WASHINGTON – The Associated Press declared Democratic Rubén Gallego The winner of Arizona’s U.S. Senate seat after voting updates Monday and over the weekend increased his statewide lead and closed all remaining paths to victory for Republican Kari Lake.

By the time the AP called the race at 11:49 p.m. ET, Gallego was leading Lake 50% of the vote to 48%, a margin of nearly 73,000 votes with about 95% of the total votes counted. To overtake Gallego, Lake would need to win about seven out of 10 of the 181,000 ballots remaining to be counted.

That was too high a hurdle for the Republican candidate to clear, given that most of the uncounted ballots came from Maricopa and Pima counties, where she received only about 46 percent and 38 percent of the vote. voice, respectively. In a major voting update Monday night, Lake received just 42 percent of the vote in Maricopa, far short of what she needed to stay on track and overtake Gallego.

The AP only declares a winner once it can determine that a trailing candidate cannot close the gap and overtake the poll leader.

Here’s a look at how the AP called this race:

CANDIDATES: Gallego (D) vs. Lake (R) vs. Eduardo Quintana (Green).

WINNER: Gallego

POLL CLOSING TIME: 9 p.m. ET on November 5. Arizona does not release votes until all precincts report or one hour after all polls close, whichever comes first, usually at 10 p.m. ET.

ABOUT THE RACE: Arizona Senate seat open after incumbent independent Kyrsten Sinema decided not to look a second term.

The contest pits Lake, a former local news anchor and 2022 gubernatorial candidate, against Gallego, a five-term U.S. Representative and Marine veteran.

The lake has become a darling of the populist right after leaving the presenter position and tried but struggled to redefine herself since losing in 2022. She never conceded his run for governorand she fought the outcome in court even after launching her Senate campaign.

Gallego largely represents Phoenix’s Latino areas and has run ads highlighting his military service and personal history over his progressive record in the House.

Arizona has been almost evenly split in statewide elections since 2016. Former President Donald Trump won the state with about 49% of the vote that year. He won in 2024 with about 51% of the vote at last count. But Democratic candidates for Senate, president and governor won in 2018, 2020 and 2022.

WHY AP CALLED THE RACE: In statewide elections going back a dozen years, Democrats have consistently carried four counties in both winning and losing campaigns: Apache, Coconino, Pima and Santa Cruz. Democrats who also won the more populous Maricopa County won their elections, while those who lost Maricopa also lost statewide.

Gallego had a wide lead over Lake in the four key Democratic counties and was also slightly ahead in Maricopa when the race was called, outperforming Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris by about 4 percentage points.

Lake would need to win about 69% of the remaining uncounted ballots to catch Gallego, but more than two-thirds of those ballots come from Maricopa and the four major Democratic counties, where she wasn’t winning near the 60% mark. Lake holds about 60% of the vote in the three Republican-leaning counties with significant numbers of uncounted ballots (Cochise, Yavapai and Yuma), but she would need to win the remaining votes in those counties by a much larger margin to be able to to make up for its lower vote shares in Maricopa and the four Democratic counties. The latest voting updates from the weekend showed she wasn’t meeting those goals in enough places to take the lead from Gallego.

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Learn more about how and why the AP declares US election winners at Explaining the 2024 election, an Associated Press series aimed at helping make sense of American democracy. The AP receives support from several private foundations to improve its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. Learn more about AP’s Democratic Initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.