Kari Lake Sounds A Little Strange These Days: The 2022 gubernatorial election in Arizona is, by all conventional and reality-based measures, over. Katie Hobbs, the Democratic winner of November’s election, was sworn in earlier this week as the 24th governor of Arizona. Hobbs is scheduled to give her inaugural address on Thursday, and Arizona’s “office of the governor” website now has Hobbs’ name on it.
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However, Hobbs’ defeated Republican opponent, Kari Lake, still says she won.
“The Uniparty stole the Arizona Election—D’s & R’s,” Lake tweeted earlier this week.
“The political elite despise We The People and can’t stand the fact that they work FOR us. They want us to give up this most important fight and go back to sleep. WE WON’T QUIT.”
In an appearance this week on the Real America’s Voice network, Kari Lake described herself as “the duly elected governor” of Arizona.
“They had to pull out all the stops and do this in broad daylight so everyone saw it,” Lake said in that interview, as reported by HuffPost. “The way we get it changed is we get the real governor, the duly elected governor, myself, in there to work with lawmakers, to change our laws, put some teeth into the laws, and frankly, we need to recall every one of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors.”
There had been widespread fears that some losing 2022 candidates, especially those associated with the “Stop the Steal” movement, would follow Donald Trump’s lead from 2020 and refuse to concede their races, heading off a legitimacy crisis for the government at large.
But for the most part, nothing like that happened, with even Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate and January 6 participant Doug Mastriano conceding defeat a few days after Election Day. With the singular exception of Kari Lake in Arizona.
After an election in which there were reported problems with printers at some polling places — but nothing that would have come anywhere close to altering the outcome of the election — Hobbs was declared the winner.
Kari Lake, however, sued, although an Arizona judge rejected her claims. Lake has since filed appeals to that ruling.
Some GOP operatives in Arizona say that Lake, who was discussed before the election as a possible candidate for higher office in the future, is hurting her political future by continuing to deny her defeat.
“I think the enormous amount of ill will that she’s going to create as a result of the appeal — I mean, it’s OK to file a case, but then some of the stuff she’s been saying on media and posts and just the degradation of the Arizona institutions — I think is really going to hurt her out here,” Arizona Republican consultant Chuck Coughlin told The Hill. “And I don’t really think she’s got a future in terms of her own electoral space here in Arizona.”
Kari Lake has been mentioned as a possible candidate in the Arizona Senate race in 2024, which could be one of the most unique races in memory: The incumbent, Sen. Krysten Sinema, recently left the Democratic Party to become an independent and could find herself facing both Democratic and Republican candidates in her re-election contest. If Sinema and a Democratic candidate split the vote, it could represent an opportunity for a Republican candidate to squeak out a win.
Also this week, the candidate who defeated Lake, Gov. Katie Hobbs, spoke about what it has been like to live out a conspiracy theory.
“I think voters rejected that extremism. But if you look at how close the margin was in our race — and other races here in Arizona — the quality of the campaign mattered. Had Kari Lake listened to people that were trying to advise her on running a smarter campaign, the outcome might have been different,” Hobbs told Rolling Stone.
“They continue to talk about evidence of the fraud, and this is not evidence of any fraud. It’s evidence of calling people out for destructive actions. And, personally, I don’t think a lot about it, except for the fact that it’s caused people that I work with to face threats and harassment — myself included — but I have security. Other than that, it’s just ridiculous.”
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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.
