Arizona's possible 3-way 2024 Senate race could make history

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s decision to bolt from the Democratic Party and Rep. Ruben Gallego’s quick entry as a challenger already has boosted interest in Arizona’s next Senate race.

But the potential for a three-way race in 2024 could put that contest in rare historical standing, both in Arizona and the Senate more broadly.

Sinema, I-Ariz., is the first independent senator in the state’s history. She hasn’t said formally she will seek a second six-year term, but she has filed necessary paperwork to do so. If she does, it would push the state into its first truly competitive three-way race in decades.

And such contests are hard to find in U.S. politics anywhere.

Donald Ritchie, the former Senate historian, said third-party success is rare by design.

“The way the American political system is set up it really works against independent candidates,” he said.

Races for the House of Representatives, for example, could legally be statewide affairs with seats assigned based on vote shares, Ritchie said, but no state does it that way.

“On the presidential level, the Electoral College really works very much against third parties,” he said. “Look at Ross Perot, who (in 1992) got 19 million votes and didn’t get a single electoral vote. His Reform Party faded away. Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party came in second in 1912 and was completely out of existence by 1916.”

Other states have had non-major-party Senate candidates make notable runs. But they seem to lack the special dynamics of a third-party incumbent running in a politically competitive state.

Arizona has never elected anyone to the Senate who wasn’t a Democrat or a Republican, and third-party candidates have seldom gotten more than low, single-digit support.

Bruce Oppenheimer, a political science professor at Vanderbilt University who researches Congress, said Arizona’s Senate race is still missing key pieces that will help determine just how fierce the race could turn out.

“One of the things we don’t know is who the Republican nominee is going to be, and that could have a big effect on the outcome,” he said. “If this looks like a major opening for Republicans, then I expect a good number of candidates will get into the Republican primary. … The candidate who wins in that sort of primary may or may not be a good general election candidate.

“So while we’re all focused on Gallego and Sinema and the problems this creates for the Democrats, we don’t have the third piece of the puzzle yet.”

Former Gov. Evan Mecham central to 2 past Arizona 3-way races

In Arizona, Republican Evan Mecham often tried to insert himself into the political puzzle.

He was a controversial perennial candidate who ran for Arizona office across five decades and had a hand in two of the state’s most memorable three-way races in 1986 and in 1992.

Mecham, who owned a Glendale Pontiac dealership that later factored into his political career, made his first run in 1952, when he sought a seat in the state House of Representatives, and made numerous, mostly futile runs in the 1960s and 1970s. He was the 1962 GOP nominee for the U.S. Senate but failed to unseat long-serving Sen. Carl Hayden, D-Ariz.

In 1986, Mecham won his fifth run for governor in a race marked by widespread dissension within both major parties and with a notable Democrat running as an independent.

Mecham’s wife was a former member of the radical John Birch Society and his popularity with that segment of the electorate left him unpopular with some Republicans. Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz., the state’s most influential Republican, only belatedly endorsed Mecham in a sign of his wariness of someone who had a history of controversies.

Arizona’s Democrats nominated Carolyn Warner, who headed the state’s public schools at the time. Her lackluster appeal helped push Democrat Bill Schulz back into a race he had quit years earlier because of his daughter’s ailing health.

After the September 1986 primaries, Schulz’s supporters quickly collected 32,000 signatures to qualify him for the November ballot. Democrats tried and failed in court to keep him off the ballot.

In the end, Schulz helped divide Democratic votes, and Mecham became the first Republican elected Arizona governor in 12 years. He won with less than 40% of the vote.

A split Democratic vote led to bitter aftermath

Glenn Davis, the chairman of the Arizona Democratic Party at the time, said he had warned of that outcome.

“I told Bill, ‘If you get in, you just might make Ev Mecham governor,’ and he said it would never happen,” Davis told The Arizona Republic on Election Day. “I don’t know how Bill Schulz can live with it.”

Mecham is perhaps best remembered for being impeached and removed from office in April 1988, just 15 months into his term. He was convicted by the state Senate of obstructing justice and funneling $80,000 to his car dealership from the state’s inaugural funds.

Two months after his removal, Mecham was acquitted of separate criminal charges of concealing a $350,000 loan.

During his brief tenure as governor, the state was engulfed in a recall effort to remove Mecham from office, and Arizona was the center of a national furor over his decision to rescind a state holiday for Martin Luther King Jr., which he maintained had been created improperly.

Mecham returns to make third-party challenge to Sen. John McCain

Out of office and still fuming at the political establishment he blamed for his undoing, Mecham ran for the U.S. Senate in 1992, when Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., was seeking his first reelection.

It was perhaps the most consequential third-party Senate race in Arizona history, though Mecham’s presence still didn’t meaningfully change the outcome.

At the time, McCain was one of the senators pulled into the “Keating Five” corruption investigation, along with Sen. Dennis DeConcini, D-Ariz.

In 1991, the Senate Ethics Committee cited McCain, along with the others, for “poor judgment” over a scandal involving Charles Keating, who owned a troubled savings and loan institution and was a major McCain donor. Keating held meetings with the lawmakers intended to pressure them into getting a fraud probe dropped against him and his bank.

A 1991 Arizona Republic poll found that nearly half of respondents thought McCain should quit at the end of his term.

Democrats nominated political activist Claire Sargent to challenge McCain. Mecham, who remembered McCain as among the first to call for him to step down during the recall and impeachment efforts, also joined the race.

Mecham happily linked McCain to his previous standards on politicos facing allegations.

“He should, by his own set of rules, resign,” Mecham said.

Mecham received 145,000 votes, and helped keep an uncomfortable spotlight on McCain, but McCain still won with 56% of the vote.

In between those two Mecham runs was Arizona’s 1990 governor’s race, which went to a runoff because of a former Mecham aide who siphoned votes from the GOP.

After Mecham lost the GOP primary to Fife Symington, Max Hawkins ran as a write-in candidate with the Stop Abortion Party in the general election and pulled in nearly 11,000 votes.

Symington only topped Democrat Terry Goddard, a former Phoenix mayor and future Arizona attorney general, by 4,300 votes, and he fell 3,700 votes short of the majority needed to win the race outright.

Hawkins effectively prolonged the race and left Republicans stewing.

“The horse he rides is vengeance,” said Sam Steiger, a former GOP congressman and onetime Mecham aide as well. “If it hadn’t been such a remarkably close race, he wouldn’t have been significant at all.”

Symington won the runoff against Goddard three months later.

No success for third-party candidates in statewide races

Arizona has had other third-party candidates who either pulled in notable numbers of votes or potentially significant vote shares.

In 2012, Libertarian Marc Victor received 102,000 votes, but didn’t really affect Republican Sen. Jeff Flake’s eventual win by nearly 70,000 votes.

In 1980, three non-major-party candidates collectively pulled in 2% of the votes when Goldwater won his final Senate term by 1 point with just under half the votes. Schulz was the Democratic nominee that year.

Nationally, there aren’t many races to compare to the one Arizona could see in 2024.

While Arizona has never before had an independent senator, such incumbents are rare but not new elsewhere.

Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine have been independents in the Senate since 2007 and 2013 respectively. Both have consistently caucused with Democrats and faced only token opposition from that party over the years.

It's not just Arizona: Third-party Senate candidates have trouble across US

Across the country, voting for third-party candidates in U.S. Senate races has bounced up and down over time, with 1992 standing as the high point since 1990, according to an Arizona Republic analysis of data from Dave Leip’s U.S. Election Atlas.

That year, the non-major-party candidates pulled in 4.8% of all votes, nearly one of every 20 cast. In recent cycles, that share hasn’t topped 3.5% since 2014.

The smaller share is at least partly impacted by changes in voting options. In California, voters have since 2012 held a “jungle primary” that includes candidates from all parties, with only the top two vote-getters moving to the general election.

Just 66, or 11% of the 590 Senate races across the country, had winning margins smaller than the vote share of third-party candidates since 1990.

Only 40 races had third-party candidates pull in more than 10% of the vote.

One of them is Arizona’s 2000 Senate race in which Democrats didn’t field a candidate against Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz. In that case, three non-major-party candidates combined for 289,000 votes, or 21% of the total, in a race Kyl won easily.

Third-party candidates only reached double-digit support 22 times in which both Democrats and Republicans fielded candidates.

Third-party candidate caused tight 2008 Senate race in Minnesota

One of them is the closest Senate race since 1990: Minnesota’s in 2008.

In that race, incumbent Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., ran against Democratic challenger Al Franken and Independence Party candidate Dean Barkley.

Barkley was appointed to the Senate for several months after the 2002 death of Sen. Paul Wellstone, D-Minn., just 11 days before the elections that November. He sat with Republicans during his brief tenure in the Senate.

Barkley refused to formally join either the Democrats or Republicans. In a sign of his independence, Barkley was chair of then-Gov. Jesse Ventura’s successful third-party election in 1998.

In 2008, Barkley ran for the Senate job he once had and wound up pulling in 438,000 votes, or 15% of all the ballots in the race. Another 25,000 votes went to other candidates, including a Libertarian.

Meanwhile, Coleman and Franken received 1.2 million votes each.

The initial certified count showed Coleman won by 215 votes. The state-mandated automatic recount included a smattering of absentee ballots originally excluded from the counting. With those in the mix, Franken led by 225 votes in a result the state certified.

Coleman challenged the results in a lawsuit that, with an appeal, dragged on for months — and kept Democrats in Washington one member shy of a filibuster-proof majority in the early phase of new President Barack Obama’s administration.

When the case ended, Franken’s lead edged up to 312 votes, or 0.01%. He took office in July 2009.

In an interview at the outset of the 2008 recount, Barkley rejected the many complaints that he had thrown the race into chaos.

“Absolutely not. That whole bizarre attitude is the height of arrogance over the two-party system,” he told the news site MinnPost. “Nobody owns votes.”

One recent race that doesn’t seem to measure up the same way happened two years earlier.

In 2006, Connecticut voters reelected incumbent Sen. Joseph Lieberman as an independent with both a Democratic and Republican challenger. But that race had at least two key differences from Arizona’s potential race next year.

For one, Lieberman lost the Democratic primary in August that year, a sign that he wanted to remain in the party, at least to that point.

And Alan Schlesinger, the GOP challenger, was always considered a long shot in a Democratic-leaning state. He was more so after revelations after securing the nomination that he had been sued over unpaid gambling debts. Some Republicans called on him to drop out even before Lieberman lost the Democratic nomination.

Lieberman won another term with 50% of the vote. Ned Lamont received 40% and Schlesinger got less than 10%.

Lessons for Arizona from 1970 New York and Virginia Senate races?

The 1970 Senate elections in New York and Virginia may have produced the two closest comparisons to what could happen in Arizona.

New York’s 1970 contest featured three viable candidates: incumbent Republican Sen. Charles Goodell ran against Democratic Rep. Richard Ottinger and James L. Buckley of the Conservative Party.

Buckley is the brother of William F. Buckley, the late founder of the conservative National Review magazine. Goodell was the father of future NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.

The race filled the seat previously held by Robert F. Kennedy, who was assassinated while running for president in 1968. New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, a Republican, tapped Goodell, who was then a member of New York’s congressional delegation, to Kennedy’s vacant seat.

As his party’s name suggested, Buckley ran as the most conservative candidate in the field. His campaign message: “Isn’t it about time we had a Senator?”

Buckley spoke to what he called the "silent majority."

It was a constituency President Richard Nixon cited in a November 1969 speech about the ongoing Vietnam War in an appeal to voters who were critical of the antiwar movement.

Goodell was a relatively conservative member in the House representing southwestern New York. He opposed, for example, President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs.

But after joining the Senate, where he would have to appeal to the entire state — including left-leaning New York City — Goodell moved leftward. He voted against two of Nixon’s Supreme Court appointments and marched with Coretta Scott King in opposition to the Vietnam War.

Ottinger was a soft-spoken moderate Democrat whose campaign struggled to stand apart from Goodell’s.

Buckley only pulled in 39% of the votes, but it was just enough to win with Goodell and Ottinger vying for the left’s votes. Goodell received 37% and Ottinger finished with 24%.

In Virginia the same year, incumbent Sen. Harry Byrd Jr. switched from a Democrat to an independent because he refused the Virginia Democratic Party’s required loyalty pledge to back the party’s 1972 presidential nominee, whoever it might be.

In 1968, the Democrats lost the White House after a chaotic nominating process and a disastrous national convention most remembered for the protests outside.

Byrd ran as an independent against challengers from the Democratic and Republican parties. But no one in Virginia could match Byrd’s political pedigree at that time.

Byrd’s father, Harry Byrd Sr., was a legend of Virginia politics, serving as the state’s governor and its senator for 32 years and was considered presidential material off and on for decades. His son was appointed to his Senate seat in 1965.

Byrd Jr., easily won the 1970 election with nearly 54% of the vote. He went on to win another term in 1976 as well. He continued to caucus with Democrats.