In addition to looking at the Republican primary for President in Arizona and Pennsylvania we also looked at the Senate primaries in those states:
Arizona looks like a snoozer with Jeff Flake already polling at 53% to 7% for Wil Cardon, 5% for Bryan Hackbarth, 2% for Clair Van Steenwyk, and 1% for Douglas McKee.
Flake is pretty well known and well liked with 48% of voters expressing a favorable opinion of him to only 13% with a negative one. That net favorability of +35 with primary voters is up from +28 when we last polled Arizona in May, so he appears to be wearing well as he becomes better known. Even though he received a fair amount of publicity with his candidacy announcement last week Cardon has only 18% name recognition and it breaks down 7% rating him favorably and 11% unfavorably, not terribly impressive numbers.
Cardon may have trouble challenging Flake on the right- that's actually where Flake has his strongest support right now with 62% of 'very conservative' voters expressing a positive opinion of him and 63% planning to vote for him in the primary. It looks like a pretty up hill battle for Cardon.
The Pennsylvania Republican primary looks far more up in the air with Sam Rohrer the early leader at 25% to 15% for Tim Burns, 3% for Tom Smith, 2% for Laureen Cummings, 1% each for John Vernon and Steve Welch, and 0% for Marc Scaringi. The key number is how many people are undecided or plan to vote for someone else: 51%. This is very much a contest in its embryonic stage.
Rohrer's early lead is largely a function of name recognition. He doesn't have much- only 25% of primary voters are familiar enough with him to have formed an opinion- but it's still a lot more than the 18% who know Burns, 13% who know Smith, and 11% with a take on Welch.
Rohrer is looking particularly strong at this point with Tea Party voters, where he gets 33% compared to only 20% with Republicans who don't identify with that movement. It's nice to start out in the lead but in this race there's a long way to go.
Full results here
Comments