Election Day 2022 Special

Good evening and welcome to the special one hour election 2022 edition of Arizona Horizon. Joining us tonight for a look at the initial midterm election results are…

• Karl Gentles, partner at The Gentles Agency LLC
• Jason Barraza, partner at Veridus LLC Contact
• Chuck Coughlin, president of HighGround, Inc.
• Lorna Romero, owner of Elevate

“It looks like Democrats are well-positioned,” Romero said. “We all knew that Democrats really emphasized early ballot returns, and so that was the first draft that we saw this evening. That’s why you can see such a large advantage for Democrats right now.”

In order to have a shot at winning the election after all the rest of the votes are counted, Democrats needed to maintain a certain threshold of about 10%. At the time of these results, the Democrats had even higher than that in some races, Romero said.

These races will tighten and the results may change, Coughlin said.

“I’m comfortable with my colleagues here thinking that Kelly and Fontes looked very strong, having a 250,000 plus vote margin with what we think is about 50% of the vote in. But we think there’s a lot of voters left out there,” Coughlin said.

The main challenge to Democrats right now is that the majority of Republicans have waited until Election Night to come out and vote, Gentles said.

“It’s been about a 3 or 4 to 1 vote difference in Election Day voting, so we’ll have to see what happens,” Gentles said.

In close races such as the Governor race, Independent voters make all the difference, Coughlin said.

“In a race that is this competitive and this close, what all the polling showed was that it was going to come down to them and that proportion. We saw them breaking heavily for Kelly and heavily for Fontes in our early polling,” Coughlin said.

Voters were not doing this for the Governor, Attorney General or Superintendent races. One may expect the pattern to be the same on Election Day, but it’s not guaranteed, since they are Independent voters, according to Coughlin.