Harry Enten, a political analyst at Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.com, just tweeted out a dire forecast for Arizona’s junior senator Jeff Flake, who is (still) running for re-election in 2018:
Here are some of the lowlights from this GBA poll of Arizona voters. (Note that GBA Strategies is a Democratic pollster.)
- Flake is trailing his likely general election opponent, Democrat Krysten Sinema, by seven points, 47-40. He trails Senema by a whopping 13 points among independent voters.
- But there is every sign that Flake won’t even make it to the general election, because his support among Republican primary voters is absolutely horrendously bad. It’s so bad that it feels like the setup for a Johnny Carson joke (“How bad is it?”)
- One of Flake’s likely primary opponents, Kelli Ward, leads Flake by a huge 58-31 margin. That’s an incredible 27 point lead over an incumbent US Senator.
- Flake’s job approval is also in the toilet. Among likely Republican primary voters, his approve/disapprove is 34-59. Yes, that’s REPUBLICAN voters giving their boy a minus-25. That’s even worse than the electorate as a whole! Because among all likely voters, Flake’s job approval is 38-50, a minus-12.
Airzona Treasurer Jeff DeWit and former AZ-GOP party chair Robert Graham are also considering entering the primary against Flake, but poll numbers like this may put those ideas to rest. Ward has already been endorsed by Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. The good news for Dems is that Ward is a Trump-loving gaffe machine:
“She is not a buffoon,” one close observer of Arizona politics told me, “but she says buffoonish things.”
Yeah, who does that remind you of?
Other good news: Arizonan Republicans really, really don’t like Mitch McConnell either, scoring an even worse 17-42 approval rating. Yes, once again that number is among Republicans.
I don’t know about you, but at this point I’d bet that somewhere in Arizona, there’s a rat on a sinking ship looking for a lifeboat.