Kari Lake appears to be following in Donald Trump’s footsteps—both figuratively and literally. Like Trump, she’s refusing to concede that she lost her election and is vowing to fight on, whatever that means. And so, even though votes are still being counted in her contest to be Arizona’s governor, she flew out to Florida to hunker down with Trump and his wealthy supporters at Mar-a-Lago on this week.
After the race was called in favor of Democrat Katie Hobbs late Monday, Lake posted a video to her Twitter account claiming her opponents had cheated to defeat her and assuring her followers that she and her legal team would fight it out in the courts, along with a video in which she used a Tom Petty song without permission (eliciting a legal threat from Petty’s estate). Then she flew out to Florida and repeated her claims, this time with Trump in the audience. To observers back in Arizona, it was clear that she is setting herself up to become Trump’s running mate in 2024.
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Lake claimed in the video that Democrats and the moderate Republicans who opposed her colluded to suppress the vote by creating brief ballot-machine malfunctions on Election Day in Maricopa County that forced “tens of thousands” to skip voting or fear that their votes weren’t counted.
The issues she referenced were a product of printing machines used by Maricopa County for Tuesday’s ballots that were too light for the scanners to read. As a result, roughly 17,000 ballots were not scanned at the precincts by vote tabulators there, but instead were placed in a separate box to be counted at more sophisticated machines at the county’s election headquarters. That collection box was referred to as “box three.” In the meantime, some polling stations—about 30% of them in the county—saw long lines develop in the morning.
“I talked to voters who waited in line for hours. One man told me he went to a location and there was a two-hour line because the tabulators weren’t working,” she said. “He drove 15 miles to another location and the printers weren’t working. He drove another 15 miles and was finally able to cast his vote but he’s not sure it counted.”
The video, in fact, didn’t even reference the election outcome—other than to say ““What happened to Arizonans on Election Day is unforgivable”—but focused on pushing these claims. “Rest assured I have assembled the best and brightest legal team, and we are exploring every avenue to correct the many wrongs that have been done this past week,” Lake said. “I’m doing everything in my power to right these wrongs.”
She concluded: “I promise you one thing: This fight to save our republic has just begun. I love you Arizona, and I love you America.”
Bill Gates, the Republican chair of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, blamed Lake’s cohort, state GOP Chair Kelli Ward, and other prominent Republicans for causing those delays and long lines because they told voters not to use “box three.”
“This team, we have accepted our responsibility in this,” Gates said Monday. “But I’m not willing to accept responsibility for issues that were caused by others. And it is clear to me that those lines were longer because leaders in one political party were spreading misinformation.”
Lake also tweeted out a video featuring footage from her campaign, set to the soundtrack of “I Won’t Back Down” by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (Petty died in 2017). Petty’s estate immediately and angrily objected:
The Tom Petty estate and our partners were shocked to find out that Tom’s song “I Won’t Back Down” was stolen and used without permission or a license to promote Kari Lake’s failed campaign.
This is illegal. We are exploring all of our legal options to stop this unauthorized use and to prohibit future misappropriations of Tom’s beloved anthem.
Lake has apparently been too preoccupied with getting closer to Trump’s camp, especially now that he has officially announced he is campaigning for the presidency. She flew out to Florida on Thursday to confer with him, and received a standing ovation when she entered a luncheon hosted at the club by the Trumpist America First Policy Institute.
At an evening Mar-a-Lago fundraiser, she repeated her story for that audience: “They had to do everything they could to stop us—ballot harvesting, they had to shut down machines on Election Day,” she said.
But we know their tricks. And they think they can slow and pour cold water on the movement. It is not possible, people. You cannot stop the American spirit. You cannot stop the Founding Fathers and the blood that we have, that we have inside of us. And so, I will fight what happened on Tuesday of, what was it, two weeks ago now? Where are we? Two weeks in? We vote for a month in Arizona and then count votes for two weeks. And look, it’s a joke. Our elections are a circus run by clowns.
According to The Washington Post, Lake has regular conversations with Trump. He reportedly called in to her Arizona “war room” on Sunday to voice his disbelief that she was behind in the race (Lake trailed from the start in the election count—mainly because the early vote went heavily in Hobbs’ favor after Lake urged her voters not to participate—and she never led at any time in the count).
At the Mar-a-Lago fundraiser, she made a transparent pitch to Trump, seated in the front row. She pointed at him and said:
I will tell you this right now. I don’t know what my future holds, other than that I’m going to continue to fight for this country. And I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure that this man gets back in the White House. We need him now more than ever.
As Arizona Republic columnist Laurie Roberts—who knows a thing or two about Lake—says, it’s true that Trump doesn’t like losers in his inner circle, but after the midterm debacle, he has fewer friends and even fewer likely candidates for a running mate. Roberts believes she’s setting herself up for the job:
And she checks all the right boxes for a vice presidential run:
- Embrace conspiracy theories about election fraud in 2020? Check.
- Embrace conspiracy theories about election fraud in 2022? Check.
- Attack the media? John McCain? The FBI? Check. Check. Check.
- Rail about a border “invasion” and a stolen election and masks and a stolen election and liberals and oh yeah, not one but two supposedly stolen elections? Cheeeeeeck.
She’s basically Trump in heels, a camera-ready candidate who could offer a shot of adrenaline to Trump and his flagging MAGA movement.
No doubt, Trump would prefer a white male running mate again. But Lake might turn out to be his best option. If so, we should prepare ourselves for another couple of years of Scary Kari.
