Kari Lake Suffers Polling Blow in Arizona Senate Race

Kari Lake trails Democratic Representative Ruben Gallego by four percentage points, according to a recent poll placing the two candidates in a hypothetical three-way Arizona Senate race that also includes independent Senator Kyrsten Sinema.

Lake, who lost Arizona's latest gubernatorial race to Democrat Katie Hobbs by just over 17,000 votes and later contested her defeat, officially declared she was running for U.S. Senate in 2024 on October 10.

She's expected to face Gallego, who announced his bid in January, and potentially Sinema, who has not yet said whether she'll run for reelection.

The polling was conducted on October 25 by the partisan National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) and presented at a closed-door meeting on Tuesday. The poll shows Gallego leading with 41 percent of the vote, followed by Lake with 37 percent and Sinema with 17 percent.

A source familiar with the meeting said that NRSC Chair Steve Daines told his fellow GOP senators that Sinema was pulling votes from Lake, despite the Arizona senator having been a Democrat before switching to independent last year.

"Daines said [the] poll shows Sinema is splitting the R vote, not D vote," Punchbowl News reporter Andrew Desiderio wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

"Sen. Lindsey Graham stood up during the meeting and said Lake is going to be the GOP nominee in Arizona, so Republicans need to help her campaign," Desiderio added in a subsequent post.

According to the NRSC, the poll had a margin of error of 4.4 percent, which means that Gallego and Lake could find themselves in a statistical tie.

Newsweek reached out to Gallego's campaign, and Lake's and Sinema's press offices for comment by email on Wednesday.

The results of the NRSC poll match with the findings of previous polls that found Gallego was best positioned to win the race.

A poll from Democratic-leaning Public Policy Polling, commissioned by Gallego's campaign and conducted between October 6 and 7, found that the Democrat had 41 percent of support in a three-way race with Lake and Sinema, who got respectively 36 and 15 percent of the vote, respectively. Some 8 percent of respondents were not sure for whom they would vote. The margin of error was 4.3 percentage points.

While Lake needs a relatively small amount of signatures to get on the ballot, she recently asked her supporters to sign a petition supporting her bid and showing its legitimacy.

"I need your help getting on the ballot," Lake said in a video posted on social media while sharing a link to an online petition for registered voters to sign.