Arizona could see 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.
Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema cuts the margin in the U.S. Senate by leaving the Democratic Party and registering as an independent.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.
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. 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.
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.
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. Two months after his removal, Mecham was acquitted of separate criminal charges of concealing a $350,000 loan.
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.
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. 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.
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. 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.
“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.”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.
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. Goodell was a relatively conservative member in the House representing southwestern New York. He opposed, for example, President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs.
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