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    • U.S. Senate race in Arizona remains tight with little change
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    U.S. Senate race in Arizona remains tight with little change

    Harry Posted on

    The sizable pile of votes from Maricopa County on Wednesday night did little to change the status of Arizona’s U.S. Senate race; Democrat Ruben Gallego still holds an unchanging lead over Republican Karl Lake.

    The latest unofficial results from the state’s population center extended Lake’s lead, which he had split overnight.

    In Maricopa County alone, there are still hundreds of thousands of ballots to be counted. Gallego’s revised lead appeared fragile as Republicans across the country showed much more strength than many pollsters expected.

    Election 2024: See Arizona election results | Election Day live broadcast

    On Wednesday, Gallego posted on social media that he hoped to maintain his lead.

    “We are watching the results closely as they come in and feel very optimistic,” he said in a tweet earlier in the day.

    In his own posts, Lake urged his supporters to improve provisional ballots in a race he expects to remain close.

    “This race will go to the end! “EVERYBODY needs DECK to fix the ballots and ensure every Arizonan can vote,” he said.

    Public polls in the race showed Lake, the former Fox 10 news anchor, in the final weeks of the campaign narrowing Gallego’s long-standing lead in the race to replace retiring U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz. He was ahead by 3 percentage points in the last week’s polls.

    Democrats have already lost control of the Senate, and incumbent Democrats were still locked in tight races in Nevada and Pennsylvania Wednesday night. Far more votes were counted in those contests than in Arizona.

    Gallego, a five-term member of Congress, is the state’s first Latino member elected to office and only the 13th.This If he wins, it’s national. Lake may be the first Republican woman elected to the Senate from Arizona.

    If Lake wins, he will do so without the help of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. He and his allies treated Lake as a post-election afterthought and never invested in the race.

    Whoever wins will replace Sinema, who won the seat as a Democrat in 2018, ending a 30-year electoral drought for the party.

    Gallego led in 79 of 87 public polls Since Sinema retired from the race in March, Lake has shed several points from her lead in the final weeks of the race.

    Green Party candidate Eduardo Quintana came in third place.

    Sinema left the Democratic Party in December 2022 and ended her fundraising efforts shortly thereafter, but remained coy about her re-election plans for more than a year. That left open the unprecedented possibility of a three-way race involving an incumbent not affiliated with a major party.

    Sinema fell to third place in opinion polls before officially dropping out of the race in March.

    Weeks after Sinema left the Democrats, Gallego officially joined the race and faced no challengers for the nomination.

    The Liberal Congress left the Progressive Caucus and changed his rhetoric on border-related issues.

    Gallego acknowledged that Arizona cities are “on the front lines of this border crisis.” That was a far cry from the tone he used in 2017, when he wrote to Congress that “Trump’s border wall is trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.”

    By contrast, Lake’s road to the GOP nomination was a bumpier ride.

    Following his narrow defeat in the 2022 governor’s race, Lake continued to push in court to overturn the election. This did not happen, but it did make Lake increasingly unpopular in the public eye.

    He was quickly deemed likely to run for Senate, but he did not officially enter the race until October 2023. Six months ago, Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb entered the race but struggled to raise money with an advantage.

    Lake stepped in with a videotaped endorsement of former President Donald Trump, setting the tone for a race modeled after his agenda.

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

    He quickly consolidated the support of many Republicans already in the Senate, aside from McConnell.

    McConnell continued to raise “candidate quality” concerns in various Senate races in 2024, and political action committees aligned with him never invested in those contests, including Lake’s candidacy.

    This was not the only turmoil that concerned his party.

    In January, Lake ousted the chairman of the Arizona Republican Party after leaking a secretly recorded conversation from 10 months earlier. Jeff DeWit told Lake that there are “very powerful people who want to keep you out of the Senate race” and urged him to determine the cost of staying out of the race.

    He rejected his offer and the recording emerged just before the party’s annual meeting. Republican operatives said the leaked recording was made known to others who were wary of Lake.

    At a candidate forum in May, Lake called Lamb “a complete coward when it comes to election integrity”; This led nine of the state’s 14 other sheriffs to condemn his remarks. Lamb threw his support behind Lake after losing the July primary and appeared on stage with him at least once.

    But other prominent Arizona Republicans were lukewarm in their support for Lake.

    Former Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey endorsed her after she won the primary but did not make a high-profile appearance with her. Lake’s closest Republican opponent in 2022, Karrin Taylor Robson, also followed this pattern.

    And when Lake tried to suggest that he was just joking when he disparaged the late U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., in a series of comments in 2022, his daughter Meghan McCain made it clear that it wasn’t funny and that the fight between him and her wasn’t funny. The McCains continued, though not moderate Republicans more broadly.

    Gallego, meanwhile, used his time and millions to describe himself on screens across the state for months. He saw himself as someone who had escaped poverty in Chicago, gotten to Harvard University, and fought 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, Democratic allies reminded viewers that Lake supported an 1864 territorial law that banned abortion in almost all circumstances. The issue gained renewed importance after the Arizona Supreme Court approved this law in April.

    Lake found himself torn apart He was torn between acknowledging that 19th-century law “was not where the people were” and personally opposing a procedure he likened to “the execution of a baby in the womb.”

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

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

    Gallego countered that he supported the bipartisan border security bill that Sinema brokered, which Trump also helped pass. Lake memorably called the bill “300 pages of pure garbage” before tossing it into the wastebasket next to 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 filings sealed any longer. Lake hyped the release of the dossier to explosive effect, even though Kate Gallego had long ago endorsed him for the Senate.

    But the dossier largely only confirmed what was known and reported at the time: Ruben Gallego had left his wife weeks before she gave birth to their son.

    This story will be updated as election results are announced.

    Harry
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