(Headline USA) Nearly a week after most states had their races decided, and even other highly contentious and razor-thin ones resolved, Arizona leftists formally stole the race from GOP candidate Kari Lake for the second consecutive election cycle.
Several counties—notably deep-blue Pima, populous Maricopa and the border region of Yuma—saw their vote totals mysteriously fluctuate througout the convoluted and opaque tallying process.
Although Yuma and Cochise—both of which broke heavily for President-elect Donald Trump—were still awaiting the results on more than a third of their final count, Democrat Ruben Gallego had made disproportionate gains in recent vote drops, giving him an edge of nearly 73,000 votes that Lake could not catch.
The Associated Press called the race at at 11:49 p.m. ET on Monday.
“Gracias, Arizona!” wrote Gallego, who has acknowledged his father is a convicted drug dealer with ties to the cross-border cartels.
Gracias, Arizona! pic.twitter.com/fWQ3AetOsy
— Ruben Gallego (@RubenGallego) November 12, 2024
The AP left a voicemail and email message seeking comment from Lake’s campaign Monday night.
It remained unclear whether she intended to wage any legal challenges—an effort that defined her 2022 race against now-Gov. Katie Hobbs, but to no avail.
Despite clear indications of election malfeasance by Hobbs—who was previously the Arizona secretary of state—Lake struggled to gain access to the evidence needed to prove deliberate voter fraud.
Instead, corrupt officials backed by George Soros and other well-heeled leftist oligarchs pushed back with a relentless lawfare attack on Lake, suing her for defamation and otherwise attempting to punish her for the act of trying to press her case legally.
With dishonest pollsters showing Lake behind by a sizeable margin in her senatorial run, Trump ultimately distanced himself from Lake in the current race, which may have contributed to the deficit between his tally and that of one of his staunchest pro-MAGA defenders.
However, some on X expressed their hope that Lake, a former TV journalist, would find a role in Trump’s incoming administration—perhaps as press secretary.
Kari Lake robbed again in Arizona. What a surprise.
She’s probably got an important role waiting for her in Trump 2.0, but with the way she savages the Fake News, she’d make a great Press Secretary 😁 pic.twitter.com/3GVyegg9vt
— Patri0tsareinContr0l (@Patri0tContr0l) November 10, 2024
Gallego’s victory continues a string of Democratic successes for the Senate in a state that was reliably Republican for those seats until Donald Trump was elected president in 2016—despite frequently choosing RINOs like Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake, and former Gov. Doug Ducey.
With Lake’s defeat and that of Nevada GOP candidate Sam Brown under similarly unusual circumstances, the GOP will have 53 seats in the 100-member Senate.
Republicans flipped Democratic-controlled Senate seats in West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Montana. In the latter three cases, defeated Sens. Sherrod Brown, Bob Casey and Jon Tester ran ahead of Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris but couldn’t overcome their states’ shifts toward the GOP.
Gallego, a five-term House member, will replace Kyrsten Sinema, who left the Democratic Party two years ago after she antagonized the party’s left wing. She considered running for a second term as an independent but bowed out when it was clear she had no clear path to victory.
“Yes, he could!” several Gallego supporters shouted in Spanish as he offered his first comments after the race was called.
“I will fight for Arizona in Washington,” Gallego told the cheering supporters, claiming he would fight as much for the people who did not vote for him as the ones who did.
In his brief remarks, Gallego promised to work to fix the nation’s broken immigration system, fight for veterans and for women’s abortion.
The latter was a contentious issue in the state after its Supreme Court briefly rolled the law back to one dating from the Civil War era that banned all abortions.
Since September, it has since been amended to reflect a more recent law that permits abortions within 15 weeks of pregnancy and allows for special circumstances such as rape, incest or risk to the mother.
Lake, like Trump, tacked to the middle on the issue, alienating some of her allies on the right by opposing a federal abortion ban while deflecting Gallego’s attempts to use abortion as a rallying cry for single-issue “AWFUL” voters.
Also contentious in the lead-up to the election was a bizarre Arizona law that did not require voters to show proof of citizenship for national elections, although it did for state ones. The resulting legal battle led to thousands of individuals being approved to vote without having confirmed their eligibility, while the disposition in the case confoundingly swung back and forth with judicial reversals.
That, along with a lengthy two-page ballot, may have contributed to a chaotic election that—like the state’s 2022 effort, which saw many Republican-heavy precincts receive the wrong size paper on Election Day—made it impossible to readily ascertain the will of voters.
With Gallego’s win, there was only one more major race left uncalled in Arizona. The race between Republican Rep. Juan Ciscomani and Democrat Kirsten Engel for the 6th Congressional District remained too early to call.
Gallego—who, like Harris, maintained a significant fundraising advantage throughout the race—portrayed Lake as a liar who would do and say anything to gain power. Ironically, he also downplayed his own radical voting record in Congress, while attempting to portray himself as a pragmatic moderate.
Lake, who called herself the “lawful governor” in her 2023 book, continued her unsuccessful fight in court to overturn the nefarious gubernatorial race even after beginning her Senate campaign.
She focused her Senate campaign on border security, a potent issue for Republicans in a border state that saw record border crossings during Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration. She promised a tough crackdown on illegal immigration and labeled Gallego a supporter of “open borders.”
She also went after his personal life, pointing to his divorce from Kate Gallego shortly before she gave birth. His ex-wife, now the mayor of Phoenix, endorsed Gallego and has campaigned with him.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
