Support for legal marijuana could help Mark Kelly

The most recent polling suggests continued majority support in Arizona for a ballot measure to legalize marijuana.

Extrapolating from the data, the pollster went further: The pot initiative could factor in the 2020 U.S. Senate race pitting Martha McSally against Mark Kelly.

That is, it could help propel political neophyte Kelly, a Democrat, past McSally, a Republican who served two terms in Congress before her current appointment.

Not a wacky observation, that.

But could and would are different things. And it’d be a stretch to give Kelly a nod over McSally.

According to the latest poll by OH Predictive Insights, Kelly supporters favor marijuana legalization by more than a 3 to 1 margin; McSally supporters oppose legalization by a nearly 2 to 1 margin.

Polling or not, it’s a safe, conventional bet to say progressives favor legalizing marijuana considerably more than conservatives. And with likely voters favoring weed legalization by roughly 10 percentage points – the percentage is even higher for those who are “extremely enthusiastic” to vote in 2020 – it’s conceivable that having the measure on the ballot may help Kelly.

All the more given that a matchup of Kelly-McSally is right now pretty much a statistical dead heat.

Still, surveying people’s preference on a single race is one thing. To tease out how those preferences relate to an unrelated ballot measure becomes more inexact science.

Especially with the election still 11 months away.

For one thing, we don’t yet know whether there will be a competing marijuana-legalization initiative, which could complicate the calculus. Or whether the Arizona Legislature would refer one of its own, if only to confuse voters and doom the marijuana industry-crafted “Smart and Safe Arizona Act.”

For another, it’s difficult to count on voters in any initiative to have a significant spillover effect.

It didn’t happen in 2016 when different progressive groups put on the ballot a similar version of marijuana legalization and a minimum-wage initiative. The latter easily passed, while the pot measure failed by a slim margin.

And last year, the #RedforEd movement and a referendum on school voucher expansion portended that Gov. Doug Ducey would face the political fight of his life. Voters rejected expansion of the voucher program he backed by a 2-1 margin. Yet Ducey crushed the Democratic challenger by 14 points.

Now, you can argue that the margin reflected how poorly the challenger campaigned. After all, Democratic newcomer Kathy Hoffman won the school superintendent job that had been held by Republican predecessors.

Still.

The polls will likely move, especially on the Senate race.

They’ll move as Mark Kelly and Martha McSally attempt more rigorously to define themselves, and each other, as things heat up next year. Their favorability and unfavorability ratings with key voting groups, their stances on health-care reforms and gun rights and other hot-button issues, their seizingthe-moments and missteps — those will move undecided voters and poll numbers.

That said, should the two remain in a tight contest come next spring, a marijuana-legalization initiative may well help Kelly.

Would the Republican-controlled Legislature be more amenable then to decriminalize marijuana possession and use, and sap support of the initiative — and any of its beneficiaries?