Dueling polls paint starkly contrarian pictures of the Arizona Republican gubernatorial primary pitting the candidate endorsed by former President Donald Trump against the contender backed by Gov. Doug Ducey and former Vice President Mike Pence.
In an independent public opinion poll from the Phoenix-based Republican firm Data Orbital, Trump-endorsed Kari Lake led Ducey-backed Karrin Taylor Robson 43.5% to 32.4%, with 11.8% undecided. With the Aug. 2 primary days away and early and mail-in voting netting almost a quarter of a million ballots thus far, Lake would appear to be in the driver’s seat and poised to net Trump a key win in a contested primary. The Taylor Robson campaign begs to differ.
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In an internal campaign poll conducted by the GOP firm Public Opinion Strategies, Lake and Taylor Robson were all tied up at 43%, with 11% undecided or supporting other candidates. Taylor Robson’s internal poll surveyed 400 Arizona GOP primary voters July 22–24 and had a margin of error of plus or minus 4.9 percentage points. The Data Orbital survey of 550 likely GOP primary voters was in the field July 18–20 and had an error margin of 4.26 points.
“With nearly 250,000 Republican ballots returned, it is clear Kari Lake has maintained — and grown — her lead in the Gubernatorial race,” Data Orbital pollster George Khalaf said in a statement.
“We have seen the undecided rate steadily drop from 28% in late June to 12%, with a little more than a week until Election Day,” he continued. “With what we are seeing in our polling, and every other public poll released on the Governor’s race, one thing is clear: Kari Lake is on her way to securing the Republican nomination.”
There have been some suggestions that Data Orbital has ties to Lake, but Khalef said in a brief text exchange Tuesday that that is flatly untrue. “We paid for [this poll] ourselves,” he said. But some Republican insiders in Arizona are unconvinced, leading them to put more stock in the internal survey from Public Opinion Strategies, although that does not mean they are predicting that Lake will lose.
“POS is basically the gold standard,” a Republican strategist in Arizona said of the pollster. “The real question though is the turnout models. If it’s in the margins, then whose voters are more motivated. I think when you look at it that way Lake probably wins, but it’s close.”
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The Public Opinion Strategies poll was reported by Garrett Archer, a political analyst for the ABC network television affiliate in Phoenix.
