Arizona’s Kari Lake just won’t give up – even if she looks a little crazy.
The failed gubernatorial candidate has newfound wind in her sails regarding the ongoing legal fight against the results of her 2022 election that she lost to Katie Hobbs. Hobbs is already in office doing things governors do, but Lake not only hasn’t conceded, but she is also taking her allegations of election wrongdoing to the Arizona Supreme Court.
Now Kari Lake is hyping a recent poll as evidence that she should be installed as governor, however unlikely the chances of that action would be. A Rasmussen Reports poll concluded that 51% of Arizona voters who voted in the governor’s race had supported Lake, while 43% said they had voted for Hobbs. Lake believes that this poll, even though it draws from a small random sample of 1,001 Arizona voters, is evidence that she really won the election. She lost by over 17,000 votes.
Kari Lake Believes the Election Was Fraudulent
To be sure, the voting in Maricopa County was problematic on election day. Lake said there were technical difficulties with the voting process that disenfranchised her voters. She thought these were deliberately caused by election officials Lake believes conspired to beat her. Lower courts have ruled against Lake and have determined that no purposeful election malfeasance took place, as Lake has claimed.
Rasmussen is sometimes seen as favoring Republican candidates, but it received a ‘B’ rating from polling aggregator FiveThirtyEight and it is included on the site’s approved list of polls when it predicts election race outcomes.
Interestingly, the poll also found that “55% of likely Arizona voters believe it is likely that problems with the 2022 election in Maricopa County affected the outcome of the gubernatorial election,” Newsweek said on March 18.
Kari Lake was enthused about the results, especially when the Trump campaign’s Liz Harrington tweeted out the poll and a statement that there was a “Red Wave” in Arizona in 2022 and that Democrats had to “cheat and lie” to win.
Lake told Trump supporter Steve Bannon’s radio show that, “My thoughts are, the red wave did happen. They had to cheat, they had to sabotage election day, they had to go a way out of their way to stop it here in Arizona and everyone knows it. This just verifies it.”
The conservative spitfire said that the Arizona Supreme Court could decide whether to hear her case this week. Lake hopes she can use this poll as evidence that her accusations are in the public interest and that would show the supreme court needs to look beyond previous rulings by lower courts.
Lower Courts Ruled Against Lake
The Arizona Court of Appeals determined that Lake’s accusations were without merit and “quite simply, sheer speculation.” Lake’s lawyers said the printer difficulties were enough evidence to determine that the election was illegitimate. A previous Maricopa County Superior Court judge originally ruled that Lake had no “clear and convincing” evidence that would show the election should be overturned.
While Kari Lake thinks the latest poll from Rasmussen shows more evidence that the election was “fixed” against her. It is spurious to conclude that one poll with a low sample size represents the voters who were disenfranchised. It just gives her more material to complain about. It is not even clear that the Supreme Court of Arizona would allow the poll as evidence and opposing lawyers will likely file a motion to remove it.
This means Kari Lake will continue to prosecute her case in the media, even if she loses the supreme court bid. Despite being seen as a sore loser, she could then run for the U.S. Senate against Kyrsten Sinema in 2024. So Lake is motivated to keep her name in the public eye, and if that means taking on a quixotic journey to overturn the results of the gubernatorial election, she believes the fight is worth it.
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Author Expertise and Experience: Serving as 19FortyFive’s Defense and National Security Editor, Dr. Brent M. Eastwood is the author of Humans, Machines, and Data: Future Trends in Warfare. He is an Emerging Threats expert and former U.S. Army Infantry officer. You can follow him on Twitter @BMEastwood. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science and Foreign Policy/ International Relations.
