‘Donald Trump with softer edges’: Kari Lake makes her pitch for Arizona governor

PHOENIX — Who is the real Kari Lake? That’s what voters across Arizona are trying to figure out ahead of the Aug. 2 Republican gubernatorial primary that could change the trajectory of state GOP politics.

The candidate’s former colleagues at a local Fox television station claim Lake is so obsessed with her own fandom that she will do anything to stay relevant, even if that means reversing long-held beliefs and sucking up to former President Donald Trump and the MAGA-verse. Others swear she is the real deal and ready to lead the state.

“What version are we going to get today, Obama fundraiser or MAGA queen?” Phoenix resident September Scott told the Washington Examiner. “Does she even know?”

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Lake is running a full Trumpist campaign, saying she wouldn’t have certified President Joe Biden’s 2020 Arizona win due to questions of fraud and chicanery — assertions for which there’s no evidence or proof. That’s a striking departure from Lake’s previous support of former President Barack Obama. Lake also donated to John Kerry‘s 2004 presidential bid when he was the Democratic nominee. And Lake partied with drag queens before turning into one of Trump’s loudest cheerleaders.

For now, the Trump-Lake love fest goes both ways.

“Arizona finally has a chance to have a GREAT Governor,” Trump posted Thursday on Truth Social. “Vote for Kari Lake — She has my Complete and Total Endorsement!”

The former president is headlining a massive rally for Lake Friday night in Prescott Valley, one of the state’s most conservative areas. His highly anticipated appearance comes the same week that former Vice President Mike Pence endorsed Karrin Taylor Robson, Lake’s closest challenger in Arizona’s Aug. 2 Republican primary for governor. It’s a move that pits Pence against Trump in yet another closely watched state race that’s turned into a full-blown proxy war and could change the way the GOP strategizes ahead of the general elections in November.

The Republican gubernatorial primary winner in November will face Democratic nominee-in-waiting Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s secretary of state and a frequent Trump target in his false assertions about malfeasance in how the 2020 elections were administrated in the state.

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Robson’s campaign gained steam late last month when former Rep. Matt Salmon, co-founder of the Freedom Caucus and a figure synonymous with conservative politics, withdrew from the governor’s race and endorsed Robson. She has also picked up noteworthy endorsements from Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey as well as former Gov. Jan Brewer, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, and ex-House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

Like Trump, Pence will be in the Grand Canyon State on Friday. He is holding events for Robson in Phoenix and southern Arizona while his former boss addresses the MAGA faithful in central Arizona.

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Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake speaks to one of her littlest fans.

The split-screen GOP events come as establishment Republicans have started to push back against Trump-endorsed candidates — with varying levels of success.

In May, Pence backed Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who was the frequent target of Trump’s ire because he refused to meddle in the 2020 presidential election results. Trump’s candidate, former Sen. David Perdue, lost by more than 50 percentage points. At the time, the loss delivered Trump his biggest electoral setback of the 2022 primaries, but he has since bounced back. Dan Cox, a far-right Maryland legislator endorsed by Trump, won the Republican primary for governor this week, defeating a centrist challenger backed by outgoing Gov. Larry Hogan, one of the most popular Republican governors in the nation.

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Lake is hoping a little of the Trump magic rubs off on her against a better-funded challenger who has outspent her significantly in recent weeks and ratcheted up the personal attacks.

Ducey took his own shot at Lake on CNN’s State of the Union, saying she is “misleading voters with no evidence.”

“She’s been tagged by her opponents with a nickname, ‘Fake Lake,’ which seems to be sticking and actually doing some damage,” he said.

Lake told the Washington Examiner she couldn’t care less whom Pence or Ducey endorsed and is wearing their disapproval like a badge of honor.

“There was a little part of me that was like, ‘Oh, I hope Gov. Ducey doesn’t try to punk me and endorse me,'” she said. “He’s not liked. He’s [one of] the least liked Republican governors in the country.”

Rae’Lee Klein, Lake’s field coordinator, likened a Ducey endorsement to “the kiss of death.”

Lake, whose lead in the competitive race has narrowed in recent days, has been pummeled not only by her political rival but repeatedly in media coverage. Stories often portray her as a cartoonish try-hard who has tethered her political ambitions to Trump’s popularity. Giant posters of her and Trump grinning side by side are plastered on almost every corner in Scottsdale, though a significant chunk of those are routinely drawn-on or painted over, and, in some cases, their heads are cut out completely.

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Lake’s campaign signs around Phoenix and Scottsdale, Ariz., are routinely defaced ahead of the GOP primary election.

Lake has been taken to task for comments she made about the transgender community and drag queens in a messy moment that grabbed national headlines. Lake condemned the growing cultural clout of drag queens. That led to one of the most popular drag performers in Phoenix calling her out as a hypocrite who attended his performances for years. The move put her on the defensive and handed her rivals more ammunition to use against her.

Since announcing her candidacy, Lake has pitched herself as “Donald Trump with softer edges” and said her success will be his legacy. She added that she can also connect with “soccer moms,” a voting bloc that’s been elusive to the Arizona GOP for years.

“I am one of them,” she said. “I am a mom, and I am tired of what I am seeing.”

Lake’s talking points have largely centered on election integrity, border security, and protecting states’ rights.

“I can’t save the entire country,” she said. “I believe Joe Biden is an illegitimate president. He’s dead set on dragging the whole country down, but we can come up as states and save our states. We need to remember that we are sovereign states, a collection of sovereign states. We are not serfs to the federal government. The federal government has way too much power, and we need to bring back power to the states. You do not steal an election and not face the consequences.”

Lake, who has locked down endorsements from Republican firebrand Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn, former White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, and Rudy Giuliani, said if she is elected, she would do another 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.”

When it comes to the border, Lake told the Washington Examiner she would declare an invasion, send in the Arizona National Guard, and finish building Trump’s wall.

“The cartels are in control of our border,” she said. “They are running drugs through the state at a record level. They are smuggling people through our state. People who are here illegally eventually drive our wages down and destroy our middle class. And frankly, it’s not secure. Our crime has skyrocketed.”

She added that the “policies Joe Biden has put into place and our do-nothing governor has accepted is hurting the people of Arizona.”

“The people elected them to stand up for them, do the right thing, and protect them, but we have nobody in office right now doing that except for maybe a couple of good sheriffs,” Lake said.

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Arizona GOP gubernatorial hopeful Kari Lake speaks at the WACPAC conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, in June 2022.

While her comments on the border wall and election fraud resonate with some, others caution it’s a carefully crafted appeal to far-right conservatives and conspiracy theorists and fails to move the state forward.

They also say her comments don’t align with the person she was just a few years ago, an impartial journalist focused on facts.

Lake had been a staple of the Phoenix news media for nearly three decades. But after declaring her candidacy, she painted the press as corrupt and “anti-American.” In one of her ads, she swung a baseball bat at a bunch of old television sets. She also told the Washington Examiner that journalists write negative stories about her because they are “too tied to their leftist beliefs” to give her a fair shot.

Her former colleagues at Fox 10 told Phoenix Magazine she’s spent the past few years burning through more than 28 years of credibility she established at the news station, starting in 2016 when she defended high school students who spelled out the N-word with T-shirts for a senior class photo. She called the decision a “mistake” that didn’t warrant the public outcry.

In April 2018, she dismissed the #RedForEd fair pay teachers movement as “nothing more than a push to legalize pot” on her work account.

Her former co-workers said she became obsessed with social media and would tweet and post controversial items to increase her followers, often blurring the line between news and opinion. The more followers she got, the more unhinged her tweets became.

Others pointed to her dropping an “F-bomb” on air in July 2019 while defending her right to appear on Parler, a social media platform that has been criticized for catering to racists, antisemites, and QAnon conspiracy theorists, as a reason for her eventual career suicide. In 2020, she tweeted a debunked COVID-19 conspiracy video and after Biden won the presidential election started clashing with producers over phrases like “president-elect,” according to the magazine.

Lake, who has been holding up to five campaign events a day for the past year, told the Washington Examiner that she has not changed, isn’t putting on an act, and, when elected, everyone will know it.

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Tempe resident Dan Rose believes her.

“She’s fighting for us and they are afraid of her,” he said. “She’s exactly what this state needs.”

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