Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore
In what will easily be one of the most watched and most interesting Senate elections in all of America in quite some time, the race to unseat Sen. Kyrsten Sinema just got a bit more interesting, and potentially in a way that will be much more advantageous to the Republicans next year.
Former U.S. Senate candidate Blake Masters recently announced that he will be taking another swing at the seat. Masters ran a respectable campaign in 2022 but ran into the fundraising buzzsaw that was Mark Kelly, losing by 5 percentage points. Considering the lopsided nature of expenditures however, with Kelly’s campaign spending over $92 million versus under $20 million for Masters, it was at least a moral victory to keep things that close.
But for anyone who has been watching Arizona politics (or even competitive Senate races), you know that this is not a normal election. As Sinema has redesignated herself as politically independent, this is currently shaping up as a hyper-competitive three-way race, with Ruben Gallego in a strong leading position on the Democratic side and the specter of a Masters/Kari Lake showdown in the Republican primary.
While Lake hasn’t officially announced her run, it is one of Arizona’s worst-kept secrets that she has been eyeing this seat for some time, even going so far as staffing up in preparation. While her fundraising wasn’t where it should have been (primarily since she figured she could eschew campaign orthodoxy), with a gargantuan email list and lessons learned, along with Masters, this would almost certainly line up to be a bruising, expensive primary.
How will it turn out? On its face, it does have the appearance of a stylistic re-run of the 2022 gubernatorial primary, with the Trump-ian candidate (Lake) against a more establishment, moderate Republican (Karrin Taylor-Robson in 2022, Masters in 2024). With Trump having a likely insurmountable lead in the Presidential primary and a primary voting base that still loves him, there is likely not much reason to think that the establishment candidate will win this time either.
Regardless of the outcome however, this is certainly shaping up to be a general election for the ages. And for us pundits who appreciate good content to write about, it’s about the best possible scenario.