Kari Lake, Arizona gubernatorial candidate in the 2022 midterm elections, is rumored to be moving on from her court battle against Governor Katie Hobbs. CNN is reporting that Lake is eyeing the Senate seat currently being held by Kyrsten Sinema, who has perturbed Democrats nationwide by becoming an Independent.
CNN reporter Kate Sullivan floated the rumor on Twitter.
I'm told Kari Lake is considering running for the US Senate seat held by Kyrsten Sinema in 2024.
— Kate Sullivan (@KateSullivanDC) January 16, 2023
“I’m told Kari Lake is considering running for the US Senate seat held by Kyrsten Sinema in 2024,” Sullivan commented on Twitter.
Kari Lake’s campaign provided a statement to Becker News about her future plans.
“Kari is hyper-focused on winning her court case as she is the duly elected Governor and her Election Case proves that,” the statement said.
“Hundreds of thousands of invalid ballots were counted in Maricopa County alone, more than 60% of Election Day voting centers were sabotaged causing lines of 4 hours or more at some locations, the wrong ballot image was printed on Election Day ballots causing tabulators to jam and spit out ballots, 25K ballots were mysteriously added to the official vote count two days after the elections and more than 100K ballots with rejected signatures were counted anyway. That is just a bit of what went wrong in Arizona. Kari Lake is fighting to protect the sacred vote of the People of Arizona.”
The campaign then addressed the Senate run speculation directly.
“It is true that dozens of people have reached out to Kari suggesting she run for US Senate,’ the campaign said. “There have been several polls showing she is the strongest candidate and could win. The corruption in DC is as bad as it is in AZ and we need to root out that corruption, but Kari’s focus is on her election case and saving the good people of Arizona from a fraud named Katie Hobbs who is dead set on destroying State 48.”
As Kari Lake said before the midterm election, she is intent on combating corruption in the nation’s politics and elections.
.@KariLake: "You guys recruited me to run for office. I don't know whether to love you or hate you for that. You recruited me to get into the corrupt world of politics because we need to root the corruption out." pic.twitter.com/WuNpveiqhX
— Kari Lake (@KariLake) November 5, 2022
“You guys recruited me to run for office,” she said. “I don’t know whether to love you or hate you for that. You recruited me to get into the corrupt world of politics because we need to root the corruption out.”
In an interview with “Clay and Buck” in late November, Kari Lake explained the state’s failure to get proper election reform and why she got into the governor’s race to begin with.
“We should have done it after 2020,” she said. “We were at ground zero. We had some lawmakers who really wanted to do this. But because of the news, when we did our forensic audit, which wasn’t a good audit, they just spent their day — all day, all night — trying to discredit anybody who said we need to look into this. And so, it never got accomplished because the lawmakers weren’t able to get… They had a majority, but it was a very small one-vote majority. And there were a few people in the legislature on the Republican side who weren’t interested in election reform. And so we didn’t have the will to do it. I did have the will. I do have the will.”
“And we hope that the response to our lawsuit will be that we get a redo of the election and we can do the right thing for the people going forward,” she added. “I didn’t get into politics because I want to be a politician. I got into it because I’m a mom who’s concerned about the future and we need to get people in there who the voters voted for who are going to do the right thing and reform our elections. It didn’t get done after 2020, sadly, and I was going to do it starting on my first day in office. And I think that’s one of the reasons that they don’t want me to win. That’s one of the reasons they want to stop our movement because we’re not controlled by the big money folks. We’re controlled by we the people. And that’s how our founding fathers envisioned it.”
Beyond the court battle against the sworn-in governor, Kari Lake’s campaign is offering another way to foist Hobbs out of office: In early January, Lake’s campaign’s Twitter account said that impeachment proceedings against Hobbs should begin as soon as the Democratic governor signs an order mandating the use of pronouns in state classrooms.
“This is blatantly unconstitutional,” the campaign claimed.
“It’s truly an exhausting feeling knowing that we were right. And that the people of Arizona know we were right,” Lake added. “But that they were denied a free and fair election to stop this garbage from happening. Are we supposed to feel vindicated watching the state be destroyed like this?”
It’s a question that will haunt the State of Arizona for years to come.
Follow Kyle Becker on Twitter @kylenabecker.