Sinema Has Two Options: Lose Badly, or Drop Out
Two new polls released today from Blueprint Polling and Morning Consult show no viable path to re-election for Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema.
Our reaction: “Sinema has only two real options in 2024: lose badly or drop out. The numbers show that Arizonans clearly see Sinema’s new political label for what it is: political opportunism. The voters deserve better,” said Sacha Haworth, spokeswoman for Replace Sinema and former communications director for Kyrsten Sinema in 2018.
The numbers from the Blueprint poll show Sinema in a distant third-place against a potential Democrat and a potential Republican.
Blueprint Polling – January 5-8
Kari Lake (R) – 36%
Ruben Gallego (D) – 32%
Kyrsten Sinema (I) – 13%
Also noteworthy from the Blueprint poll: “Sinema gets very little support from Hispanic voters, garnering 3% of their vote (Gallego leads Lake 41%-39% with this group), while Sinema gets the support of 17% of white Arizonans. Notably, Gallego does better with women by about 4% than with men and Sinema enjoys a similar positive differential with men.”
Meanwhile, the new Morning Consult data shows that Sinema’s statewide approval among Arizona voters remains in the toilet – while she remains one of the most unpopular Senators in the country.
From Morning Consult: “Following Sinema’s Dec. 9 declaration that she was separating from the Democratic Party, her overall approval rating only moved marginally. But among Democrats in her state, whose national apparatus helped her flip a seat in the 2018 midterm elections, Sinema’s disapproval rating climbed 18 percentage points, to 59%.”
While Sinema’s approval has ticked upward among Independents and Republicans, it’s not enough to make up for a massive loss of Democratic support since her party switch – making her net approval exactly the same as before (-12). She remains at an overall 38% approve and 50% disapprove.
Morning Consult also notes that Sinema is in the bottom tier of all U.S. Senators by approval in their home states. The only Senator with a lower positive approval than Sinema is Mitch McConnell.
Read the Blueprint Polling memo and the Morning Consult report.
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