Democratic Representative Ruben Gallego holds a double-digit lead over Republican Kari Lake in the latest poll for Arizona’s U.S. Senate race.
Arizona is a swing state that is roughly evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. Prior to the Donald Trump-era, it was viewed as having a Republican lean. However in 2018, then-Democrat Kyrsten Sinema won a U.S. Senate race in the state. Two years later, President Joe Biden flipped Arizona in the presidential election, becoming the first Democrat to carry the Grand Canyon State in the Electoral College since 1996.
This year, Arizona is again expected to be one of the closest states, both in the presidential election and in the race to replace Sinema who opted not to run for reelection after switching her party affiliation to independent.
Gallego, who represents the Phoenix area in Congress, and Lake, a former television news anchor who unsuccessfully ran for Arizona governor in 2022, are viewed as frontrunners to win their primaries, which are scheduled for July 30.
A new poll conducted by CBS News and YouGov suggested that Gallego may have a lead over Lake, with more than five months until the election—though neither candidate received more than 50 percent of support from respondents.
Forty-nine percent of respondents said they plan to back Gallego in November, while 36 percent said they expect they will be voting for Lake, according to the survey.
While the poll may be viewed as a good sign for Gallego, it still found that Republicans are leading on the presidential level. Fifty-two percent of respondents said they are voting for Trump and 47 percent said they plan to vote for Biden, according to the poll.
The poll was conducted from May 10 to 16 among 1,510 adults living in Arizona. The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.3 percentage points.
Other polls have similarly found Gallego with a lead over Lake.
An April 28 to May 9 poll from The New York Times and Siena College found Gallego leading Lake 46 to 43 percent among 626 likely voters. An April 25 to 29 Emerson College poll found Gallego leading 45 to 43 percent among 1,000 registered voters.
Newsweek reached out to the Gallego and Lake campaigns for comment via email.
Meanwhile, Lake is viewed as a rising star in Republican politics. She is a staunch supporter of Trump who has endorsed her campaign and has echoed the former president’s unproven claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential race in Arizona where Biden won by just over 10,000 votes.
Still, she lost the 2022 gubernatorial race to Democrat Katie Hobbs by less than a single percentage point. She has blamed her defeat on fraud in Maricopa County, the state’s largest that is home to Phoenix.
Meanwhile, Gallego is a former U.S. Marine who was first elected to the House of Representatives in 2014. He has easily won reelection in the Democratic-leaning seat, winning 77 percent of the vote in 2022.
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