Kari Lake Loses Arizona Senate Race in Massive Blow to MAGA
Arizonans have elected Representative Ruben Gallego as the next senator of the Grand Canyon State, according to the Associated Press. Gallego clinched 50 percent of the votes, besting far-right darling and local TV news anchor Kari Lake by 2.2 percent with 95 percent of the state reporting.
Bipartisan polls stretching back to July had placed Gallego squarely in the lead, sometimes with a double-digit jump on the former news anchor.
“Gracias, Arizona!” Gallego wrote on X late Monday night.
Gallego’s win will revert both of Arizona’s upper chamber seats back to the liberal party. After running as a Democrat in 2018, Senator Kyrsten Sinema—whom Gallego will replace—opted to become an independent, citing partisan extremism as her reasoning for the intra-office switch-up in an Arizona Republic op-ed. Earlier this year, Sinema announced she would not be seeking re-election, skirting a three-way race in the swing state.
Gallego’s victory is a bright spot for Democrats, who have lost control of the Senate to Republicans. The GOP holds 53 seats in the chamber.
Lake launched herself into the far-right stratosphere in 2022, when she made a national splash in Arizona’s gubernatorial race as a disciple of Donald Trump, carving her own candidacy out of mimicking the Republican presidential nominee’s bombastic and divisive rhetoric. Her narrow loss in that race to Democrat Katie Hobbs appeared to indicate that the MAGA tide had dried up in Arizona, but the state still voted for Trump this time around.
In the final months of the race, Gallego and Lake’s match-up boiled down to a handful of issues plaguing voters in the state, including immigration, the border, the economy, and abortion access, all of which took center stage during a feisty debate between the two candidates in October.
Over the course of 55 minutes, Gallego and Lake traded personal barbs while Lake positioned herself as a local radical.
“Kari Lake is an unreformed fanatic. Ruben Gallego is an adult,” wrote Phil Boas for the Arizona Republic in the wake of the debate, noting that Gallego was the only candidate in the race who had grown from their radical campaign positions in 2022.
After opening the debate by remarking that there are no Republicans or Democrats in war, Gallego—an Iraq war veteran—took aim at Lake’s track record, claiming that the local TV star had “failed the basic test of honesty.” In turn, Lake argued that Gallego, a former progressive, had “undergone an extreme makeover” in favor of his political ambitions.
Lake also attacked Gallego for his prior comments on immigration in which he called Trump’s border wall “stupid” and “dumb.”
In April, women in Arizona were rattled by a state Supreme Court decision to revive a 160-year-old anti-abortion law that offered no abortion exemptions, even in cases of rape or incest. That radical policy was quickly nipped by the state legislature, but not before Lake reversed course on her “100 percent pro-life” position, telling Arizona voters that she sympathized with women in need of abortions, and that she didn’t believe the ruling was in line with the state’s current politics. That same week, Lake backed Arizona Republicans’ bill to replace the 1864 ban with a law banning abortion after 15 weeks. The proposed bill also did not make exceptions for rape or incest.
And, a week before Election Day, the Republican nominee copied one more Trumpian strategy: refusing to concede that she had lost her race in 2022. When pressed by CNN to answer a question that she has spent two years dodging, Lake claimed that she was unable to speak on the issue since she was still in litigation over the outcome, though she added that she intended to “make sure our elections are run properly” and that she wanted to “look forward” rather than backward.