Blake Masters has grabbed the edge in the race for the Republican nomination for Senate in Arizona, according to a poll conducted for the super PAC supporting his campaign.
Masters, a venture capitalist, led the field of GOP primary candidates with 16%, with Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich and wealthy businessman Jim Lamon close behind at 14%. Mick McGuire, the former adjutant general of the Arizona National Guard, trailed far behind at 5%. Justin Olson, a state corporation commissioner, garnered just 1%. This survey for Saving Arizona PAC marks the first time Masters, a conservative populist, has led in a publicized poll.
“The race to take on Mark Kelly remains close,” reads the polling memo prepared by Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio and colleagues at his firm, Fabrizio Lee, and shared first with the Washington Examiner. “The Masters message of fighting for American workers and securing our border is clearly resonating with the Republican primary voters of Arizona.”
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Kelly, the incumbent Democratic senator, was elected in November 2020 in a special election held to fill the remaining two years of the term won by Republican Sen. John McCain in 2016. McCain died in August 2018 after a bout with cancer.
The Arizona primary is scheduled for Aug. 2, leaving plenty of time for the race for the Republican Senate nomination to develop and elevate a true front-runner. The poll for Saving America, the super PAC supporting Masters, reveals as much, as a whopping 52% of the likely 800 GOP primary voters surveyed March 13–14 said they were undecided. The margin of error was plus or minus 3.46 percentage points.
In addition to the poll’s main findings, Fabrizio, who has advised former President Donald Trump, also tested Masters versus Lamon.
The survey found that roughly an equal number of respondents had recalled viewing either a Masters campaign advertisement or a Lamon campaign advertisement (47% had seen a Masters spot; 49% had seen a Lamon spot.) Among this subset of Republican primary voters, Masters and Lamon were tied for first place, with 23% each. Brnovich was behind them with 14%, and a still very significant 34% were undecided.
Saving America is being funded largely by Republican megadonor Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist allied with Trump and whom Masters worked for until recently.
Thiel also is funding a super PAC that is backing J.D. Vance in the Ohio GOP Senate primary.
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Trump has yet to endorse in either race, although his criticism of Brnovich over the outcome of the 2020 presidential election in Arizona suggests the state attorney general, a favorite of movement conservatives, is not in the running for his backing.
Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, heavily recruited to run for Senate in the midterm elections by Republicans in Washington, decided against mounting a campaign.
