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    • Rubén Gallego maintains advantage over Kari Lake in race for the US Senate
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    Rubén Gallego maintains advantage over Kari Lake in race for the US Senate

    Sakege Posted on

    Democrat Ruben Gallego had a sizable lead over Republican Kari Lake late on election night in the U.S. Senate race in Arizona.

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

    Gallego led in 79 of the 87 publicly available surveys since Sinema dropped out of the race in March, but Lake shaved several percentage points off her lead in the final weeks of the race.

    Green Party candidate Eduardo Quintana came in a distant third.

    On social media, Lake called on the media to call the presidential race, saying, “We ALL know Trump won!” But he didn’t acknowledge his poor standing in the Arizona Senate race on election night.

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

    The GOP establishment, particularly Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and their allies treated Lake as an electoral afterthought and never invested in the race.

    Political experts expect early results from Arizona to favor Republicans and believe subsequent vote declines will tilt toward Democrats. If so, that’s a change from 2020 and 2022, when GOP skepticism toward mail-in voting meant early results leaned Democratic, while final votes counted had a clear Republican lean.

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

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

    The winner succeeds Sinema, who won the seat in 2018 as a Democrat, breaking a 30-year electoral drought for that party.

    Elections 2024: View Arizona election results | Live coverage on Election Day

    Sinema resigned from the Democratic Party in December 2022 and her fundraising dried up soon after, but for more than a year she played coy about her re-election plans. That left open the unprecedented possibility of a three-way race involving a non-major party starter.

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

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

    Resigned from the liberal Congressional Progressive Caucus and changed its rhetoric on border issues.

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

    By contrast, Lake’s path to the Republican nomination was bumpier.

    After his narrow loss in the 2022 gubernatorial race, Lake continued to push to overturn the election in court. That didn’t happen, but it kept Lake in the public eye by maintaining a view increasingly out of step with public opinion.

    He was quickly considered likely to run for Senate, but did not formally enter the race until October 2023. Six months earlier, Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb entered the race, but had difficulty raising money with advantage.

    Lake weighed in with a videotaped endorsement of former President Donald Trump, setting the tone for a race inspired by his agenda.

    Above all, that meant that border security and finishing Trump’s border wall were the country’s top priority. He blamed illegal immigrants for inflation, Arizona’s housing shortage and crime everywhere.

    He quickly consolidated the support of many Republicans already in the Senate, with the notable exception of McConnell.

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

    It was not the only turbulence that involved his party.

    In January, Lake ousted the chairman of the Arizona Republican Party after leaking a secretly recorded conversation ten months earlier. Jeff DeWit told Lake that there were “very powerful people who want to keep you out” of the Senate race and urged her to set the price she would pay to stay 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 tipped off others who distrusted Lake.

    At a candidate forum in May, Lake called Lamb “a total coward when it comes to election integrity,” a slight that led nine of the state’s 14 other sheriffs to condemn her comment. Lamb supported 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 did not make high-profile appearances with her. Karrin Taylor Robson, Lake’s closest Republican rival in 2022, also followed that pattern.

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

    Gallego, meanwhile, used his time and millions to define himself for months on screens across the state. He portrayed himself as rising from poverty in Chicago, rising to Harvard University and fighting 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 prohibited abortion in 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 that the 19th century law “is not where the people are” and maintaining his personal opposition to a procedure that he compared to “the execution of a baby in its mother’s womb.”

    Lake lacked the resources to consistently refute the attacks, but he found his footing in the October debate.

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

    Gallego responded that he supported the bipartisan border security bill that Sinema helped negotiate and Trump helped sink. Lake memorably called the bill “300 pages of pure garbage,” before throwing it into a trash can placed near his podium.

    In the final weeks of the campaign, Gallego and his ex-wife, Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego, lost a court battle to keep their 2016 divorce record sealed. Lake touted the release of the record as an imminent bombshell, despite that Kate Gallego had long supported him for the Senate.

    But the file did nothing more than confirm what was known and reported at the time: Rubén Gallego abandoned his wife weeks before she gave birth to their son.

    This story will be updated as election results are reported.

    Sakege
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