Kari Lake's fans are crying fraud, but here's why they should have seen her loss coming

Just before U.S. Sen.-elect Ruben Gallego formally declared victory over Republican rival Kari Lake, one of her allies posted on social media a message hinting at something amiss in the race.

Tyler Bowyer, the chief operating officer at the conservative Turning Point Action, called it “very odd” that the Green Party candidate in the Senate race received more than triple the support of that party’s presidential nominee.

“I am not sure that this has ever happened at this level before,” he wrote.

Lake shared the post with her 2.2 million followers on X.

It draped a conspiratorial overtone to her latest loss without Lake making the accusation.

Both Lake and Bowyer overlooked the 2016 U.S. Senate race in Arizona. Green Party candidate Gary Swing pulled in 138,000 votes in a loss that year to the late U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., while Jill Stein, the Green Party’s presidential candidate, received 34,000 votes in Arizona.

It also made clear that Lake once again could not bring herself to accept an election loss.

On Election Day, Lake signaled in a news conference in Mesa that she would not challenge the process.

“I will accept the results of the election. I have had a few concerns, but we’ve done a lot of legwork to prevent any problems,” she said, crediting Turning Point Action with busing voters to the polls as helping avert problems.

By Tuesday afternoon, half a day after Gallego clinched the Senate race, Lake still had not conceded. She has yet to concede her 2022 gubernatorial loss as well.

“Kari Lake is a case unto herself,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.

“She is still refusing to concede the election for governor. It’s just laughable. … The way she comes across, there’s just an arrogance that just turns people off.”

Some of her supporters have rejected the notion of voters who supported both Trump and Gallego. Others can’t fathom how she could lose when Trump won relatively handily. And they point to the money Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s allies denied her in a race she lost by a little more than 2 percentage points.

Steven S. Smith, a political science professor at Arizona State University, said the outcome shouldn’t be considered a surprise.

“It’s not shocking in that she’s lost a statewide race before. Her positioning on the issues did not change in a material way,” he said. “It appears that a majority of Arizonans really do favor someone else when she’s pitted against a reasonably competent Democrat.”

Tyler Montague, an Arizona Republican consultant, scoffed at any suggestion of election mischief.

“I guess the people fixing the election forgot to make Trump lose and they just focused on her,” he joked. “She is just so fluent in MAGA and does not know how to talk to moderates in the middle.”

As polls and politicians signaled more than a year ago, Lake never appealed to Democrats, had limited reach with independents and alienated a slice of Republicans. She couldn’t compete financially with Gallego and remained a polarizing figure throughout her latest campaign.

Trump outperformed all five GOP Senate candidates in the competitive races in presidential battlegrounds. Unofficial results, however, show Lake did the worst of the Republicans in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

As of Tuesday afternoon, she won 90.3% of the votes that Trump did.

Nevada Republican Sam Brown did only slightly better than Lake, but his state includes an option to vote “none of these candidates.” If it did not, he would have gotten at least some of those 42,000 votes and been closer to Trump.

The other Senate Republicans in swing states got about 96% of Trump’s total. If Lake did as well as they did, she would have picked up an additional 91,000 votes in Arizona in a race she was losing by about 73,000 votes on Tuesday afternoon.

And on the flip side, Gallego did much better with voters than Vice President Kamala Harris. By comparison, the Senate Democrats in swing states got more than 99% of her vote total. Gallego had 6% more votes than Harris in Arizona.

Lake singularly ran as a Senate version of Trump himself. She called herself “Trump in heels.”

“Trump clones never work. Ask (Florida Gov.) Ron DeSantis,” said Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University. “We saw this in 2022. (Pennsylvania Senate candidate) Mehmet Oz didn’t work. Kari Lake didn’t work.”

Trump did notably well with Latino men, who may also have been hesitant as a demographic bloc to vote for a woman, Schiller said.

“Why should a Latino man vote for Kari Lake over Ruben Gallego? She’s not Donald Trump, and if there are some attitudes about women leaders prevalent in the Latino male community — there’s a lot of dispute about that — but that could be a factor.”

There were also signs that Lake’s Senate run didn’t have the energy of her gubernatorial run.

In 2022, Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters spent time at Lake’s campaign events, in part because she could draw enthusiastic crowds. By the end, they were branded as a “Lake and Blake” GOP ticket.

On the October night last year when she made her long-expected entry into the Senate race, Lake had an impressive stage in Scottsdale with a large screen to display her videotaped endorsement from Trump.

Even with days of public notice from Lake herself, the event had plenty of empty space.

Fast-forward to September: Lake held a rally in Chandler supporting law enforcement that included the endorsement of her former rival, Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb, and an appearance from comedian Rob Schneider.

It, too, had room for many more to attend if they wanted.

From the time Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., quit the race in March, Gallego dominated the polls. He wound up ahead in 79 of the 87 publicly available polls taken in that time.

The race tightened in the final weeks, especially after Lake’s strong debate performance in early October. But there was scant evidence she was ever the favorite outside her own circle.

Gallego also dominated in fundraising from the time he entered the race in January 2023.

In the first six months of 2023, Gallego easily outpaced Sinema, who had been a prolific fundraiser until she quit the Democratic Party in December 2022.

In that period, he raised $6.9 million and socked away $3.8 million in cash. Lake spent that period privately discussing her interest in running for the Senate and writing and hawking her book “Unafraid: Just Getting Started.”

Gallego began posting TV ads in March and never stopped until after the election. Lake couldn’t match his presence on screens all over the state and Republican allies were hard to find.

In March 2023, seven months before she entered the race, Jeff DeWit, then the chair of the Arizona Republican Party and a prominent Trump loyalist, delivered a message from “very powerful people” asking Lake to stay out.

A recording of the conversation in Lake’s home surfaced 10 months later, toppling DeWit from party leadership, but also putting other Republicans on edge, GOP insiders said afterward.

Before she entered the Senate race, people with the National Republican Senatorial Committee advised Lake privately and, later in public remarks, to focus on matters such as inflation and border security, not election denialism. Lake often sneered at past election results, and she continued to face questions from the media over her views.

She spent two years battling in court to overturn her 2022 loss. The Maricopa County recorder, Stephen Richer, a Republican, sued her for defamation over her baseless claims of a botched election. She didn’t challenge his allegations and will return to court to determine how much, if anything, she owes for damages in the case.

Lake frequently displayed contempt for some of her fellow Republicans, from John McCain years after the six-term senator’s death to a taunting March tweet of former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley during the presidential primary this year.

Lake used a misspelled version of Haley’s birth name, calling her “Nimrata,” to point to reports that Haley would end her race against Trump “after more humiliating, landslide (losses).”

Two weeks later, 18% of Arizona Republican voters supported Haley in a primary that was over before voting ended.

Lake’s allies note that McConnell, who said earlier this year he would not seek another term in GOP leadership, wouldn’t invest in Lake’s race.

The Senate Leadership Fund, which is closely allied with McConnell, poured $211 million into races across the country, according to a tally by OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan organization that tracks money in politics.

None of it went to Arizona to help Lake.

It was the second straight election cycle in which McConnell’s allies refused to invest in an Arizona Senate race. In 2022, they didn’t provide help to Masters.

A person familiar with the information shared with McConnell at the time, said Masters’ favorability was lower than former Alabama U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore’s was after reports that he pursued romantic relations with teen girls when he was in his 30s.

Lake effectively received the same, unelectable verdict from McConnell even as polling suggested her race had tightened in October.

A social media account aligned with Lake’s campaign posted a message on Tuesday blaming McConnell for the shutout, noting Gallego received $100 million from groups aligned with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

“Kari Lake got $0.00 from Mitch McConnell,” the post said. “Republicans must choose a Senate Majority Leader who is more interested in helping candidates win elections than settling ideological scores.”

Montague, for one, said there is a different lesson for all Republicans.

“What it means for Republicans in Arizona is that they are going to have to be more strategic because they are delivering candidates that win the primary and lose the general.

“Had Karrin Taylor Robson been the candidate for governor (in 2022), I’m pretty sure she would have won. Had somebody else been the candidate for U.S. Senate, they would have had a much better chance than Kari Lake.”

Election victory: Ruben Gallego wins US Senate race, making Arizona history

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Why Kari Lake lost her Senate bid and why election fraud is improbable