Kari Lake, a former TV anchor and gubernatorial candidate, is making it known that she will be launching a campaign to take on Democratic Independent U.S. Senator Kyrsten Sinema in what is sure to be one of the biggest spectacles in 2024.
In an exclusive statement to the Wall Street Journal, Lake announced that her campaign kickoff will be at a rally she’s holding on October 10. She had previously hinted at a run.
“We need to get a senator in there who is going to fight back and put America first,” Lake said in an interview with the paper.
More via the WSJ:
Arizona is a top battleground in next year’s presidential and Senate elections, and combined campaign spending in the state will be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Voters here have narrowly elected Democrats for president, governor and Senate over the past several cycles, after moderate Republicans and independents moved away from former President Donald Trump and his GOP allies, including Lake.
Lake captured the nation’s attention during her gubernatorial campaign last year, when she aligned herself closely with Trump and relished attacking the media and her critics, including Republicans who clashed with Trump and his brand of politics like the late-Sen. John McCain.
Lake is also a proponent of the idea that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from then-president Donald Trump and that the 2022 gubernatorial election was stolen from her. She has been a very vocal supporter of Trump’s since the start of his campaign, leading to speculation that she may also be angling for a vice presidential nod from the real estate mogul.
Sinema has not officially announced her re-election bid, but the WSJ points out that her team has been laying the groundwork for a third-party bid. The Democratic candidate in the race, Ruben Gallego, is running to Sinema’s left.
The current Senator has been a thorn in the side of progressives since Joe Biden took over as president, routinely bucking the far-left in favor of slightly more politically neutral positions. She, along with Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, have been excoriated by their own side for not adopting extreme left positions in their votes.
Lake, meanwhile, has been traveling the country, selling books and fundraising for her legal battles against the state of Arizona. She maintains that the 2022 election should have gone to her, but fraud and deception gave the election to her opponent. Former president Trump is also reported to have called Blake Masters, who lost a bid for the U.S. Senate in Arizona in 2022 and asked him to sit out in favor of Lake.
Masters is reportedly still mulling the idea for a run but put his plans on hold at Trump’s request.
Sen. Steve Daines of Montana, who took over the National Republican Senatorial Committee after a disastrous run by Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, said Lake is “a talented campaigner with an impressive ability to fire up the grassroots.”
The NRSC has not made an endorsement in the race but is apparently not ruling one out. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has a network of donors and political action committees, has remained silent on the race.
