Ms. Hobbs, Arizona’s secretary of state, narrowly defeated Ms. Lake, a former newscaster whose campaign was built on lies about the 2020 election.
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Katie Hobbs rose to national prominence when she stood steadfast against efforts by Trump loyalists to overturn the results of Arizona’s 2020 election.
PHOENIX — Katie Hobbs, who as Arizona’s secretary of state stood up to efforts by allies of former President Donald J. Trump to overturn the 2020 election, has clinched a victory in the state’s race for governor, according to The Associated Press.
Ms. Hobbs, a Democrat, narrowly defeated Kari Lake, a right-wing former newscaster who was talked about as a future leader in a Trump-dominated Republican Party, in a bitter and closely watched race that became a final test of whether candidates molded in Mr. Trump’s image could win in battlegrounds. Ms. Lake, one of the most prominent purveyors of Mr. Trump’s lies about his 2020 election, followed several other election-denying candidates in defeat.
The contest was a study in contrasts of both style and substance, but the stakes for American elections and democracy were evident from the first.
Ms. Lake was a magnetic performer who began her campaign echoing Mr. Trump’s baseless claims that the 2020 election had been “crooked” and “corrupt.” She borrowed and sharpened Mr. Trump’s tactic of using the news media as a foil, routinely videotaping her interviewers or denigrating their news organizations. She taunted Ms. Hobbs as a “coward” and ridiculed her as “chicken” through the contest’s final days for refusing to debate her onstage.
She disparaged the late Senator John McCain, who championed a maverick brand of Republicanism, as a “loser” — again echoing Mr. Trump — and claimed that she and her followers had driven “a stake in the heart of the McCain machine.”
Ms. Hobbs, a mild-mannered elected official, rose to national prominence when she stood steadfast against efforts by Trump loyalists to overturn the vote in 2020. On the stump, she often pointed to her refusal to give in to the “insurrectionists” — protesters who at one point surrounded her home — as a sign that she was “battle tested.”
Ms. Hobbs often sought to stay out of the spotlight, and held fast to her decision not to debate Ms. Lake, saying she did not want to give a platform to an election denier and her lies. But even some of Ms. Hobbs’s own voters and allies expressed concerns that she was evasive and awkward in the limelight.
Understand the Outcomes of the 2022 Midterm Elections
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What we know. It seemed as if the conditions were ripe for a red wave in the 2022 midterms, but in the end Republicans generated no more than a red ripple, leading to an improbable, still-undecided election. Here’s what the results tell us so far:
Biden beat the odds. President Biden had the best midterms of any president in 20 years, avoiding the losses his predecessors endured and maintaining the Democrats’ narrow hold on the Senate, which provides him with a critical guardrail against Republicans should they win the House.
G.O.P. faces a reckoning. A thin Republican majority in the House appears likely, but a poor midterms showing has the party wrestling with what went wrong: Was it bad candidates, bad messaging or the electoral anchor that appeared to be dragging the G.O.P. down, Donald J. Trump?
Trump under fire. Mr. Trump has faced unusual public attacks from within the G.O.P. after a string of losses by his handpicked candidates. There are also signs of an effort to inch the party away from the former president ahead of his expected announcement of a third White House bid.
Abortion mattered. In the first major election since the fall of Roe v. Wade, abortion rights broke through, as Democrats seized on the issue to hold off a red wave. In all five states where abortion-related questions were on the ballot, voters chose to protect access or reject further limits on it.
Voters rejected election deniers. Every 2020 election denier who sought to become the top election official in a critical battleground state lost at the polls this year. Voters roundly rejected extreme partisans who promised to restrict voting and overhaul the electoral process.
Ticket-splitters made a comeback. While ticket-splitting has declined substantially in recent elections, some voters seemed more inclined to support candidates of different parties this year, emphasizing candidate quality over partisan identity.
In the end, it was Ms. Lake who struggled to defeat Ms. Hobbs.
Ms. Hobbs continually reminded voters of the larger issues at play, underscoring Ms. Lake’s staunch position against abortion and casting her own candidacy as essential to protect the future of elections. In the final stretch, she told voters that supporting her amounted to choosing “sanity over chaos.”
For her part, Ms. Lake attacked the news media and campaigned on culture-war issues, barnstorming the state with the other three top Republicans on the ticket and with right-wing supporters, including Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser, and Senators Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Josh Hawley of Missouri.
Ms. Lake lost in a year in which high inflation, President Biden’s low approval numbers and historical trends favored Republicans. By contrast, Gov. Doug Ducey, who is term-limited as governor, trounced his Democratic opponent by more than 14 percentage points in the 2018 midterm elections, when the national environment gave Democrats the edge.
The outcome of this year’s race for governor carried serious potential implications for the 2024 presidential race.
Arizona’s governor is empowered to give final approval to the certification of the winner of the presidential election there, as well as to the selection of Arizona’s slates of presidential electors. The governor could also be either an ally or an adversary of right-wing Republican legislators who have already sought to give themselves the right to decertify the 2020 election and to appoint their own presidential electors.
Arizona has been at the center of conspiracy theories about the 2020 election since Mr. Biden won the state by more than 10,000 votes. All four of Arizona’s top Republican nominees on the statewide ballot, including Ms. Lake, ran in the mold of Mr. Trump and advanced his false claims of widespread election fraud.
Former President Barack Obama, who stumped with Ms. Hobbs, and other top Democrats framed the midterm elections in Arizona as a battle to preserve American democracy.
Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, vowed to do all she could to keep Ms. Lake out of office, and her leadership PAC invested $500,000 in a television ad urging Arizona voters to reject Ms. Lake and Mark Finchem, the party’s nominee for secretary of state, and their election denialism. Mr. Finchem was defeated by Adrian Fontes, a Democrat and former Maricopa County recorder, making him one of several election deniers who were running to take over elections who lost at the polls.
Ms. Hobbs will be the first Democratic governor to serve the state since Janet Napolitano resigned in early 2009 after her confirmation as homeland security secretary during the Obama administration. This wasn’t Ms. Hobbs’ first tight race. When she was elected secretary of state in 2018, she won by less than one percentage point.
Both Ms. Hobbs and Ms. Lake emphasized their work ethic and humble roots. Ms. Hobbs, who was born and raised in Arizona, came from a middle-class family that she said knew “the value of a dollar” and sometimes relied on food stamps. She went on to become a social worker and later served in the Arizona House of Representatives and the Arizona Senate as minority leader.
Ms. Lake, the youngest of nine children raised in eastern Iowa, said she worked as a janitor to pay her way through college. She became a journalist and spent more than two decades as a news anchor for a Fox affiliate in Phoenix.
Former friends and colleagues of Ms. Lake described her as a liberal and a Buddhist who had a close circle of gay friends before she entered politics. But as she ran for office, she refashioned herself as a Christian conservative, among other things by assailing drag performers as bad influences on children.
At a campaign rally just days before the election, Ms. Lake invited Wendy Rogers, a state lawmaker, on to the stage. Ms. Rogers was censured by the State Senate after giving a speech at a far-right conference with ties to white supremacy. Referring to Ms. Rogers, Ms. Lake said she would never back away from “fighters who love this state.”
In recent days, Ms. Lake escalated tensions as officials in Maricopa County, which encompasses Phoenix and is the state’s most populous and politically powerful, counted votes, including a record-breaking 290,000 ballots that were dropped off on Election Day. She and other top Republican candidates made baseless suggestions that election officials were incompetent and hinted at malfeasance. Ms. Lake’s allies indicated they planned to collect affidavits from voters to bring forth legal challenges.
Election officials urged Ms. Lake to tone down her comments and asked voters to stay patient, insisting that the long process would ensure accuracy and that the election system was fair.
Source: nytimes.com
