Arizona television anchor Kari Lake edged out land-use expert Karrin Taylor Robson on Thursday for the Republican gubernatorial nomination in a closely watched primary contest that pitted a Trump-backed candidate against one endorsed by former Vice President Mike Pence.
Lake’s November Democratic opponent will be Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs. Lake’s win likely means the fall campaign will be heavily focused on relitigating Trump’s 2020 loss in Arizona, and nationally. Lake is a prominent election skeptic, asserting, without evidence, that President Joe Biden’s win over Trump was rigged. Hobbs as secretary of state was responsible for administering an election in which Biden became only the second Democratic presidential candidate since 1948 to win Arizona (along with President Bill Clinton in 1996).
Lake had been the front-runner for almost the entire race, though her lead narrowed in the last month when Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, Pence, and a host of other prominent Republicans threw their support behind Robson.
The race in the Grand Canyon State has been reminiscent of how establishment Republicans rallied around Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp in the final stretch of his primary race against Trump-endorsed candidate and former Sen. David Perdue. In that race, Kemp bested Perdue by more than 50 percentage points and handed Trump his most bruising primary defeat to date.
‘DONALD TRUMP WITH SOFTER EDGES’: KARI LAKE MAKES HER PITCH FOR ARIZONA GOVERNOR
We officially won every single county in Arizona. Clean sweep of the State.
This isn’t MY win.
This is OUR win.Thank you, Arizona. ♥️
— Kari Lake for AZ Governor (@KariLake) August 5, 2022
Like Perdue, Lake ran a full Trumpist campaign, claiming at every turn she would not have certified Biden’s 2020 Arizona win due to allegations of fraud that lack any evidence. Her embrace of all things Trump has been a striking departure from her public support of former President Barack Obama, her donation to John Kerry’s 2004 presidential bid, and well-documented partying days with drag queens in Phoenix — something her opponent has seized on.
Lake told the Washington Examiner allegations she turned her back on long-held beliefs and betrayed friends in the LGBT community were part of an orchestrated hit job by “RINOs” (Republicans in Name Only) and the media to kill her political aspirations and silence her support of Trump.
“[Journalists] can’t seem to cover any of our amazing policies which will make Arizona better, but they are digging through old posts trying to find a gotcha story,” she said. “The people are on to it, and they are tuning all of this nonsense out. There’s no one in this race who loves and respects President Trump more than me. I am the only Republican running who voted for him every single time he was on the ballot. I have supported him since the moment he came down the escalator.”
Few states have been as central to Trump’s election fraud theories as Georgia and Arizona, the two closest 2020 battleground states, where he pushed back aggressively to overturn the results and then called foul when the governors and secretaries of state refused to go along.
Trump returned to Arizona two weeks ago to headline a rally for Lake, Senate candidate Blake Masters, and “the rest of the Trump ticket” in the state.
At the Prescott Valley event, which nearly sold out, Lake hugged Trump onstage and told the crowd not to “sit back and wait for superman to come in and rescue us. … We’ve got to stand up, we’ve got to vote, we’ve got to get active.”
She told the Washington Examiner that if she makes it to the governor’s mansion, she would do a deep dive into allegations of voter fraud and election rigging.
“We are going to drag it back out into the sunlight, examine what went wrong, and we are going to fix every single thing,” she said. “Going forward, I want my children to have a country. If you don’t have secure borders and you have rotten elections, then you don’t have a country.”
On the same day Trump preached to thousands of the MAGA faithful, Pence spoke to about 300 Republicans supporting Robson at two invite-only events, telling those in attendance that Robson was “the only candidate for governor that will keep Arizona’s border secure” and that she would “promote conservative values.”
“When I joined the ticket in 2016 to help Donald Trump win back America, Kari Lake was supporting Hillary Clinton,” Pence said. “Arizona Republicans don’t need a governor who supported Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. You need a governor that supported every conservative candidate from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump. You need Karrin Taylor Robson.”
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Robson spent an astronomical amount of her own money for the state race. Her total level of self-funding for the primary was $13.3 million through the end of June. She brought in only $723,000 from outside donations and reported having only about $91,000 on hand at the end of the quarter. She spent more than $2 million on television ads alone starting in July. Lake raised more than $1.2 million last quarter and had about $400,000 on hand at the start of the month. Ironically, the former television anchor only spent $661,000 on TV ads by mid-July, according to campaign finance reports.
