Former President Donald Trump appears to be riding off the backs of ticket splitters in Arizona, according to a major poll released Monday.
Ticket splitting, a phenomenon where voters support one party’s candidate for president and the other’s for Congress, could change the game this November in the battleground state.
The latest New York Times/Siena College poll showed the former president has opened up a critical lead over Vice President Kamala Harris in Arizona even as the state’s Democratic senate candidate continues to outperform his Republican challenger, who is a close Trump ally.
Trump now has a five-point lead over Harris in Arizona. The news comes as a boost to the Trump campaign after similar polling released roughly four weeks ago showed the former president trailing Harris by the same margin in the state.
Meanwhile, Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) continues to beat his GOP opponent, Kari Lake. However, his lead of six percentage points signals a modest drop from a slightly larger lead he held in a previous New York Times/Sienna College poll conducted in August.
A Republican veteran and former lawmaker in the state credited Trump’s success in winning over voters to his determination to march to the beat of his own drum.
“Donald Trump creates his own weather, and he has a coalition supporting him like no other Republican nominee in our lifetime — perhaps ever — in Arizona,” Stan Barnes, a GOP political consultant in Arizona, told the New York Times.
The ticket split was on full display when Trump and Gallego both gained the Arizona Police Association’s support last month. The head of the largest law enforcement association in Arizona, Justin Harris, backed Trump over the vice president during a Glendale rally in August. Just days after that endorsement, the APA switched to the other side of the aisle to support Gallego in his senate race against Lake.
Trump’s gains in Arizona come after he made repeated visits to the state in recent months. He even announced a new branch of his campaign there last month, which could appeal to moderate voters in the purple state.
Speaking to cheers at a packed-out Glendale rally in late August, former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. declared his plans to tackle the country’s chronic disease epidemic with Trump’s blessing. At the height of his campaign, Kennedy garnered support from 15% of the electorate but ultimately suspended his presidential campaign to endorse the former president and “save our children.”
A leading advocate of reform in federal health agencies, Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” campaign could hold an olive branch to centrist voters concerned about matters such as childhood obesity and diabetes.
Trump has seen a bump in the polls since Kennedy’s endorsement and leadership on the MAHA indicative, and he’s also pulling support from Hispanic voters, a group Gallego has been targeting.
The economy and inflation have been a top concern for Arizona Hispanics, and the latest poll shows they trust Trump more than Harris to handle them.
Gallego, a Latino, leads the Congressional Hispanic Caucus’s political arm, BOLD PAC. Aided by a background in crafting pitches to the key coalition, Gallego has given Lake a run for her money.
“It’s easy to say Latinos … don’t have the representation they deserve in Washington, D.C. But I’m not just here to say it. I’m here to fix it,” Gallego has told voters across the state in English and Spanish.
Lake, whose husband is Hispanic, has sat down for interviews with Spanish media in recent months. But she recently suffered another loss to Gallego when the Hispanic mayor of a high-profile border town threw his weight behind the Democrat.
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Jorge Maldonado, the mayor of Nogales, previously campaigned alongside Lake but said in July he was backing Gallego because “Ruben will never use our city as a political talking point.”
“Ruben Gallego has a deep understanding of our community here in Nogales and a genuine commitment to making Arizona a better place for all of us,” Maldonado said.