Public Policy Polling posted interesting results on its blog of a recent poll it conducted about the race for Arizona Governor.
According to the poll, Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard, a Democrat, is the candidate to beat for governor right now. He beats Republican Gov. Jan Brewer by large margins in the poll and wipes the floor with former Republican Gov. J. Fife Symington III.
Because of Arizona’s resign to run law, few candidates have formally declared they are running for governor, although several people have said they “intend” to run, including Goddard, sparking a blogosphere war of words about whether saying you “intend” to run is a formal declaration that you are.
So the poll is a little premature in that that there may be candidates out there lying in the weeds waiting for Jan. 1 to roll around when they can make their formal declaration without giving up their cushy day jobs.
The resign to run law has a huge loophole in it though, in that it doesn’t prevent a candidate from setting up an “exploratory” committee to raise money to conduct polling and other activities to determine if a run for office is viable. All those exploratory committees do is allow candidates to get a jump on fund raising the year before they’re formally running, then when they declare, the exploratory committee dumps all the money raised for exploring into the candidate’s campaign committee (unless they’re running with Clean Elections money).
So who do you want to be governor of Arizona? Below is a poll with a list of names of people who have either said they’re thinking about running, they “intend” to run, have set up exploratory committees or who others have said “boy, I wish he/she would run.” It’s off the top of my head (helped by a little Google searching) so it may not be comprehensive. (The poll’s loaded with Republicans because it looks like the Dems have cleared the decks for Goddard).