Kari Lake has been branded "a one-note candidate" by a prominent political scientist, who warned Republicans against selecting the outspoken Donald Trump supporter, after she filed paperwork to run for an Arizona Senate seat in 2024.
In November 2022 Lake ran for the governorship of Arizona but was beaten by Democratic candidate Katie Hobbs. She refused to concede defeat, and is continuing to insist the election was rigged against her despite this claim being repeatedly rejected in the courts. Lake is also a prominent supporter of the discredited conspiracy theory that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump by fraud.
Following the death of Californian congresswoman Dianne Feinstein on September 28, Democrats currently posses wafer thin-control over the Senate, with 50 Senators affiliated with the party, versus 49 for the Republicans. The GOP had been hoping to seize control of the Senate in November 2022 but a number of Trump-aligned candidates, including Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania and Herschel Walker in Georgia, lost in key swing states giving Democrats a slim majority.
Lake has been teasing a Senate run for weeks and will formally launch her campaign for the seat, currently occupied by independent Kyrsten Sinema, with an event on October 10, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Speaking to Newsweek Thomas Whalen, an American politics expert who teaches at Boston University, argued Lake would be a poor candidate for Arizona Republicans.
Asked about her chances he replied: "Kari who? Seriously, she's been beating to death that old saw about alleged electoral fraud [so much] that she's diminished what once seemed like a promising political brand. No one likes a sore loser and she is the poster child for one. I just think her political window of opportunity has closed. The Arizona GOP would be wise to give their support to someone else, who is not such a one-note candidate. She's sooo 2022."
Newsweek has reached out to Kari Lake's campaign team for comment by email.
Voters in Arizona elected Sinema to the Senate in November 2018 as a Democrat. In December 2022 she announced she was becoming an independent but remains aligned with her former party for committee purposes.
Sinema has yet to announce whether she will run again in November 2024, potentially setting up a three-way battle along with Democratic and Republican candidates. Democratic House Representative Ruben Gallego and Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb have already launched their election bids. Earlier this week a video of Lake and Gallego arguing at an airport after sharing a flight went viral, receiving more than 700,000 views on X, formerly known as Twitter.
In August a poll released by Noble Predictive Insights' gave Gallego a ten-point lead in a hypothetical face-off against Lake.
Senator Steve Daines, who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which is devoted to getting GOP candidates elected to the upper chamber, urged Lake not to dwell on the past if she runs. This was an apparent reference to her election fraud claims.
He said in an interview with CNN: "I think one thing we've learned from 2022 is voters do not want to hear about grievances from the past.
"They want to hear about what you're going to do for the future. And if our candidates stay on that message of looking down the highway versus the rear-view mirror, I think they'll be a lot more successful particularly in their appeal to independent voters, which usually decide elections."
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
James Bickerton is a Newsweek U.S. News reporter based in London, U.K. His focus is covering U.S. politics and world ... Read more
