This past Tuesday, Marc Victor, the Libertarian candidate, officially dropped out of the race for U.S. Senate in Arizona, but not before making sure to throw his support over to endorse Blake Masters, the race’s GOP candidate.
This intense turn takes place just a week prior to the election and has a chance to solidly swing what was previously marked as a close race between incumbent Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly and his GOP opponent Blake Masters. Throughout most of the campaign trail, Masters has been trailing Kelly but has managed to close the gap over the past month. The election forecasters from groups such as Cook Political Report and Politico have reclassified the Senate race in Arizona from a category of Democratic-leaning to a toss-up because of this.
Victor had been polling, quite consistently, in the single digits throughout the entire race and was at no point thought to possess any viable chance at winning the seat. Despite this, the single-digit support could end up sparking a crucial swing for Masters in the very close race. This past Monday. one group, Ohio Predictive Insights, put forth the results of a poll of its own that measured the support for Victor, finalizing it at 3%. The very same poll put Kelly and Masters at roughly 2% apart: 48% to 46%, respectively.
“This is another major boost of momentum as we consolidate our support,” expressed Masters via a release sent to The New York Times Tuesday of last week.
Victor, who was known to campaign as the “live and let live” candidate, claimed via a video released Tuesday morning of last week that he came to the decision to stand with Masters in the wake of having a conversation with the Republican candidate concerning his support for the “global peace movement.”
“We talked through many, many issues. We talked about a lot of economic issues, we talked about a lot of civil liberty issues. And while we don’t see eye-to-eye on everything, I feel very confident after that conversation that Blake Masters is going to do everything he possibly can to further the interests of the Live and Let Live Global Peace Movement,” explained Victor.
Despite Kelly leading the vast majority of polls, he, along with a large number of other Democrats from all over the nation, has been made to deal with strong pushback as he makes his way into the midterms. Old Uncle Joe’s current very strong unpopularity with voters and the extreme concerns concerning inflation and crime has sparked a heavily hostile environment for Democrat electoral campaigns. To deal with this, Kelly has lauded various analyses which put him as one of the most bipartisan lawmakers in the Senate.
Despite these claims, Masters’s campaign has highlighted that Kelly has voted alongside Biden for over 95% of his votes for the past two years, as reported by an analysis carried out by FiveThirtyEight.