Donald Trump has endorsed Lake, 2022’s failed gubernatorial candidate, for that state’s Senate seat in 2024.
Here Comes Kari Lake
In the 2022 election cycle, former President Donald Trump backed several candidates in Senate and governor’s races in swing states who ended up losing.
One of those candidates was Kari Lake, a former news anchor who ran for governor of Arizona as a major Trump loyalist. Lake lost her race for governor and, much like Trump in 2020, denied that she had lost and engaged in a series of doomed legal challenges.
Lake, after losing to Gov. Katie Hobbs, has spent much of her time as a Trump surrogate and has frequently appeared on short lists of potential Trump running mates. But now, Lake is running again, in Arizona, with Trump’s endorsement.
According to NBC News, Lake launched her Senate campaign this week and has been endorsed by Trump. Lake had been rumored for weeks to be considering a Senate run, while Trump reportedly discouraged Blake Masters, Arizona’s 2022 Senate candidate, from running for the seat.
“When I’m back in the White House, I need strong fighters like Kari in the Senate. She is a fighter. She’s strong, and she’s good,” Trump said in a video played at Lake’s launch rally. “Republicans must win, and we must win very, very big. It’s much harder for them to cheat if we do it like we should.”
Lake also implied that higher forces had kept her from becoming governor so she could pursue a Senate race instead.
“After we did everything right, and we saw the disaster of Election Day, sometimes when things don’t go the way we expect, we find ourselves questioning and asking why,” she said. “I said, ‘Why God?’ I think God has bigger plans for us.”
She also implied that the massacres that occurred in Israel last week could happen “here.”
“Thousands of fighting-age men have poured across the southern border with no vetting. We know they have terrorists coming across the border,” Lake said. “The cartels own Arizona, and, until we kick Joe Biden to the curb, Ruben Gallego and Kyrsten Sinema, we’re not going to have a state.”
Sinema and Gallego are likely to be Lake’s two opponents. Gallego, a member of Congress, is running as a Democrat, while Sinema, the incumbent, is a former Democrat who is now an independent, and while she hasn’t yet officially announced her re-election plans, she is expected to run.
Gallego and Lake, last week, happened to be on a plane together, resulting in a war of words both over social media and eventually in the airport, where a video emerged of the two of them arguing about immigration and other issues.
The first poll in the race emerged this week and showed Gallego in front in the Senate race, although the poll, from Public Policy Polling, was commissioned by Gallego’s own campaign, and arrives more than a year before Election Day.
The poll showed Gallego with 41 percent support in the race, compared to 36 percent for Lake and 15 percent for Sinema, with 8 percent undecided. Gallego also was shown leading other Republican candidates. And in a head-to-head race with Lake without Sinema, Galleon leads Lake 48 percent to 43 percent.
Per a new MSNBC op-ed, Lake’s decision to run could be good news for Democrats in that state.
“ She’s a high-profile MAGA extremist. That’ll help her in the primary — but it’s questionable how well that recognition plays for her in a general election next year. (We already saw it fail her in the 2022 midterms), the column said. “Frankly, many Arizonans see Lake’s recent turn to right-wing politics as a grift — Republicans included. And that’s just one roadblock she’ll face. Another is that she’s repeatedly cast doubt on voting machines, mail-in ballots, and the legitimacy of early voting in Arizona, a state where an overwhelming majority of voters tend to cast early ballots.”
Author 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. Stephen has authored thousands of articles over the years that focus on politics, technology, and the economy for over a decade. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) at @StephenSilver, and subscribe to his Substack newsletter.
