Kari Lake, the Arizona Senate candidate known for her firebrand comments and complete devotion to former President Donald Trump, is aiming for a political comeback this fall — but she may be without the funds to finance her efforts after spending too much challenging her 2022 loss.
Lake lost the gubernatorial race to Katie Hobbs in the 2022 midterm elections, one of several Trump-endorsed candidates who beat out centrist Republicans in the primary to lose to Democrats in the general election. Since then, she has refused to concede her loss and has spent millions on legal challenges to find any glimpse of election fraud — and it’s more than she’s raised to win a new race.
Though Lake raised more money than Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) during the last three months of 2023, she ended the year with little money in the bank. She brought in $2 million in the 11 weeks since she entered the race in October, but she quickly spent half of that haul.
The firebrand conservative has spent more than $400,000 on payments related to direct mail, including $285,000 on postage, as well as $93,000 on fundraising. Now, she enters 2024 with little over $1 million cash on hand and $308,000 in debt, according to campaign finance records.
This is significantly less than the $2.5 million she raised after the 2022 general election to support her claims of voter fraud, a fruitless venture that she dragged out for months with unsuccessful litigation.
A Lake campaign official told Politico that the debt recorded in her 2023 records stems from invoices that arrived at the end of the quarter and would be paid quickly.
“Kari Lake had one of the strongest fundraising quarters of any GOP challenger. She is consolidating support with Arizonans and has cleared the field in the primary,” Garrett Ventry, senior Lake adviser, said. “Kari is well positioned to win in November, as she is beating her Democrat opponents in the last three polls.”
Following the 2022 election, Lake has established close ties with Trump and hard-line conservatives within the Republican Party. Before she entered the 2024 race, she parroted claims that the 2020 election was stolen and her election was rigged. Since launching her Senate campaign, Lake has distanced herself from Trump’s avid election denialism but continues to throw her full support behind Trump, earning her “Make America Great Again” status — which hasn’t translated into her fundraising, particularly at the level she wants to see in her quest to attract “disaffected” Democrats and independents to help her win the campaign.
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Lake’s election denialism has become so dominant in her politics that she was warned by Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT), chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, to let go of the past if she wants to have a successful Senate campaign. It is possible that losing every court challenge and receiving admonitions from Daines caused Lake to change her tune toward a campaign platform on crime and immigration.
Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), who is the likely Democratic nominee for the Senate, pulled in the highest amount in the last three months of 2023 at $3.3 million. He has six times more cash on hand than Lake. Sinema, who has not launched a reelection campaign, had a weak haul at just under $600,000 during that time period. However, she does have a massive war chest from her years in the Senate, which could spell disaster for Lake and Gallego should she decide to run for her seat again.