Blake Masters has taken a clear lead in Arizona’s Republican U.S. Senate primary, edging past Attorney General Mark Brnovich and businessman Jim Lamon, a new poll provided exclusively to Breitbart News ahead of its public release shows.
The poll, conducted for the pro-Masters Super PAC Saving Arizona PAC, shows Masters with a four-point lead over both Brnovich and Lamon. Masters, at 22 percent, leads both Brnovich and Lamon — both of whom are at 18 percent — by more than the poll’s 3.46 percent margin of error. Another candidate, Mick McGuire, is down at seven percent and Justin Olson is at two percent, while 34 percent are undecided.
The poll, conducted by the highly respected Fabrizio, Lee, and Associates, from May 17 to May 18, surveyed 800 likely voters ahead of the forthcoming August 2 primary. The polling firm is highly respected in that it accurately captured several other major races this cycle, including most notably accurately portraying the Ohio GOP U.S. Senate primary in the lead-up to J.D. Vance’s victory there earlier in May. The firm has also conducted polls for former President Donald Trump.
5-22 AZ Senate GOP Primary Memo – Final by Breitbart News on Scribd
“We found that Blake Masters is quite popular with RPV [Republican primary voters] in as far as he is known and continues to lead in the GOP primary for U.S. Senate, buoyed by those who are aware of recent ads about him, underlying the efficacy of pro-Masters communications being delivered to the RPV electorate,” pollsters Tony Fabrizio, David Lee, and Travis Tunis wrote in the polling memo provided to Breitbart News.
This poll comes on the heels of a previous survey from March that also showed Masters in the lead but inside the margin of error back then. Now, his lead is convincing and just outside of the margin of error — meaning Masters has now emerged as the undisputed frontrunner in the lead-up to Memorial Day weekend in the final two months of the campaign.
The poll also found that Blake Masters has high favorability ratings, with 42 percent viewing him favorably with only 18 percent viewing him unfavorably — a number that rises even higher among those who have recently seen pro-Masters advertisements. Among those who have seen the ads, his favorability rises to 57 percent and his unfavorable rating only rises to 26 percent.
Among those who have seen Masters’s ads, too, he takes an even more convincing lead over Brnovich and Lamon. In that sub-group, Masters leads the field even more so at 31 percent, with Lamon in a distant second place down at 21 percent and Brnovich at just 19 percent.
The survey also found that Trump remains incredibly popular among Arizona Republicans, with an approval rating of 88 percent — and just 11 percent who disapprove — basically unchanged from the earlier survey in March.
This reputable poll’s release also comes as, Breitbart News has learned, Lamon’s team intends to release a not-so-reputable push poll to try to counter the narrative that Masters is taking off. Screenshots of the online poll — which is reportedly being done by Lamon’s team under the banner of “Remington Research Group” in the same manner in which Lamon has previously released such polls and other failing candidates like Ohio’s Josh Mandel and Missouri’s Eric Schmitt and others have done — shows them testing several attacks against Masters.
These polls, however, are incredibly unreliable as evidenced by one late Ohio poll that showed Mandel leading before the Trump endorsement of Ohio’s J.D. Vance and claiming that Trump backing Vance would only boost the now-Republican nominee by just a few percent. Obviously, that turned out to be inaccurate. One of the attacks being tested against Masters directly mirrors a Lamon campaign television ad that claims Masters is a “puppet” of Big Tech because of his ties to Peter Thiel, one of his biggest benefactors. That pro-Lamon push poll is expected to be released in the coming days.