How Republican candidates would or would not reflect the GOP base when it comes to views of the 2020 election was one of the key questions going into the 2022 cycle. Numerous surveys have revealed that a sizable majority of Republicans hold the mistaken belief that President Joe Biden did not properly win the 2020 election.
Therefore, it may not come as a surprise that many Republicans seeking for office also hold this belief. But is it possible for any of those candidates to win elections in places with close races? The majority of the time, the answer is no. The majority of election sceptics running for governor either have slim chances of succeeding or come from states that former President Donald Trump clearly won.
One notable exception is Arizona’s Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor. Lake and Katie Hobbs, the Democratic candidate, are tied for first place in the second-closest state of the 2020 presidential contest.
The idea is clearly illustrated by three surveys that were released this past week and were all well within the margin of error. Lake and Hobbs were deadlocked at 49% in a CBS News/YouGov survey. Fox’s survey gave Hobbs a 44% to Lake’s 43% advantage. Hobbs and Lake each scored 45% at Marist College.
The candidates are essentially tied in these polls, which are typical of the average of all polls.
Blake Masters, the state’s Republican candidate for the US Senate, is trailing Lake by a significant margin. In the average of all polls, Masters is more than 5 points behind his Democratic rival, Sen. Mark Kelly.
You might believe that Lake is more extreme than Masters. That is not at all evident, at least in relation to the 2020 presidential race.
Like Masters, Lake is an election sceptic on that matter. That is what makes Lake so special, in fact. Other Republicans who are in a position to win the governorship of competitive states in the 2020 election this year are almost unanimous in having either tried to have it both ways regarding the most recent presidential election (i.e., casting doubt on its legitimacy but refraining from claiming it was rigged) or accepted the 2020 results.
Tudor Dixon in Michigan and Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania are the other outright election sceptics running for governor in 2020 battleground states this year. In the average of the polls, both are significantly behind their Democratic rivals, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, respectively. Despite Mehmet Oz’s rocky start following the primary, Mastriano is currently far behind him in Pennsylvania’s Republican Senate primary. (Oz, who received Trump’s support in the primary, claimed he would have voted to certify the outcome of the 2020 election.)
In fact, losing gubernatorial elections in swing or blue states have a history of denying the 2020 election. Despite being the incumbent and outgoing governors of their respective states, blue-state Republicans Dan Cox in Maryland and Geoff Diehl in Massachusetts are losing to their rivals in the polls.
Given that many in the Grand Canyon State believe the 2020 election was rigged, you might be tempted to assume Lake has a chance. That doesn’t seem to be the situation. Only 28% of voters said they had no confidence that ballots were cast legitimately and fairly in the 2020 election, according to a Fox poll conducted in August.
A measly 6% of voters, according to the Marist poll, are not at all confidence that the 2022 election in Arizona will be conducted fairly and accurately. The majority (71%) are certain it will be; another 23% are not overly certain.
What, then, is Lake’s secret? Her prior experience as a television anchor might be contributing to some of it. She appears to be addressing voters in the middle of the electorate fairly effectively.
Lake just needs to maintain his level of opposition to win Arizona. Unlike many other competitive states, Arizona has a majority Republican voting population. This means that Democratic candidates often need to win a significant number of independent voters as well as more Republican voters than Republican candidates gain Democratic voters. In other words, even if Lake loses independents and keeps less of her base than Hobbs, she can still win.
For instance, Kelly has a 17-point advantage among independents in the Marist survey. Only by two points is Hobbs ahead of them all.
But Lake’s position may have more to do with the reality that voters may not care as much about 2020 election denialism as we might imagine when it comes to casting their ballots in elections for state offices. Only 18% of voters in a CBS News poll said they wanted Arizona elected authorities to declare Biden the loser in the 2020 presidential election, while another 41% said it didn’t matter. This indicates that the majority of people in Arizona (59%) don’t appear to mind or even like it when a candidate for office doubts the validity of the 2020 election.
Further analysis of the data reveals that the GOP has a good chance of winning the secretary of state elections in Arizona (Mark Finchem) and neighbouring Nevada (Joe Marchant). As they seek to become the top election officials in their respective states, the Republicans standing for each of those positions have rejected the results of the 2020 election.
Additionally, Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, who opposed certifying the results of the 2020 election, is a small favourite to win re-election over Democrat Lt. Governor Mandela Barnes. Similarly, Adam Laxalt of Nevada has questioned the 2020 election and been a key player in post-election legal initiatives to overturn Biden’s victory in the state. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of the Democratic Party is his closest rival.
However, neither of those GOP Senate candidates is running to be the governor of a swing state. And compared to Lake, the aforementioned contenders for secretary of state have substantially lesser name recognition.
Despite being well-known and seeking a genuine position of power in elections, Lake is highly competitive as an election denier. In the event that she and Finchem triumph, the two Arizona election certification officials will go on record as contesting the validity of the 2020 election.
That might be a significant problem in two years if Arizona is once again involved in a tight presidential race like the one in 2020 between Biden and Trump.