Ruben Gallego maintains the lead over Kari Lake in the battle for the US Senate

Democrat Ruben Gallego held a significant lead over Republican Kari Lake late election night in Arizona’s U.S. Senate race.

The unofficial results appear to be in line with Gallego’s continued lead in publicly available polls in the race for the seat of retiring U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz.

Gallego led in 79 of 87 publicly available polls since Sinema left the race in March, but Lake shaved several percentage points off his lead in the final weeks of the race.

Green Party candidate Eduardo Quintana was a distant third.

On social media, Lake called on the media to call the presidential race, saying, “We all know Trump won!” But she failed to acknowledge her own poor standing in the Arizona Senate race late on election night.

She pointed out complaints to her followers about the pace of vote counting in Maricopa County, but did not suggest foul play.

The Republican Party establishment, especially Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and his allies treated Lake as an electoral afterthought and never invested in the race.

Political insiders expect Arizona’s early returns to favor Republicans and believe later voting declines will take a more Democratic flavor. If so, that’s a change from 2020 and 2022, when the Republican Party’s skepticism toward mail-in voting meant early returns were Democratic, while the final counted ballots had a clear Republican slant.

Gallego, a five-term member of Congress, hopes to become the state’s first Latino elected to office and only the 13th^e national if he wins.

Lake, a former Fox 10 news anchor, could become the first Republican woman elected to the Senate from Arizona.

The winner will succeed Sinema, who won the seat as a Democrat in 2018, breaking a thirty-year election drought for that party.

Election 2024: See Arizona election results | Live election day coverage

Sinema left the Democratic Party in December 2022 and her fundraising dried up soon after, but for more than a year she was coy about her reelection plans. That left open the unprecedented possibility of a three-way race involving an incumbent who was not a member of a major party.

Sinema fell to a distant third in public opinion polls before formally dropping out of the race in March.

Weeks after Sinema left the Democrats, Gallego formally entered the race and never faced an opponent for the nomination.

He left the liberal Congressional Progressive Caucus and changed his rhetoric on border-related issues.

Gallego acknowledged that Arizona cities were “on the front lines of this border crisis.” It was a very different tone than he used in Congress in 2017 when he wrote: “Trump’s border wall tries to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.”

By contrast, Lake’s path to the GOP nomination has been a bumpier ride.

After her narrow loss in the 2022 governor’s race, Lake continued to push for the election to be overturned in court. That didn’t happen, but it kept Lake in the public eye and clinging to a vision that was increasingly out of step with public opinion.

It was soon assumed she would run for Senate, but she did not formally enter the race until October 2023. Six months earlier, Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb entered the race but struggled to raise money with a lead to collect.

Lake intervened with a videotaped statement of support from former President Donald Trump, setting the tone for a race modeled on his agenda.

Above all, that meant border security and completing Trump’s border wall as the nation’s top priority. She blamed illegal immigrants for inflation, Arizona’s housing shortage and crime everywhere.

She quickly consolidated the support of many Republicans already in the Senate, with the prominent exception of McConnell.

McConnell continued to raise concerns about the quality of candidates in several 2024 Senate races, and political action committees aligned with him never invested in those contests, including Lake’s candidacy.

It was not the only turbulence surrounding her party.

In January, Lake ousted the chairman of the Arizona Republican Party after leaking a secretly recorded conversation from 10 months earlier. Jeff DeWit told Lake that there are “very powerful people who want to keep you out of the Senate race” and urged her to name her price for staying out of the race.

She rejected his offer and the recording surfaced just before the party’s annual meeting. Republican operatives said the leaked recording was a warning to others wary of Lake.

In a candidate forum in May, Lake called Lamb “a total coward when it comes to election integrity,” a slight that prompted nine of the state’s 14 other sheriffs to condemn her comment. Lamb threw his support behind Lake after losing the July primary and appeared on stage with her at least once.

But other prominent Arizona Republicans were lukewarm in their support for Lake.

Former Arizona Governor Doug Ducey endorsed her after she won the primary but had no high-profile appearances with her. Karrin Taylor Robson, Lake’s top Republican rival in 2022, also followed that pattern.

And when Lake tried to suggest she was just joking when she disparaged the late U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., in a series of 2022 comments, his daughter Meghan McCain made it clear it wasn’t funny and that the feud with the McCains, if not moderate Republicans more broadly, continued.

Gallego, meanwhile, used his time and millions to define himself for months on screens across the state. He cast himself as someone who rose from poverty in Chicago, rose to Harvard University and fought for his country as a Marine in Iraq. Now, Gallego often said, he promised to “fight” for working-class Arizonans in Washington.

At the same time, his Democratic allies reminded viewers that Lake supported an 1864 territorial law that banned abortion under almost all circumstances. The issue took on new relevance after the Arizona Supreme Court upheld that law in April.

Lake found herself torn between recognizing the 19th century law is “not where the people are” and maintaining her personal opposition to a procedure she likened to “the execution of a baby in the mother’s womb.”

Lake lacked the resources to consistently counter the attacks, but found support in their October debate.

She aggressively pressed Gallego about his voting record in Congress, saying he was more concerned about what to call those crossing the border illegally than doing anything about it.

Gallego countered that he supported the bipartisan border security bill that Sinema helped broker and scuttle Trump. Lake memorably called the bill “300 pages of pure garbage,” before tossing it into a trash can next to her podium.

In the final weeks of the campaign, Gallego and his ex-wife, Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego, lost a lawsuit to keep their 2016 divorce file sealed for longer. Lake hyped the release of the dossier as an impending bombshell, even though Kate Gallego had long ago endorsed him for Senate.

But the file largely only confirmed what was known and reported at the time: Ruben Gallego left his wife weeks before she gave birth to their son.

This story will be updated as election results are announced.