Lake making splash with Trump backers
Ex-TV news anchor draws on reserve of credibility to win votes in Ariz. governor’s race
PHOENIX — Kari Lake worked her way through television interviews at her election night party, fielding a barrage of questions about her bid to be Arizona’s next governor. Votes were still being counted, and she had been up all night. But Lake, a first-time candidate, did not flinch.
Instead, she grabbed a reporter’s microphone, locked eyes with the camera and delivered her campaign message as seamlessly and authoritatively as if she were reporting from behind the local anchor desk she left just last year.
Lake is among a crop of hard-right Republican candidates winning primaries with a potent mix of election lies and cultural grievances. Her polished delivery and ruthless instincts, honed through decades in TV news, have landed her in a category all her own. The 52-year-old former journalist has drawn on a reservoir of credibility and familiarity to turn former viewers into voters. Donald Trump has praised her camera-ready discipline, privately telling other candidates to be more like Lake. Her say-anything bravado has won cheers from a base eager to stick it to the state’s old guard. Her lack of experience with policy and her fixation on fictions about the 2020 election have left the establishment white-knuckled, bracing for how she might wield power.
Some Republicans have discussed her as a potential vice presidential contender if Trump runs again in 2024. National Republican groups are planning to pour millions into her race to help keep the party in control of a key political battleground. “I am beloved by people, and I’m not saying that to be boastful,” Lake said in an interview last week at her campaign headquarters.
“I was in their homes for the good times and the bad times,” she added. “We’ve been together on the worst of days, and we’ve been together on the best of days.”
Polls show Lake as an underdog in her race, having survived a narrow primary race last week in which Gov. Doug Ducey and most of the Arizona Republican establishment opposed her.
But if she can unite her party and expand her appeal to independent voters, Lake has history on her side: Arizona Republicans have won six of the last eight governor’s races. On Saturday, Ducey released a statement urging his party “to unite behind our slate of candidates.”
Raised in Iowa, Lake has spent more than two decades on the air at KSAZ-TV, a Phoenix station owned by Fox. From her perch in the nation’s 11th-largest TV market, which covers about two-thirds of the state’s households, she delivered straight news. She interviewed Barack Obama and Trump during their presidencies, a rare feat for even the most ambitious local news figure. But in recent years, she began to hint at her personal political leanings on social media. In 2021, she complained about biased reporting in the media: “I promise you if you hear it from my lips, it will be truthful,” she said in a statement announcing her departure from the network.
Since then, Lake has embraced Trump’s falsehoods about the 2020 election, claiming that the contest was “corrupt and stolen.” She supported a partisan review of the results in Maricopa County and claimed electronic voting machines were not “reliably secure.”
Her combative campaign has touched on other trigger points of America First populism.
She has rallied against vaccine mandates, and one of her bestselling campaign T-shirts features a graphic of a cloth face mask on fire. She is opposed to letting transgender people use bathrooms that are consistent with their identity and has assailed drag queens as dangerous to children.
She suggested the Second Amendment protects ownership of rocket launchers, and she told a summit of young conservative women, “God did not create us to be equal to men.”
In response to the FBI search of Trump’s residence this week, Lake declared, “Our government is rotten to the core.”
When one Republican rival, Matt Salmon, offered a counterpoint to Lake’s proposal to install cameras in classrooms, she smeared him as sympathetic to pedophiles. When he objected, she said his complaints showed he was too weak to be governor.