In late August, I wrote (here) that Kari Lake won’t be a U.S. Senator.
Now, weeks away from the election, after she debated Rep. Ruben Gallego, her Democratic opponent, I’m confident she’ll take a shellacking.
Lake blew the debate, refusing to admit she lost Arizona’s 2022 governor election, and repeatedly referring to IVF as “UVF.” As a woman, she should know what in vitro fertilization is.
The former TV newscaster has no qualifications to run a state or represent one in the Senate. She’s never held a public office at any level, has no training in government or management; and as the debate showed, she’s barely conversant on issues.
She’s an election denier and Trump bootlicker, trading on fawning admiration and her cursory association with him. But even he doesn’t want anything to do with her.
GOP fundraisers have turn their back on her. So have significant numbers of Arizona’s GOP politicians and Republican voters. She trails badly in polls, and her miserable debate performance will only reinforce their existing impressions of her as a bumbling incompetent.
MSNBC said, “If Republicans at the state and national level entered the debate with some skepticism, it’s hard to imagine they feel any more confident after this performance” (read story here).
Lake will emerge from the 2024 elections as a candidate who’s never won an election, and lost two major ones. The governor’s race was close enough that she could still pretend to have some plausibility as a candidate. That pretense won’t survive this election, which should end her nascent career in politics.
I don’t know where she’ll go from here. She can’t return to journalism; she’s too partisan now. Her act is getting old, but maybe she can trade on her notoriety on the rightwing speaking circuit for a while longer, ranting about the things she rants about, which has some appeal there. Maybe she can get work as a clown at county fairs.
I really don’t care. More importantly, Arizonans won’t, either. They just want her to go away. The entire world wants her to go away.