Posted by Sean Trende
It has been a crazy year in the Republican primaries, and many analysts looking for the next upset have cast their eyes toward Arizona's August 24 Senate primary, where John McCain will face off against conservative firebrand J.D. Hayworth.
The boisterous Hayworth, who represented Arizona's Sixth Congressional District (renumbered the Fifth in 2002) from 1994 until losing to Democrat Harry Mitchell in 2006, is aiming to make McCain the next Bob Bennett.
I think that's unlikely. Unlike many GOP incumbents, McCain seemed to see this coming.
Almost immediately after his loss in 2008 he veered rightward, criticizing the stimulus, leading the charge against the Democrats' health care bill, and, perhaps more importantly for the Arizona GOP electorate, becoming more of a hardliner on immigration reform.
Hayworth, by contrast, has things that set him apart from other Tea Party winners. Unlike Mike Lee in Utah, he has to face a primary electorate immediately, rather than a convention filled with the party's most conservative activists. And unlike Sharron Angle, he doesn't benefit from a three-way race, which allows a candidate who
can win 40% of the state's primary vote to win handily.
Plus Hayworth certainly has problems unique to his own candidacy. McCain has been hammering him on his connections to "birtherism," and other odd views (I am guessing an awful lot of Republicans are wondering where these ad men were during McCain's 2008 campaign . . .).
Making matters worse for the former Congressman, a video has now resurfaced where Hayworth appeared in an infomercial explaining how Americans can get billions of dollars from the government to help build a better America. Methinks this is unlikely to sit well with his Tea Party base.
So it isn't entirely surprising that a recent Magellan Strategies (R) poll shows McCain leading Hayworth 52%-29%. Magellan is kind of a new kid on the block, but they've had some polling successes recently in Republican primaries. They pretty well nailed the Republican primaries in California, and came awfully close in the Kentucky Republican primary as well. So we give a fair amount of weight to their findings here.
Perhaps the key result: McCain has succeeded in pushing Hayworth's favorables into negative territory, as the former Congressman is 38/50 unfavorable (compared to 60/37 favorable for
McCain). And looking at the rest of the polls in the RCP Average, we find Hayworth pretty consistently in a range between 28 and 36 points, while McCain is somewhere between 46 and 54 points. In other words, when you figure in error margins, all of these polls are pretty well telling us the same thing.
It's still two months until August 24, so there is time for things to move. But for now, McCain looks like an unlikely victim of an upset.
Magellan Arizona US Senate Republican Primary 062410
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