Over these two weeks starting February 21, we are profiling the five most vulnerable incumbent senators up in 2022. We began with New Hampshire’s Maggie Hassan and Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson. In this piece, the third most vulnerable: Arizona Democrat Mark Kelly.

The story of the Senate races in Arizona of late rivals few others, save for perhaps Georgia. In 2018, Republicans put up Congresswoman Martha McSally against Democratic Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema to vie for the seat of outgoing Trump-critical-Republican Jeff Flake. McSally tried to position herself as a “sort-of-pro-Trump” candidate and lost. But, she was then controversially appointed by Governor Doug Ducey to the late John McCain’s seat, becoming a senator anyway and preparing to run for election again in 2020. As we wrote in 2020, the “Arizona GOP’s quest to make McSally ‘happen’” has not gone well, and sure enough, McSally lost that election to the Democrat, former astronaut Mark Kelly, by a bit over 2% – earning her the embarrassing distinction of losing two seemingly-safe GOP Senate seats in the span of less than two years.

For the third time in six years, Arizonans will vote for a senator as Kelly faces whoever the Republicans settle on in their primary in what is considered one of the closest elections this cycle. Kelly is less vulnerable than he appears, though, for a number of reasons:

  1. He is raising a compelling amount of money, outpacing any of his potential GOP challengers. He has demonstrated himself to be an effective fundraiser with an inspiring story – an astronaut whose wife, then-Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, survived an assassination attempt in 2011. He has already outpaced what he raised in 2019, the year before his 2020 election.

  2. He is likely to face a Republican with electability problems. Say what you will about McSally but she was – on paper – a very strong candidate: she was the first woman to fly in combat and the first to command a fighter squadron; she sued the Defense Department over military dress codes for U.S. service members stationed in Saudi Arabia; and she unseated a Democratic incumbent in 2014 in a moderate (now a relatively safe Democratic-leaning) district. The top three Republicans running in the 2022 primary all have problems: Attorney General Mark Brnovich is resented by Trump for not doing anything about what the former president falsely believes was a “rigged and stolen” election in Arizona in 2020. Businessman Jim Lamon is much more chummy with Trump and ran an ad during the Super Bowl depicting himself shooting at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Biden, and Kelly – a questionable strategy given Kelly’s personal history with gun violence. And Thiel Foundation President Blake Masters has highlighted his own chumminess with Trump, flirted with election fraud conspiracies, and is issuing non-fungible tokens to fundraise for his campaign (which actually proved to be relatively successful). None of them makes a particularly strong candidate against a former astronaut-turned-senator, and Arizona swung pretty definitively against Trump-style conservatism in the last six years. Republicans don’t seem to have learned that though.

  3. Polling. Polling this far in advance shouldn’t serve as much of an indication, but in all of 2021 and 2022, Kelly has not trailed in a single reputable poll. He routinely outperforms Lamon and Masters and narrowly outperforms Brnovich. And if Arizona Republican Party Chairman Kelli Ward (who, for some reason, has not lost her job after overseeing the annihilation of the party in both of its serious statewide races in the last two years) decides to jump in the race, he outpolls her too.

So yes, if things really start to turn, Kelly could be in a tighter election – but it’s currently less competitive than many prognosticators seem to think.