It’s usually risky to make predictions about candidates months before an election, especially ones running in swing states, but I’m not going out on a limb by saying Kari Lake will lose her Senate race in Arizona.
Lake has never held public office. She didn’t work her way up through politics. She brings no experience to the table.
She was a TV news anchor who tried to parlay her public profile into a political career, but lost her 2022 bid for Arizona governor because even Republican voters didn’t want her (see posting here).
In 2024, she’s running for the Senate seat being vacated by Kirsten Sinema. Her Democratic opponent is Ruben Gallego, an Iraq War combat veteran and five-term congressman. He will win, she will lose, because he’s a serious person and she’s a hyper-MAGA election-denier flake still obsessing over her 2022 defeat.
Since then, Lake has busied herself contesting that election in the courts (and losing), making the rounds of the rightwing speaking circuit, and stopping by Mar-a-Lago to pay homage to Trump.
She apparently hoped he would choose her as his 2024 running mate, despite bringing nothing to a ticket — she couldn’t even deliver her own state to him in 2020, which Biden won. Instead, he went with a guy who’s actually won an election. He doesn’t like women anyway, and they don’t like him, see story here.
There’s absolutely no reason for Arizona voters to send her to the Senate, but that’s not why I feel confident saying Gallego will eat her lunch. I’m looking at polls. This sad, washed up, never-elected-to-any-0ffice political failure is trailing by 41% to 56% in a Fox News poll released on August 28, 2024, see story here.
This means if Lake captures every single voter who didn’t assure the pollster they would vote against her, she would still lose. Her 42% showing in purple Arizona is comparable to what Republican candidates typically get in statewide races in solid-blue Washington (see posting here).
If she can’t do any better in Arizona than Tiffany Smiley or Loren Culp did in Washington (see posting here), she’s in neck-deep dodo doo-doo. And she shouldn’t be a senator, because she has nothing to offer Arizonans except election denialism taken to extremes and MAGA pablum also taken to extremes. There are already enough embarrassments in Congress without adding another one.
But mainly, Arizona voters just don’t like her. Want proof? Wait until November, and you’ll have your proof. After Lake gets her clock cleaned again, hopefully she’ll “retire” from politics and we’ll never hear from her again.