Arizona’s Kari Lake makes midterm waves as Republican’s new star

The US media has become obsessed with Kari Lake – they appear to hate her – knowing full well her victory would usher in a new Trump-like political force.

Arizona Republican nominee Kari Lake beams to the crowd at a campaign rally attended by former US president Donald Trump. Picture: Mario Tama/Getty Images/AFP

“So you’re going to the rally, too, right?” I didn’t expect the Kari Lake and Glenn Youngkin rally to begin as soon as I hopped into an Uber last week on my way to Scottsdale, Arizona.

But Derek Muhammed, 54, observing my destination, could not wait to show me his “Bidenflation” T-shirt, and regaled me on the 25-minute, high-speed trip along Phoenix’s trademark six-lane, inner-city roads with what was wrong with the modern Democratic Party.

Arizonans know that their state, which flipped to Joe Biden in the 2020 election by the narrowest of margins, marking the beginning of the end for Donald Trump’s presidency, has become the nation’s political bellwether.

A red wave here next month would spell doom for the Democrats, who are defending wafer-thin majorities in the House of Representatives and Senate in US midterm elections on November 8. Their loss would end the Biden administration’s ability to legislate without the agreement of Republicans.

No governor’s race this midterm election has attracted as much attention as Arizona’s. The US media has become obsessed with Lake – they appear to hate her – knowing full well her victory would usher in a new Trump-like political force.

“If she wins next month, she will immediately vault to the top of potential vice-presidential candidates in ’24,” says Barrett Marson, a veteran Republican political strategist based in Arizona. For what it’s worth, Lake, a married mother of two teenage children, could well run for president one day if she wins.

Virginia’s Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin campaigns with Lake at an Arizona rally.

A few hundred Republican supporters gathered at Dillon Precision’s aircraft hangar last Wednesday evening (Thursday AEDT) to hear Lake, the Republican candidate for Arizona governor, and Youngkin, the governor of Virginia, rile up their supporters, hemmed in between a World War II fighter jet and military helicopter.

“She’s one of the most compelling figures in the world right now,” says Amy Foto, a supporter and public school teacher of 25 years, who was visiting Phoenix from Denver.

Lake, 53, has leveraged her fame as a 22-year Arizona nightly news anchor and former Democrat seemingly with no political inclinations, to transform into a high-profile political machine with national ambitions. Think Leigh Sales or Jana Wendt, in an earlier period, running for NSW premier. That Youngkin, who has already won a powerful office, travelled five hours across the country to campaign with Lake points to her ascendancy within the Republican Party.

“I’m Republican, I’m hard-core, I love the new Republican Party,” says Lake, emerging in her trademark perfectly cropped hair and a one-piece yellow suit, and beaming to the crowd, liberally dotted with cowboy hats.

Last year she quit media, joined the Republican Party, and two months ago edged out the local establishment Republican candidate in a closely fought primary in August, winning Trump’s fawning approval.

Lake’s growing appeal might even pull the state’s Republican Senate candidate, 35-year-old Blake Masters, across the line against incumbent Democrat senator and “fundraising juggernaut”, former astronaut Mark Kelly, who has raised $US75m for his re-election campaign, more than five times as much as Masters.

“The adverts are just killers, and yet he’s within striking distance,” political strategist Marson says. For Democrats, Lake has become the dangerous face of the hard “MAGA right”, a Trump acolyte, a threat to democracy itself and the face of the new Republicans.

Lake, for her diehard and rapidly growing Republican fan base, personifies the future of the party along with Youngkin and Florida Governor Ron Desantis, and looks set to become governor of the 14th largest US state, succeeding well-liked incumbent Doug Ducey, who has reached the state’s eight-year term limit for governor.

Dismissed as “Trump in heels” by her critics, it’s hard not to be impressed with Lake, whatever you think of her politics: faultlessly articulate and immaculately turned-out, she commands attention.

“When Kari Lake walks into a room, all eyes turn to Kari Lake. She is one of those people,” The Washington Post recently conceded.

Arizona Secretary of State and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs. Picture: Mario Tama/Getty Images/AFP

Lake is ahead of her Democrat rival, Katie Hobbs, 48.5 per cent to 45.7 per cent, according to the latest average of relevant state polls compiled by FiveThirtyEight, a gap that has been steadily growing.

PredictIt, an online betting agency, gives her an 84 per cent chance of winning, up from 50 per cent two months ago.

“I think we’ve done more events today than Katie Hobbs has done in the whole campaign,” says Lake, fresh from six events earlier that day, mocking her quietly spoken, reclusive opponent.

Hobbs, 52, the incumbent Arizona Secretary of State, has refused to debate Lake, saying she does not want to give her Republican opponent, who has refused to concede Trump lost the 2020 elections, a “platform”.

A more likely explanation is Hobbs fears being ripped to shreds.

“(Lake) believes in everything I believe in: securing our borders, secure elections, she cares about the immigration crisis and a better education for our kids,” supporter Rachel Truse told me, as the Rolling Stones’ Start Me Up and then Laura Branigan’s Gloria boomed in the background at the rally.

The half-dozen supporters I spoke to decried high inflation, the politicisation of the public school curriculum, excessive taxation and especially the scourge of fentanyl, a deadly narcotic streaming across the Mexican border into the US in ever larger quantities that has killed more than 71,000 Americans last year – up 25 per cent from the previous year.

“Maybe we can take that to the border on day one; I’m not a pilot but I’ll be happy to sit back,” Lake says, promising to “declare an invasion” if she wins.

Arizona, at the border with Mexico, has borne the brunt, along with Texas, of the extraordinary surge in illegal immigrants that has dominated US politics for more than a year.

US officials arrested 227,000 illegal migrants in September, a 11 per cent jump compared with August, bringing the annual total to 2.4 million, 37 per cent more than the year before.

“This is the best Republican midterm backdrop in decades,” Marson says. “Dems may have the money, but they don’t have the economy on their side,” he adds, referring to the Democrats’ traditional financial advantage. Inflation is Americans’ No.1 concern, according to polls leading into midterms. Phoenix, Arizona’s biggest city, with about 4.5 million people and geographically double the size of Greater Sydney, has endured 13 per cent inflation, the highest of any big American city.

It isn’t entirely a Republican love-in in the aircraft hangar. Software programmer Andy, 23, reluctant to share his full name, says he’s still on the fence about Lake. “We need lower taxes, and I like school choice, which is a big issue, but sowing distrust in the election is really dangerous,” he told me.

Lake’s refusal to concede Trump’s loss, and support for the former president whose future is under a cloud as multiple political and legal inquiries take their toll, has dogged her campaign, at least among mainstream media.

“She can’t; she’s stuck to him like glue, their brands are intertwined,” Marson says, dismissing my suggestion that Lake, who did not mention Trump once at the rally but name-checked Ronald Reagan twice, might be trying to pivot. “We’re the leading state in election deniers,” Marson says.

Lake and Trump at a rally in January. Picture: AFP

Lake has not conceded she will accept defeat, citing as evidence a plethora of unfounded claims the Arizona electoral system is not trustworthy. Indeed, only this week, Republicans claimed Democrats were intimidating voters.

To Lake’s credit, she does talk a lot about concrete policy proposals, even if most media only want her to deny, once again, over and over, the 2020 election result. Her platform includes abolishing the state’s rent and grocery taxes, which average 2.7 and 2.8 per cent, respectively.

“We’re funding students, not schools; you can pick their own school. If they teach garbage to our kids, we can take them out – that’s the fastest way to turn our schools around,” Lake says, referring to a revolutionary education policy just enacted in the state that has enraged public sector teachers unions.

Parents, even those who choose to homeschool their children, receive about $US7000 a year a child, which they can spend on whatever school or tutors they want. It could destroy, in time, the US public education system, which has come under repeated attack during the Covid-19 pandemic for keeping schools shut for more than a year.

National polls suggest Democrats’ key political messages – warnings about the risk to abortion rights and the spectre of “semi-fascism” if Trump-backed Republicans win – have not cut through to an electorate worried about bread-and-butter issues of inflation, crime and immigration.

“It’s all bullshit,” Bill Truse, Rachel Truse’s husband, tells me when I ask if he is worried about Lake’s refusal to concede that Trump lost the 2020 election.

“Dems have been denying elections for years; Hillary (Clinton) denied Trump beat her, that woman in Georgia, I don’t care about it,” he adds, referring to high-profile Democrat Stacey Abrams, who is running for governor in Georgia.

“What did Benjamin Franklin say at 81? You have a republic …” Lake says, as she wraps up her remarks, encouraging the crowd to finish the apparently famous quote. “If you can keep it,” the audience answers, suggesting her audience is more educated than it is typically given credit for.

Trump’s still extraordinary political power is in its winter. Lake, if she wins, will almost certainly supplant Trump in the Republican party: younger, more articulate, more compelling and more attractive. Australians won’t know much about Lake now, but they will after November 8, if the polls are prescient.

“It’s sad because Denver doesn’t have a chance, it’s hopeless in Colorado,” Foto tells me, walking back to her car after the rally, blaming migrating Californians for rendering the GOP irrelevant in her home state.

Maybe with Lake at the helm of the party, that might change.