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Fire-breathing pretend-governor Kari Lake (R) is running for the Senate in Arizona. In 2022, she dissed moderate Republicans during her whole campaign. The high point was when she asked a roomful of people if there were any McCain Republicans in the room, and said that, if so, they should get the hell out. The crowd loved it. Now she is desperate to get those McCain Republicans back and it is not working. They remember all too well what she said and did in 2022 and don't trust her for a second.
Republican strategists in Arizona don't think she is going to be able to pull it off. Her fiery style and refusal to concede go over well with Donald Trump's true believers, but Arizona has become a purple state and the true believers aren't a majority there. She also still insists that Trump won in 2020. Lake must get the moderates to win; if Kyrsten Sinema decides to run, many of those moderate Republicans will vote for Sinema and doom Lake. And if Sinema doesn't run, some of the moderates will vote Democratic or will skip the race entirely.
Republican strategist Daniel Scarpinato said: "She's going to be the nominee unless an asteroid hits Arizona, and she's going to need to consolidate Republicans in order to win. It's going to take time for some of those wounds to heal. My advice would be keep doing it. It's got to be something that's consistent and not one and done." But Lake didn't just misspeak one time; her whole brand was hostility to "RINOs."
Indeed, McCain wasn't the only Republican Lake targeted in 2022. In the primary she ran against Karrin Taylor Robson. She described Robson as someone who "married a billionaire twice her age" who gave her a blank check to run for office. Robson and her supporters found that deeply offensive. Robson was not some Johanna-come-lately to politics. Her father was president of the Arizona state Senate and her brother was a member of the Maricopa Board of Supervisors. She has a J.D. degree from ASU and was a member of the state Board of Regents. When Lake asked Robson for her support recently, Robson said she was too busy with state Senate races to help out.
Lake has also attacked the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors and county recorder. They have received death threats. She can sure dish it out. We don't know if she can also take incoming fire. Some people think she is a Black person (or maybe a biracial person) who tries to pass as a white person by wearing half an inch of makeup. It wouldn't be hard to imagine some rich person who doesn't especially like her to set up a super PAC and begin running ads saying she should be proud of her heritage, not hide it.
Another problem that is making it harder for Lake to reach moderate Republicans is that she camped out at Mar-a-Lago for weeks earlier this year, apparently trying to get Donald Trump to promise to make her his running mate. It looks like he didn't fall for her. Maybe she's not his type. People who don't like Trump aren't going to see Project Veep as a plus for her.
Lake says that she has a good relationship with the NRSC, but there are a lot of competitive Senate races in 2024 and if the chairman, Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT), thinks that she is never going to win over moderate Republicans, he may decide to spend his money elsewhere.
Some of Lake's policy proposals from 2022 still rankle. One of the things she said in her 2022 gubernatorial race was that she wanted to install video cameras in all the classrooms in Arizona so she could identify (and then fire) all woke teachers. That didn't go over real big with teachers. Count on Democratic candidate Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) bringing that up a couple of times. Former Republican congressman Matt Salmon, a long-time Arizona conservative, strongly opposed the camera idea. He said: "She employs the politics of personal destruction, and she'll say anything—the most vile things in the world—to get ahead. I'm sorry, I just can't forget that."
Lake seems to have made her bed and is now going to have to sleep in it. She was a fire-breathing MAGA type in 2022 who vilified and mocked anyone who wasn't MAGA enough. Now she wants their help. Good luck with that against a Latino Marine veteran who served in Iraq and who has been elected to the House from Phoenix four times, never with less than 74% of the vote. (V)