and she seems headed for a crushing defeat in November in her battle with Gallego.

A Fox News poll conducted from September 20 through 24 of 1,021 registered Arizona voters showed Gallego with a double-digit lead over Lake, 55% to 42% among a subsample of 746 respondents who were identified as likely voters and 56% to 42% among the entire sample of registered voters.

The margin of error was +/- 3.5 percentage points for the likely voter sample and +/- 3 percentage points for the registered voter sample. Polling was conducted via live phone interviewers who spoke via landlines or cell phones to Arizona registered voters randomly selected from the statewide voter files.

Fox News’ report noted that Gallego was “preferred across most demographic groups,” but his advantage was especially strong with women voters, who preferred him over Lake by 23 points, 60% to 37%. The poll’s crosstabs showed that Gallego was ahead among pretty much every demographic group tested by the pollsters except with White men, where he tied Lake 49% to 49%.

Gallego unsurprisingly dominated among Democrats (96% to Lake’s 3%) but also won a majority of independents (59% to 37%) and nearly 2 in 10 Republicans (16% to 81%).

This large margin in the Senate race was not reflected in the presidential contest between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. Arizonans preferred Trump 50% to 48% for Harris, a slight shift from Fox’s August poll where she was up one point, 50% to Trump’s 49%. Both polls’ results were within the margin of error. Trump’s better showing is due to about 15% of Gallego voters splitting their ticket to vote for Trump.

The same Fox News poll also showed that a proposed abortion rights amendment to the Arizona Constitution had support from more than 7 in 10 Arizona voters, including more than two-thirds of independents and half of Republicans, reflecting trends in other states with similar measures on their ballots in the wake of the Supreme Court’s repeal of Roe v. Wade.

A Marist poll of likely Arizona voters also showed Gallego with a double-digit lead over Lake, Arizona Republic columnist Laurie Roberts reported on Thursday.

That poll was taken from September 19 through 24 of 1,524 Arizona registered voters and a subset of 1,264 likely voters, with a margin of error of +/- 3.6 percentage points and +/- 3.8 percentage points, respectively for each sample. The presidential contest was similarly close as the Fox News survey showed, with Harris down one point, 49% to Trump’s 50%, and then voters splitting their ticket again to back Gallego 54% to 44% among likely voters.

That poll was an “exceedingly bad sign” for Lake, Roberts tweeted, with her “polling about as well” as embattled North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, the GOP nominee for governor there who was getting dragged down by his controversial “black NAZI!” comments he reportedly posted on a porn site.

Lake’s branding as a far-right firebrand was dooming her with moderates, wrote Roberts, and she was hindered by likeability problems. “Simply put, most Arizona residents don’t. Like her, that is,” she added, noting that “two years of virtual nonstop campaigning” had resulted in Lake “boosting the number of people who don’t like her by nine points.”

After remarking that “every Republican operative” she spoke to “says this race is over” and early voting would kick off in Arizona in just 13 days, Roberts concluded that she was imagining the late Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) — whom Lake infamously trashed as a “loser” during her gubernatorial campaign — “somewhere in the hereafter, laughing his head off.”