Arizona election denier Kari Lake announced her Senate bid on Tuesday with an endorsement from Donald Trump, though even her intraparty skeptics already acknowledged before this week that she’ll have little trouble securing the Republican nomination. However, there’s considerably less consensus on how she’d do in a general election against Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego, who faces no serious primary opposition, especially since Democrat-turned-independent Kyrsten Sinema remains uncommitted about seeking reelection.
Two polls were released ahead of Lake’s campaign rally, and they presented very different takes of this still-developing race. Gallego’s campaign first publicized a Public Policy Polling internal that showed him leading the Republican 41-36, with Sinema taking 15%. PPP also found Sinema drawing equal support from both major party opponents, as it has the congressman beating Lake 48-43 in a two-way matchup.
The Republican group National Research Inc., though, argues that Democrats should hope the incumbent sits the contest out. The firm showed Lake leading Gallego 37-33, with Sinema at 19%; when respondents were just asked about the two frontrunners, however, the race became a 44-44 deadlock. The pollster tells us this survey was “conducted for a private client with no ties to either campaign.”
The GOP primary already includes Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb, a former Lake ally who launched his bid back in April. (NBC reported in December of last year that Lake was encouraging him to run before she started eyeing this race herself.) The sheriff, though, has struggled to raise money, and he was overshadowed by Lake months before she even launched her campaign against him. Still, Lamb insisted to local NBC reporter Brahm Resnik on Tuesday, “I don’t scare easily and I’ve looked a lot tougher people in the eyes than what I’m running against.”
Blake Masters, who waged a disastrous 2022 campaign for Arizona’s other Senate seat last year against Democratic incumbent Mark Kelly, has been talking about another run, but the Wall Street Journal reported late last month that Trump convinced him to pause his planned entry; Masters, though, has yet to say if he’s decided not to run. PPP tested both Lamb and Masters in three-way matchups and found them each performing worse than Lake: Gallego led the sheriff 40-31 and Masters 41-31, with Sinema respectively taking 16% and 17%. National Research, by contrast, did not release any numbers testing this pair of Republicans.
Well before her 2022 campaign for governor, Lake herself became a household name in the Grand Canyon State as an anchor at Phoenix's Fox 10, and she was still at that job when she began setting up accounts on sites popular with QAnon followers and neo-Nazis and circulated lies about COVID and the 2020 election. Lake went on to run to succeed termed-out GOP incumbent Doug Ducey and, with Trump’s endorsement, she narrowly beat Ducey’s chosen successor in the primary.
What followed was an expensive and nasty race between Lake and her Democratic foe, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs. Lake and her allies adopted the playbook Republicans used nationwide and portrayed Hobbs as weak on public safety, while Lake also attacked the secretary of state for refusing to debate her. Hobbs and her allies, though, stuck with their strategy of highlighting Lake’s extremism, which included an ad hitting her for appearing to flirt with secession in response to the FBI's search of Mar-a-Lago. They also made use of clips of the Republican saying, "I don't think abortion should be legal" and calling for the FBI to be disbanded.
Lake became a national MAGA star ahead of what her party expected would be a red wave year, and some over-eager observers speculated that she could be Trump’s running mate―or even a future presidential nominee. What she didn’t do, though, was try to appeal to voters who were sick of the Trump-era GOP. In addition to throwing out more lies about the 2020 election, Lake spent the week before the election making light of the assassination attempt on Nancy Pelosi, saying, “Nancy Pelosi, well, she’s got protection when she’s in D.C.—apparently her house doesn’t have a lot of protection.”
Hobbs won 50.2-49.5, and Lake characteristically spread more conspiracy theories about her defeat before proclaiming herself “the duly elected governor” in January. Lake spent the following months filing more lawsuits to overturn her defeat and throwing out more attacks on election officials; a fellow Republican, Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, filed a defamation lawsuit against her in June, alleging that Lake’s actions had led to “violent vitriol and other dire consequences.” She also spent the time since her defeat going on a nationwide tour to promote her memoir and functioning as a Trump surrogate.
However, while Lake has spent the last several months preparing a Senate bid, it’s not clear just how much time she’s actually spent in the state she wants to represent. People Magazine reported in June that she had in fact "spent a significant portion of her time" in Florida at Trump's Mar-a-Lago lair. "Kari Lake is there all the time," volunteered one unnamed source. "There’s a suite there that she practically lives in." Her team called this account “ridiculous,” a denial they leveled weeks after Lake urged her social media followers to read a thread that claimed the state of California, which backed Biden 63-34, had actually gone for Trump "BIG."
This story has been updated to include Trump’s endorsement of Lake.
Republished with permission from Daily Kos.
