By Alison Steinbach || The Arizona Republic
With just days to go until Election Day, it’s hard to know from looking at polls what to believe about who is ahead in Arizona’s top-of-the-ballot elections.
And given the recent past, it’s reasonable to look skeptically at polling, particularly in the state. Polls may show a candidate has a big lead one day, and then another poll might mark the race a toss-up. It can depend on who’s doing the poll, what their method is and whether they have a partisan lean.
You’re better off just waiting until the votes are counted.
Arizona doesn’t have many in-state pollsters, but national groups do polls in Arizona around election season, too. Elections analysts say the number of pollsters seems to have dropped this election cycle. It’s hard to know how accurate any given poll might be and how reliable their scientific methods were.
2020 election tighter than polls showed
The Sunday before the November 2020 election, for example, a poll from the New York Times/Siena College showed President Joe Biden leading over former President Donald Trump by 6 percentage points, and now-Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., leading over then-incumbent Republican Sen. Martha McSally by 7 points, both with a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
The races ended up being far tighter. Biden carried Arizona by some 10,000 votes, or 0.3 percentage points, and Kelly defeated McSally by just more than 2 points.
In this year’s Senate race, recent polls have put Kelly anywhere from handily ahead to tied with his Republican challenger Blake Masters. Masters hasn’t led in any major polls. In the race for governor, an average of polls has for a few weeks put Republican Kari Lake slightly ahead of Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs.
Both races are still labeled toss-ups by some polling averages and nonpartisan elections analysts.
