PHOENIX, Arizona — As campaigns across the country hurtle toward Election Day, courting voters in a flurry of events, the result could be anticlimactic in the Senate battleground of Arizona. A new reality has emerged over the last couple of cycles after candidates in statewide races waited days for vote tallies to be finalized. With Arizona’s Senate race in a dead heat, it’s an outcome the campaigns, election officials, and political operatives are both expecting and preparing for.
The contest between incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) and Republican Blake Masters is one of a few races that will decide which party is in control of the Senate in 2023. The Cook Political Report and Politico moved the race from favoring Kelly to a toss-up as recent polling showed Kelly’s lead shrinking to a few points, significantly tighter than in surveys taken throughout the summer. There’s a similar feeling in the state that the race has shifted and is anyone’s game.
Both campaigns have been gearing up for next Tuesday and the days following, hiring election attorneys and setting up a robust post-Election Day infrastructure that will fight for every vote cast in favor of their respective candidates.
“There is no reasonable expectation for anyone in Arizona to think that the race is going to be decided on election night and they could go to bed knowing the results,” said Eric Spencer, an attorney who represents Republican and conservative organizations in the state.
“The new normal for several cycles is to have that result two to three, maybe four, days after the election,” said Spencer, a former state elections director.
For decades, Arizona was a Republican stronghold, but it has become more competitive in recent years. The last couple of statewide elections have been won by razor-thin margins. Arizona’s senior senator, Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), narrowly defeated Republican Martha McSally in 2018 by just over 38,000 votes and about 1.7 percentage points. The race took nearly a week to call.
Kelly also faced McSally in a special election in 2020 and ultimately won by just under 2.5 points. Then, in 2020, President Joe Biden won Arizona by over 11,000 votes, or about 0.3 percentage points. Many expect the outcome of the race for Senate this year will also be in line with these recent trends.
“The system is heavily reliant on early votes, and at least historically, 80-90% of voters vote by early vote. A lot of folks hold on to their ballot relatively at the last minute, and that pushes their ballot to be signature-verified very close to the election or after the election, so those results get reported later,” Spencer said.
The state’s GOP legislature also eased the automatic recount threshold to 0.5% of the votes cast. In previous elections, recounts were required only if the difference between the top two candidates was 0.1% of the total votes. The rule change makes a recount more likely and could delay the final election results if numerous recounts are required.
“I’m fully prepared for us to be working through next week without knowing whether we won or not. I think that’s a realistic possibility,” an election attorney who represents one of the campaigns told the Washington Examiner.
The gubernatorial race in the state between Republican Kari Lake and Democrat Katie Hobbs has garnered the bulk of media attention in recent months. Lake, a former TV news anchor, has almost a cult-like following and has emerged as a conservative darling. Meanwhile, the Senate race appears to be playing out silently in the background.
“I don’t think we hear a lot about the Senate race. Truthfully, I don’t think as many people are paying attention to it here,” said Carol Marshall, a registered Republican from Scottsdale, Arizona.
Marshall said she would be supporting Masters in the Senate race. She said she feels like there is a lot of support for the Trump-endorsed candidate but isn’t sure he’ll win.
Several voters at a Lake rally in Peoria, Arizona, and Mesa, Arizona, last week said they planned to vote for her but were unsure of who they would vote for in the Senate race.
“I really haven’t decided yet. I need to check their websites and see what they stand for. I’m a registered Republican, but I don’t always vote with Republicans,” said John Myers of Mesa.
Independents and unaffiliated voters have tripled over the last 30 years to 1.4 million and make up about a third of the voting population. But some in this key voting bloc seem skeptical of Masters’s stances on a number of topics. In recent months, Masters erased from his website some of his stated views on abortion and language that proclaimed Donald Trump would be in the Oval Office if the 2020 election had been “free and fair.”
In a recent debate, Masters said that Biden was “the legitimate president” and that he hadn’t seen evidence of fraud in 2020. A clip in a Fox documentary revealed a phone call between Trump and Masters at some point after the debate in which the former president encouraged Masters to lean into the unfounded election claims.
“I don’t think there was any fraud in the election. I don’t think Masters can win because of what he’s said on that,” said Dan Stack, a registered independent living in Scottsdale. “He’s too far right, particularly on the abortion issue. He’s got the thing where he’s all about the border and crime, which he should be. Mark Kelly has got to learn that. But I still think Mark Kelly is going to eke it out,” he said.
Other independent voters said Masters had earned their votes. Jack Hinson, 53, of Chandler, Arizona, said he’s supporting Masters because illegal immigration is out of control in the state.
“I feel more comfortable having Blake Masters as our senator than Mark Kelly. He hasn’t done enough at the border. After the debate between Blake Masters and Mark Kelly, Blake’s numbers shot up. It’s tightened up right now, and that’s what everyone is feeling,” he said.
Masters, 36, a venture capitalist and political newcomer, is trying to take advantage of the growing momentum benefiting GOP candidates across the country, slamming Biden’s job performance and pointing to Phoenix’s worst-in-the-nation inflation rate of 13%.
“If you give Mark Kelly any more time in office to rubberstamp Biden’s agenda, you’ll soon be paying $10-$12 for a gallon of gas. He’s unfit for duty. He should resign, right?” Masters said to a crowd at a Lake event in Mesa.
Kelly’s campaign reported raising more than $79.4 million through mid-October, over six-and-a-half times more than the $12 million that Masters’s campaign reported raising during the same amount of time. But millions of last-minute dollars are flowing into Arizona to support Masters after a group aligned with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell pulled out of the state. The Club for Growth, a leading conservative outside spender, is dropping $5.5 million into the Arizona Senate race in the days ahead of the election, according to Axios. The ad buys come as more Republican outside money flows into the race. A pro-Masters super PAC funded by billionaire Peter Thiel and a new super PAC backed by Trump has been active in the general election and has flooded the airwaves with ads.
Lake and Masters have been hitting the trail together recently and promoting one another on social media. Billboards, yard signs, and T-shirts have been printed that read, “VOTE LAKE & BLAKE.” The Republican Senate candidate is often added to the lineup at Lake’s well-attended campaign events at the last minute, a move that gives him added visibility with voters.
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A person inside Masters’s campaign said they see a clear path to victory. Part of their strategy in the final days is avoiding the spotlight. They have rarely been offering open press events and have been limiting interviews to mostly local media.
“That’s one of many reasons he could lose,” said Barrett Marson, an Arizona-based GOP strategist. “The hits on Blake have been significant, and six months ago, many probably wrote him off. But he’s experiencing a late surge.”
In contrast, Kelly’s closing strategy includes holding multiple campaign events across the state a day, open to the press. He rallied with former President Barack Obama in Phoenix on Wednesday and plans to campaign with first lady Jill Biden in South Phoenix on Saturday.
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A Democrat close to the Kelly campaign said they have a realistic view that the race is going to be very tight, but there’s cautious optimism that the senator will pull out a victory, likely by an even smaller margin than when he won in the 2020 special election.
“I feel good. I’ve been traveling all over the place,” Kelly said in an interview with the Washington Examiner last week. “I was in Yuma — yesterday I was in Phoenix, Show Low, Pinetop, Tuba City, Flagstaff, Prescott, all in the last five days.”
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Many Arizona Democrats said they had always known this race would be close and that the national narrative should have never been that Arizona was considered “safe” for the party this year.
“Historically speaking, the path to victory when you’re looking at the makeup of the state, the biggest party registration is Republican, followed by independents, followed by Democrats. So, we are in third place,” said Roy Herrera, a Democratic attorney and consultant in the state. “You’ve got to have at least 10% of Republicans. That’s how you win statewide. It’s the only way you can do it from a numerical perspective.”
Chuck Coughlin, the CEO of HighGround, said its polling shows Kelly is outperforming Masters with unaffiliated voters, key to winning elections in Arizona.
“I think it’s gonna be extremely close. You know, our latest data, which we polled a week ago, showed both Kelly and Hobbs winning that cohort. And my instinct is that that’s what will happen,” Coughlin said.
For years, Coughlin worked to get Republican candidates elected in the state. He worked on the late Sen. John McCain’s race in the 1980s but left the GOP when Trump and the party turned against his former boss. It’s voters like Coughlin that Kelly is often trying to appeal to during his stump speeches.
“It has been the honor of my life to represent Arizona in the U.S. Senate, and by the way, in John McCain’s Senate seat. That’s a big deal for me. Here’s a guy I looked up to when I was first in the Navy. To be able to sit at his desk every day in Washington is a big deal for me,” Kelly said to voters at a campaign stop in Yuma.
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“I’m aware of the history of this Senate seat. Like John McCain, I try to keep the politics and the partisanship out of this and work with whoever I need to work with to get stuff done.”
Republicans need to gain one seat to take control of the Senate, which is divided 50-50 with Vice President Kamala Harris as the tiebreaking vote.
