Kari Lake ran for governor on a platform centered on debunked conspiracy theories. Now she may choose to star in one.
For the past week, Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake’s Twitter feed has been a steady stream of optimism. In tweet after tweet, Lake told her followers that everything was falling into place, that totals coming in from various counties showed her gaining solid percentages of counted votes. In television interviews, she assured supporters that there was some batch of heavily Republican votes sitting out there, waiting to be counted — enough to propel her to a confirmable victory.
There was not any such batch and, on Monday evening, Lake’s opponent, Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, was projected to be Arizona’s next governor.
Lake’s response to the news was terse: “Arizonans know BS when they see it.”
So here we go.
No one running in the 2022 midterm elections had made false claims of election fraud more central to their candidacy than did Lake. Her entire campaign was a subset of a particular iteration of right-wing theorizing, one in which the non-sycophantic media was dishonest and scheming, one in which the results of the presidential contest two years ago were obviously corrupted by fraud. Lake’s campaign looped in a who’s who of conspiracy theorists, from Stephen K. Bannon to Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers. But Lake remained the lead actor in this particular drama.
In the months before the election, she offered ominous warnings. There were “already tons of election irregularities,” she insisted in July. She suggested that Democrats were poised to appoint election officials who might skew the vote. She appeared at an event hosted by True the Vote, the group behind the debunked election fraud claims in the film “2000 Mules.” She later touted an endorsement from one member of the organization, Gregg Phillips.
On Monday, shortly before the race was called, she promoted a website aimed at collecting stories about problems at the polls.
