Kari Lake Campaigns in Front of Confederate Flag, Arizona Republican Rival Mark Lamb Stays Silent

Few public signs have emerged that Arizona U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake or her prominent supporters have any doubts about her recent campaign under a Confederate battle flag.

Days after it was announced that the Republican frontrunner had done so at a campaign event in Show Low, Arizona, neither the state Republican Party nor the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee had an immediate comment Monday.

Lake’s Republican Senate rival, Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb, also declined to comment on the flag incident.

In contrast, Rep. Ruben Gallego, the lone Democrat running to succeed retiring Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., condemned Lake’s appearance with the flag, saying it is “emblematic of who she is: divisive, dangerous and unfit to serve in the United States Senate.”

“I served this country in the Marine Corps and swore to defend the values ​​of liberty, equality and democracy that we hold dear, that we fought and died for – not the failed Confederacy.

“This is who Kari is: a power-hungry politician who will do or say anything to get power,” Gallego said in a written statement from his campaign.

Use of Confederate flag could alienate moderates and some Latinos, experts say

While the incident does not appear likely to shake his support in Republican circles, it may not help him extend his appeal to those who are less partisan, political experts said.

“She’s operating in an alternate universe,” said John J. Pitney Jr., a politics professor at Claremont McKenna College.

“In recent years, people have come to understand that the Confederacy was an act of treason and that flying the Confederate flag is actually condoning treason,” he said. “Among her core supporters, it probably won’t make a difference. But it won’t help her attract the moderate independent voters she needs to beat Gallego.”

Lisa Sanchez, an assistant professor of government at the University of Arizona, said the issue could hurt Lake’s standing with some Latinos.

“Research suggests that Latinos tend to react more negatively to the Confederate flag than non-Latino whites,” she wrote in The Republic. “Like black Americans, Latinos generally react negatively to the Confederate flag, but it does not have the same lived historical significance that it does for blacks. Latinos who are not politically active or engaged may not see a strong connection between their ethnicity and the Confederate flag.”

“However, Democrats are likely to use the opportunity to associate Republicans, including Kari Lake, with the oppression and anti-Latino sentiment that the Confederate flag has (more broadly) come to represent in recent years through its association with white nationalist identity.”

Chandler James, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Oregon who has studied norm-busting behavior in the Trump era, said the Confederate flag may not mean anything to all of Lake’s supporters, but it signals to them that she’s willing to push her policies in the way they want.

“It’s a deliberate strategic choice,” James said. “For many of his supporters, the norm violation itself, having a Confederate flag, may not mean a lot to them personally. Many of them may not care if someone uses the Confederate flag. But if it pleases liberals, if it upsets the right people, that’s where the value lies. When you do something that generates controversy among people you don’t want to like you … it can be a really good way to show that you’re not part of the establishment.”

Steven White, an associate professor of political science at Syracuse University who has researched racial politics, said the incident appears to reflect its polarizing nature.

“As a candidate, she hasn’t really made an effort to go to the center. She’s really more committed to Trump’s right-wing style of politics,” he said. “I feel like those kinds of things help her appeal to a certain part of the base, but it’s probably not a good thing for swing voters.”

“I think it hurts him to see this stereotypical white, suburban, college-educated guy who was a Republican and has now joined the Democratic Party. … Given the level of polarization that we have now, most voters have already chosen their side, so to speak. This kind of thing might have seemed more shocking a decade ago.”

Opinions on Confederate flag divide politicians

The Confederate flag was often flown in Republican presidential primaries in South Carolina in the past. The state flew the flag on its Capitol grounds for years. The state flew the battle flag on or near its Capitol grounds from the Civil War centennial in 1961 until 2015, after a massacre at a Charleston church targeting black people.

When U.S. Senator Mitt Romney, a Republican from Utah, ran for president in 2008, he told CNN, “That’s not a flag I recognize. That flag, frankly, is divisive and it should not be displayed.”

John McCain, the Republican who won the Republican Party nomination that year, wavered on the issue during his 2000 presidential campaign because of political considerations.

McCain had initially called the flag a “symbol of racism.” He later called it a “symbol of heritage.” After losing the 2000 nomination to then-Texas Governor George W. Bush, McCain apologized.

“I was afraid I wouldn’t win the South Carolina primary if I answered honestly,” McCain said in April 2000. “So I chose to compromise my principles. I broke my promise to always tell the truth.”

Today, McCain, who died in 2018, and Romney, who is retiring from the Senate, are often decried by Trump supporters as embodying the GOP’s political failure.

Lake mocked McCain during his 2022 gubernatorial campaign, and in a radio interview earlier this year she tried to dismiss his criticism of her as a joke. That only reignited a public feud with McCain’s daughter, Meghan McCain.

Likewise, the video of Lake speaking under a Confederate flag garnered national media attention and only adds to the long list of controversies surrounding Lake.

In a video obtained by The Arizona Republic, a USA TODAY Network partner, Lake appears at the Trumped Store in Show Low on May 31 and discusses her concerns about election administration with a roomful of supporters. She was campaigning with Steve Slaton, the store’s owner who is a Republican legislative candidate and whose military record has become a source of controversy.

Speaking into the microphone, Lake is seen turning to those behind her, easily bringing the flag into her field of vision.

“Kari Lake went to a store”

Lake’s campaign on Friday did not express regret for the incident or distance itself from the Confederate cause.

“Kari Lake went to a store. The campaign does not own the store,” her campaign said in a statement to The Arizona Republic.

Lake’s campaign team told the British newspaper The Guardian, which first reported the story, that the campaign “does not respond to the British propaganda media. We stopped doing that in 1776.”

The store Lake visited is named after former President Donald Trump and sells a range of Trump-themed items.

Lake, like Trump and others such as Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Arizona, has downplayed the criminal behavior of the pro-Trump mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to overturn the 2020 election.

In December, she told Fox News, those imprisoned for their roles were “political prisoners.”

“What happened is terrible,” she said. “To me, it’s one of the greatest injustices in American history.”

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Lake’s visit has already sparked controversy for Slaton, who claimed in an April radio interview with Payson’s KMOG that he was a combat veteran of the Vietnam War.

“I was a combat veteran in Vietnam for four months supporting South Vietnamese missions and patrolling the DMZ,” he said.

Days later, the Mountain Daily Star reported that Slaton’s official military records show he was stationed in South Korea in 1974, serving primarily as a helicopter mechanic.

Slaton is one of six Republicans running for two state House seats in the heavily Republican district in northeastern Arizona.

The 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis sparked a national reckoning around slavery and race, including a purge of symbols of racism and the Confederacy.

In Arizona, for example, several Civil War-themed monuments were quickly removed, and in 2023, Tempe officials renamed streets that had been named after people identified as members of the Ku Klux Klan a century earlier.

This article was originally published on Arizona Republic: Kari Lake’s Confederate flag debate sparks silence from Arizona GOP and party rival