GOP's Chances at Midterm Victory Threatened by Dark Horse Senate Candidate

A new poll out of Arizona shows Trump-backed Republican Blake Masters losing to his Democratic opponent Mark Kelly by more than a dozen points thanks to an unexpected surge in the polls by a dark horse candidate following last week's first—and likely only—debate in a race that could decide control of the U.S. Senate.

With less than one month until Election Day, Arizona pollster OH Predictive Insights on Tuesday projected Libertarian candidate Marc Victor to earn approximately 15 percent of the vote in November's contest, a 9-point surge from its last poll of the race in September.

If accurate, Victor's performance would eclipse the margin of victory Masters would likely need to overcome Kelly by several points. The poll, which has a 3.77 percent margin of error, shows Victor's support likely coming from approximately half of the voters who are still undecided in the race.

Meanwhile, Victor—who describes himself as the "live and let live" candidate—is currently refusing to drop out of the race, even if his staying in affects the outcome of what the majority of polling has shown to be a potentially winnable race for Masters, who is currently an underdog to Kelly.

On Monday, Victor released a YouTube video saying he would decline to exit the race unless either candidate agreed to an unscripted, on-camera conversation with him in which they explained why Victor should drop out and endorse either of them, after which he might—or might not—exit the race.

"The world needs help right now," he told Newsweek in an interview. "It's not just the United States and it's not just Arizona. Nobody's talking about issues like artificial intelligence and synthetic biology and the proliferation of nukes. To me, these are existential threats that we've got to get more attention. I'm doing this to get more attention on the very serious problems that we've got coming up, that we're not talking about. If somebody else can do it better than me, I'm out."

Victor, who says he has had little help from the national party in his campaign, generated some negative press attention for comments he made during the debate about the age of consent being put to a vote. But he also says he stands to the left of Kelly on several issues, including his support for a more non-interventionist posture on foreign policy.

He also attempts to strike a middle ground on contentious issues like LGBTQ rights and abortion by opposing any laws at either the state or federal level that restrict or expand the limitations of what people can do, instead favoring legislation that would take place at a more localized level.

But one of his biggest boosters, he says, comes from the general disarray of the Arizona Republican Party, which he says has become too extreme to gather mainstream appeal. Meanwhile, Democrats have generally lacked an alternative, with progressives and moderates in the party banding together to be competitive in a state that has had just one Democratic governor in the last three decades, and only recently managed to elect a pair of Democrats in the Senate.

Campaign finance reports show he has also received thousands of dollars in support from at least five liberal-aligned political action committees, including $5,000 from the Defeat Republicans PAC as well as the Stop Republicans PAC, an affiliate of the Democrat-aligned Progressive Turnout Project.

"The Republicans have pretty much been co-opted by the radical right," Victor said. "And the Democrats have been co-opted by the radical left. And the people who aren't radical—they're what I would call the reasonable crowd. There's a reasonable crowd in the Republicans, and a reasonable crowd in the Democrats. That right there is the group I am trying to speak to."

Some states have shown signs there could be room for a third-party "spoiler" candidate in recent elections. In Wyoming, several downballot races in the 2020 election cycle showed Libertarians returning strong results against more mainstream Republican candidates in the general election.

And in that year's presidential election, Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen's share of the vote in some fiercely competitive states was higher than the margins separating Democratic candidate Joe Biden and then-President Donald Trump.

While he's unlikely to win, Victor says staying in the race is an important way to show voters there is an alternative to two imperfect choices.

"It seems like everybody is upset about the current state of affairs on both sides," Victor said. "There's more unhappiness and frustration in politics now than I can ever remember in my life. Yet when somebody steps up on a third party and says, 'Hey, let's try to do something different,' they're vilified for it. Do we want something different or not? Do we want to move past this tribalism and this divisiveness that we've been mired in? Or do we want the same thing? That's really what my candidacy is about."