Democrat Ruben Gallego beats Republican Kari Lake in Senate race

Democrat Ruben Gallego became the projected winner of Arizona’s U.S. Senate race on Monday night after Maricopa County counted more ballots and Republican Kari Lake could not plausibly overtake him.

The Associated Press called the race after the latest figures pushed Gallego’s lead to about 73,000 votes.

Gallego, who will become the first Latino to serve Arizona in the Senate, stands to be the only Democratic gain in the Senate, and the party already lost four seats that had been held by Democrats or independents working with the Democrats. Republicans will control the chamber beginning in January, along with the House of Representatives.

Gallego's lead over Lake rivals past Democratic victories in Arizona.

In 2018, U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, then a Democrat, won her seat by 2.3 percentage points. In 2020, U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., won his first race by 2.3 points.

The Associated Press, CNN and NBC called the race for Gallego soon after the Monday night county ballot drop.

On Sunday, Sinema, I-Ariz., whose seat the winner will fill, made clear she believed Gallego would succeed her.

Lake trimmed Gallego’s lead for three days after voting ended, but her chances of winning vaporized during the weekend.

Lake’s electoral problem was a familiar one for Republicans in recent election cycles. She was losing in Pima County by nearly 97,000 votes as of Monday morning.

While she drew a larger share of votes in Maricopa County, the numerical gap was about the same, 97,000.

Those population centers more than offset Lake’s advantage in the rest of the state, where she led by nearly 125,000 votes.

On social media, Lake’s supporters had noted a skeptical tone that Lake is trailing President-elect Donald Trump in Arizona by more than 160,000 votes.

But polling in the race always suggested Arizona was headed for a split-party outcome.

The politics website Real Clear Politics showed its final polling average in Arizona giving Gallego a 2.6 percentage point advantage over Lake while Trump had a 2.8 point lead over Vice President Kamala Harris.

Lake lashed out Friday at Maricopa County Stephen Richer, a Republican who has sued her for defamation in a case where she didn’t contest the allegations and is awaiting to determine what, if anything, she owes him.

London’s Daily Mail reported Friday that Lake’s legal team was filing papers suggesting Richer last year weighed a run for the Senate seat, too, “to make life hell for Kari.”

In a social media post pointing to the Daily Mail’s story, Lake said she wanted every legal vote counted “with no prejudice.”

A social media account affiliated with Lake’s campaign said Friday night that it asked Pima County officials for clarification of their remaining ballots.

Election 2024: See Arizona election results

Gallego kept a low profile during the vote-counting process. On Wednesday, he said he expected to keep his lead.

“We are closely watching as results come in, and we’re feeling very optimistic,” he said in a tweet.

On Sunday, he acknowledged the Marine Corps' birthday.

Publicly available polling in the race showed that in the final weeks of the campaign Lake, a former Fox 10 newscaster, had narrowed Gallego’s longstanding lead in the race to replace Sinema. He held to a 3-percentage-point lead in polls in the final week.

Democrats already have lost control of the Senate, although incumbent U.S. Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., won her tight race. Democrats have already lost seats in West Virginia, Ohio, Montana and Pennsylvania.

Sinema quit the Democratic Party in December 2022 and her fundraising dried up shortly afterward, but for more than a year she was coy about her reelection plans. That left open the unprecedented possibility of a three-way race involving an incumbent who wasn’t in a major party.

Sinema fell to a distant third in public polling before formally quitting the race in March.

Weeks after Sinema left the Democrats, Gallego formally joined the race and never faced an opponent for the nomination.

He quit the liberal Congressional Progressive Caucus and shifted his rhetoric on border-related matters.

Gallego acknowledged Arizona cities were on “the front line of this border crisis.” It was a far different tone than he used in Congress in 2017 when he wrote “Trump’s border wall is trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.”

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

After her narrow loss in the 2022 gubernatorial race, Lake continued to press to overturn the election in court. That didn’t happen, but it kept Lake in the public eye holding to a view increasingly out of step with public opinion.

She was quickly seen as likely to run for Senate but didn’t formally enter the race until October 2023. Six months earlier, Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb entered the race but struggled to raise money with a head start.

Lake jumped in with a videotaped endorsement from former President Donald Trump, setting the tone for a race modeled on his agenda.

Above all, that meant border security and finishing Trump’s border wall as the nation’s top priority. She blamed illegal immigrants for inflation, Arizona’s housing shortage and crime everywhere.

She quickly consolidated support from many Republicans already in the Senate, with the prominent exception of McConnell.

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

It wasn’t the only turbulence involving her party.

In January, Lake toppled the chairman of the Arizona Republican Party after leaking a secretly recorded conversation from 10 months earlier. Jeff DeWit told Lake there were “very powerful people who want to keep you out” of the Senate race and urged her to name her price to stay out of the race.

She rejected his offer and the recording surfaced just ahead of the party’s annual meeting. Republican operatives said the leaked recording served notice to others who were wary of Lake.

In a May candidate forum, Lake called Lamb “a total coward when it comes to election integrity,” a slight that led nine of the state’s 14 other sheriffs to condemn her remark. Lamb threw his support behind Lake after losing the July primary and appeared on stage with her at least once.

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

Former Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey backed her after she won the primary, but didn’t hold high-profile appearances with her. Karrin Taylor Robson, Lake’s closest Republican rival in 2022, followed that pattern as well.

And when Lake tried to suggest she was only joking when she disparaged the late U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., in a series of comments from 2022, his daughter Meghan McCain made clear it wasn’t funny and the feud with the McCains, if not moderate Republicans more broadly, continued.

Gallego, meanwhile, used his time and millions to define himself for months on screens across the state. He cast himself as emerging from poverty in Chicago, rising to Harvard University and fighting 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, his Democratic allies reminded viewers that Lake supported an 1864 territorial law that banned abortion in nearly all circumstances. The issue took on new relevance after the Arizona Supreme Court upheld that law in April.

Lake found herself torn between acknowledging the 19th-century law is “not where the people are” and maintaining her personal opposition to a procedure she likened to “the execution of a baby in the mother’s womb.”

Lake lacked the resources to consistently rebut the attacks but found her footing in their October debate.

She aggressively pressed Gallego on his voting record in Congress, saying he was more concerned with what to call those who crossed the border illegally than doing something about it.

Gallego countered that he supported the bipartisan border security bill that Sinema helped broker and Trump helped sink. Lake memorably called the bill “300 pages of pure garbage,” before tossing it in a waste basket placed near her 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 file sealed any longer. Lake hyped the release of the file as a looming bombshell, even though Kate Gallego had long ago endorsed him for the Senate.

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

This story will be updated as election results are reported.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Democrat Ruben Gallego beats Republican Kari Lake in Senate race