Kari Lake still thinks she’ll be governor – With Sen. Krysten Sinema recently leaving the Democratic Party to become an independent, it set up the possibility of a three-way Senate race in Arizona in 2024; with Sinema running as an independent, Rep. Ruben Gallego already declared as running as a Democrat, along with a Republican candidate.
Kari Lake, the defeated Republican gubernatorial candidate in 2022, has been mentioned as that GOP candidate.
Kari Lake Won’t Give Up
But according to a new report from The Daily Mail, Kari Lake is minimizing Senate talk- because she think she’ll still be declared the winner of the governor’s race.
‘I’m going to win this,” Lake said of the challenge to the governor’s race results. She said that at the RNC’s winter meeting in California, where she is backing Harmeet Dhillon’s challenge to RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel.
‘We have an amazing movement of real people,” Lake said. “They call it the grassroots I call it the mama bears and the papa bears bears… and we have an opportunity to take that energy and move it to the Republican Party and take this country. We’re all willing to do that. We need a change to make that happen.”
“They cheated in elections in Arizona,” Lake said, per the Mail. “And they’ve been cheating for a long time… we are going to take every avenue we can to end the fraud in Arizona’s election. They sabotaged election day to take our vote and our voice away. Only after that would I even consider it,” she said of a potential Senate race in 2024.
Lake lost the race for governor to Democrat Katie Hobbs, who was sworn in as governor earlier this month. Lake sued to challenge the results of the election, but lost that case. The court ordered Lake to pay Hobbs $33,040.50 for expert witness fees, while rejecting a request to sanction Lake and her lawyers.
According to the Arizona Mirror, Lake has had success raising money after the election, especially from those who want her to keep fighting. But of the $2.5 million that the ex-candidate has raised since Election Day, just 10 percent went to lawyers.
“More than 8,000 people contributed $338,388 to Lake’s failed campaign on Nov. 14. Less than a quarter of those contributions came from Arizona, though the Grand Canyon State led the way with about 1,700 donations. Money arrived from every state, plus Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia,” the report said. “Lake took in more money that day — six days after the election — than she did on any other day of her campaign, which began in mid-2021. It was the first of five days after the Nov. 8 election that Lake’s campaign would tally more than $100,000 in contributions from across the country.”
Those contributions tended to come in after Lake made appearances on the conservative media circuit, claiming that the election for governor had been stolen from her.
An Arizona Republic column ripped Lake for keeping “the grift” going even beyond election day.
“There are big bucks to be made by undermining Arizona and its elections. Facts don’t matter. Just continue to invent new and ever more hair-raising ways in which the election was supposedly stolen then stand back and watch the money roll in,” it said. “It’s why you see failed Secretary of State candidate Mark Finchem continuing to beg for donations to pay off his non-existent campaign debt.”
This week, Lake posted a “bombshell discovery” to Twitter, claiming that nearly 40,000 ballots were illegally counted, due to signatures not matching.
“I think all the ‘Election Deniers’ out there deserve an apology,” Lake said.
But Garrett Archer, the “data guru” at ABC 15 in Arizona, debunked that.
“Ms. Lake, These signatures are from 2020,” he said. “They use recent affidavit envelopes to verify as well. That way if the MVD signature comes across wrong they have in-house to compare to. So this doesn’t confirm anything.”
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Expertise and Experience: Stephen Silver is a Senior Editor for 19FortyFive. He is an award-winning journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.
