Why Kari Lake lost her Senate bid and why election fraud is unlikely

Just before U.S. Sen.-elect Ruben Gallego formally declared victory over Republican rival Kari Lake, one of her allies posted a message on social media suggesting something was wrong in the race.

Tyler Bowyer, the chief operating officer at the conservative Turning Point Action, called it “very strange” that the Green Party candidate in the Senate race received more than three times the support of that party’s presidential candidate.

“I’m not sure this has ever happened at this level before,” he wrote.

Lake shared the post with her 2.2 million followers on X.

It gave a conspiratorial undertone to her latest loss, without Lake making the accusation.

Both Lake and Bowyer overlooked the 2016 U.S. Senate race in Arizona. Green Party candidate Gary Swing received 138,000 votes that year, a loss to the late U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., while Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein received 34,000 votes in Arizona.

It also made clear that Lake once again couldn’t bring himself to accept an election loss.

On Election Day, Lake indicated at a news conference in Mesa that she would not contest the process.

“I will accept the results of the elections. I have had some concerns, but we have done a lot of prep work to avoid any problems,” she said, crediting Turning Point Action, which brought voters to the polls, as a way to avoid problems.

By Tuesday afternoon, half a day after Gallego won the Senate race, Lake still had not conceded. She has also yet to concede her 2022 gubernatorial loss.

“Kari Lake is a case in itself,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics.

“She still refuses to allow the election for governor. It’s just laughable. … The way she comes across, there’s just an arrogance that just turns people off.”

Some of her supporters have rejected the idea of voters supporting both Trump and Gallego. Others can’t fathom how she could lose when Trump won relatively handily. And they point to the money that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s allies denied her in a race she lost by just over 2 percentage points.

Steven S. Smith, a professor of political science at Arizona State University, said the outcome should not be considered a surprise.

“It’s not shocking because she’s lost a statewide race before. Her position on the issues has not changed significantly,” he said. “It appears that a majority of Arizonans really would prefer someone else when running against a reasonably competent Democrat.”

Tyler Montague, a Republican consultant from Arizona, scoffed at any suggestion of election mischief.

“I think the people who fixed the election forgot to let Trump lose and just focused on her,” he joked. “She speaks MAGA so fluently and doesn’t know how to talk to moderates in the middle.”

As polls and politicians indicated more than a year ago, Lake never appealed to Democrats, had limited reach among independents and alienated some Republicans. Unable to compete financially with Gallego, she remained a polarizing figure during her final campaign.

Representative Kari Lake at Paradise Valley Community College

Kari Lake interacts with people on Election Day at Paradise Valley Community College.

Trump outperformed all five Republican Senate candidates in the competitive presidential battleground races. However, unofficial results show that Lake fared worst among Republicans in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

On Tuesday afternoon she received 90.3% of the votes, just like Trump.

Republican Sam Brown of Nevada did only slightly better than Lake, but his state offers the option to vote for “none of these candidates.” If not, he would have at least gotten some 42,000 votes and been closer to Trump.

The other Senate Republicans in swing states received about 96% of Trump’s total. If Lake had done as well as she did, she would have received another 91,000 votes in Arizona in a race she lost by about 73,000 votes on Tuesday afternoon.

And on the other hand, Gallego fared much better with voters than Vice President Kamala Harris. By comparison, Senate Democrats in swing states received more than 99% of her vote total. Gallego had 6% more votes than Harris in Arizona.

Lake, in particular, was a Senate version of Trump himself. She called herself ‘Trump in heels’.

“Trump clones never work. Ask (Florida Governor) Ron DeSantis,” said Wendy Schiller, a professor of political science at Brown University. “We saw this in 2022. (Pennsylvania Senate candidate) Mehmet Oz didn’t work. Kari Lake didn’t work.”

Trump did remarkably well among Latino men, who as a demographic bloc may also have been hesitant to vote for a woman, Schiller said.

“Why would a Latino man vote for Kari Lake over Ruben Gallego? She’s not Donald Trump, and if there are certain attitudes about female leaders in the Latino male community — there’s a lot of disagreement about that — but that could be a factor.

There were also signs that Lake’s Senate run lacked the energy of her gubernatorial career.

In 2022, Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters spent time at Lake’s campaign events, in part because she could draw enthusiastic crowds. By the end they were branded as a “Lake and Blake” GOP ticket.

On the October evening last year when she made her long-awaited entry into the Senate race, Lake had an impressive stage in Scottsdale with a big screen showing her videotaped endorsement of Trump.

Even with days of public attention from Lake himself, the event had plenty of empty space.

Fast forward to September: Lake held a rally in Chandler in support of law enforcement, which included an endorsement from her former rival, Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb, and an appearance by comedian Rob Schneider.

There was also room for many more people to attend if they wished.

From the moment Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., left the race in March, Gallego dominated the polls. He finished ahead in 79 of the 87 publicly available polls conducted during that time.

The race has heated up in recent weeks, especially after Lake’s strong debate performance in early October. But there was little evidence that she was ever the favorite outside her own circle.

Gallego also dominated in fundraising from the moment he entered the race in January 2023.

In the first six months of 2023, Gallego easily surpassed Sinema, who had been a prolific fundraiser until she left the Democratic Party in December 2022.

During that time, he’s raised $6.9 million and burned away $3.8 million in cash. Lake spent that period privately discussing her interest in running for Senate and writing and promoting her book “Unafraid: Just Getting Started.”

Gallego started running TV ads in March and didn’t stop until after the election. Lake couldn’t match his presence on screens across the state, and Republican allies were hard to find.

In March 2023, seven months before she entered the race, Jeff DeWit, then chairman of the Arizona Republican Party and a prominent Trump loyalist, delivered a message from “very powerful people” asking Lake to stay out.

A recording of the conversation at Lake’s home surfaced 10 months later, ousting DeWit from party leadership but also putting other Republicans on edge, Republican Party insiders said afterward.

Before she entered the Senate race, people from the National Republican Senatorial Committee advised Lake privately and, later in public comments, to focus on issues like inflation and border security, not election denial. Lake often mocked past election results, and she continued to receive questions from the media about her views.

She spent two years fighting in court to overturn her 2022 loss. Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican, sued her for defamation over her baseless claims about election failures. She has not disputed his allegations and will return to court to determine how much, if any, she is owed for damages in the case.

Lake has regularly shown contempt for some of her fellow Republicans, from John McCain years after the six-term senator’s death to a taunting tweet in March from former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley during this year’s presidential primaries.

Lake used a misspelled version of Haley’s birth name, calling her “Nimrata,” to point to reports that Haley would end her race against Trump “after more humiliating landslides (losses).”

Two weeks later, 18% of Republican voters in Arizona supported Haley in a primary that was over before voting ended.

Lake’s allies note that McConnell, who said earlier this year he would not seek another term as GOP leadership, would not invest in Lake’s race.

The Senate Leadership Fund, which is closely tied to McConnell, $211 million poured into races across the countryaccording to a tally by OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan organization that tracks money in politics.

None of it went to Arizona to help Lake.

It was the second consecutive election cycle in which McConnell’s allies declined to invest in a Senate race in Arizona. In 2022 they offered no help to Masters.

A person familiar with the information shared with McConnell at the time said Masters’ preference was lower than that of former Alabama U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore after reports that he pursued romantic relationships with teenage girls while in office was thirty.

Lake received essentially the same, ineligible verdict from McConnell, even though polls suggested her race had tightened in October.

A social media account affiliated with Lake’s campaign posted a message Tuesday blaming McConnell for the shutout, noting that Gallego received $100 million from groups tied to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

“Kari Lake got $0.00 from Mitch McConnell,” the post read. “Republicans must elect a Senate majority leader who is more interested in helping candidates win elections than in settling ideological scores.”

For example, Montague said there is a different lesson for all Republicans.

“What it means for Arizona Republicans is that they’re going to have to be more strategic as they produce candidates who win the primaries and lose the general.

“If Karrin Taylor Robson had been the candidate for governor (in 2022), I’m pretty sure she would have won. If anyone else had run for the U.S. Senate, they would have had a much better chance than Kari Lake.”