Kari Lake enters bid to run for Arizona Senate seat

Kari Lake is running for Senate in 2024, filing paperwork on Tuesday to enter the already fiery competition for Sen. Kyrsten Sinema‘s (I-AZ) seat.

The paperwork came the same day Lake met with Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) at the National Republican Senatorial Committee in Washington, D.C., a source familiar told the Washington Examiner.

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Lake is a former gubernatorial candidate. She ran as a Republican against now-Gov. Katie Hobbs (D-AZ) in the 2022 midterm elections.

She has yet to concede her 2022 loss and continues to push her claims of election interference, allegations that she carried all the way to the Maricopa County Superior Court. The court eventually affirmed there was no election fraud in Arizona’s gubernatorial race.

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On Monday, Daines appeared to give Lake advice about entering the Senate race.

Voters “do not want to hear about grievances from the past,” Daines said in a CNN interview. “They want to hear about what you’re going to do for the future. And if our candidates stay on that message of looking down the highway versus the rearview mirror, I think they’ll be a lot more successful, particularly in their appeal to independent voters, which usually decide elections.”

Lake’s hard-line conservative views have caused establishment Arizona Republicans to fear a repeat of 2022, where several hard-line Republicans beat centrist GOP candidates in the primaries but lost to Democrats in the general election. Several of those who lost their elections push claims of voter fraud, similar to Trump’s reaction when he lost the 2020 election.

Though she lost to Hobbs, Lake has been able to build a loyal following among former President Donald Trump’s supporters in the state, which she is hoping will help her in a Senate matchup.

Before announcing her campaign, Lake emerged as the front-runner for the Republican Arizona Senate primary. Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb followed close behind as Lake’s top opponent.

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The Arizona Senate race is a top target for Republicans looking to retake control of the Senate, which Democrats hold with a 51-49 majority. Sinema has not yet announced if she is running for reelection, but if she does, it could make for a high-stakes, three-way race. The seat is rated as a “toss-up” by Cook Political Report.

Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), who is also running for the Senate seat, is leading in a three-way race against Lake and Sinema with 34%, compared to 26% for Lake and 25% for Sinema, according to an August poll.