close
close

Apre-salomemanzo

Breaking: Beyond Headlines!

    • Arizona U.S. Senate race remains tight with few changes
    aecifo

    Arizona U.S. Senate race remains tight with few changes

    Umito Posted on

    A significant number of votes in Maricopa County Wednesday night did little to change the status of Arizona’s U.S. Senate race, with Democrat Ruben Gallego maintaining a lead over Republican Kari Lake that remained largely unchanged.

    The latest unofficial results from the state’s population center slightly increased his lead, which Lake cut in half overnight.

    There are still hundreds of thousands of ballots to be counted in Maricopa County alone. With Republicans showing far greater strength across the country than many pollsters expected, Gallego’s revised lead appeared fragile.

    2024 election: View Arizona election results | Live Election Day coverage

    On Wednesday, Gallego took to social media to say he hopes to maintain his lead.

    “We are closely monitoring the results and are very optimistic,” he said in a tweet earlier today.

    In her own posts, Lake urged her supporters to correct their provisional ballots in a race she hopes will remain close.

    “This race will be played out until the end! We need ALL HANDS ON DECK to care for ballots and ensure every Arizonan’s vote counts,” she said.

    Public polling of the race showed that in the final weeks of the campaign, Lake, a former Fox 10 anchor, had narrowed Gallego’s long-standing lead in the race to replace retiring U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz. He maintained a 3 percentage point lead in the polls into the final week.

    Democrats have already lost control of the Senate and incumbent Democrats were still engaged in tight races in Nevada and Pennsylvania as of Wednesday evening. In this election, many more votes have already been counted than in Arizona.

    Gallego, a five-term congressman, hopes to become the state’s first Latino elected to the position and only on the 13th nationally if he wins. Lake could become the first Republican woman elected to the Arizona Senate.

    If she wins, Lake will do so without any help from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. He and his allies treated Lake as an electoral afterthought and never invested in the race.

    Whoever wins the vote will succeed Sinema, who won the seat in 2018 as a Democrat, ending a 30-year electoral drought for that party.

    Gallego leads in 79 of 87 publicly available polls Since Sinema left the race in March, Lake has reduced her lead by several percentage points in the final weeks of the race.

    Green Party candidate Eduardo Quintana comes a distant third.

    Sinema left the Democratic Party in December 2022 and her fundraising dried up soon after, but for more than a year she remained coy about her re-election plans. That left open the unprecedented possibility of a three-way race involving an incumbent president who was not a member of a major party.

    Sinema fell to third place in public polls before officially leaving the race in March.

    Weeks after Sinema left the Democrats, Gallego officially joined the race and never faced an opponent for the nomination.

    He left the liberal Congressional Progressive Caucus and changed its rhetoric on border issues.

    Gallego acknowledged that Arizona cities are “on the front lines of this border crisis.” It was a much different tone than the one he used in Congress in 2017 when he wrote: “Trump’s border wall is trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. »

    In contrast, Lake’s path to the GOP nomination was more rocky.

    After his narrow defeat in the 2022 gubernatorial race, Lake continued to push to overturn the election in court. This did not happen, but it allowed Lake to remain in the public eye with a view increasingly out of step with public opinion.

    She was quickly considered likely to run for Senate, but did not officially enter the race until October 2023. Six months earlier, Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb entered the race but struggled to raise funds with a head start.

    Lake chimed in with a video endorsement of former President Donald Trump, setting the tone for a race modeled on his agenda.

    Above all, this meant that border security and completing Trump’s border wall were the country’s top priority. She blamed illegal immigrants for inflation, Arizona’s housing shortage and crime everywhere.

    She quickly consolidated the support of many Republicans already in the Senate, with the notable exception of McConnell.

    McConnell continued to cite concerns about “candidate quality” in several 2024 Senate races and political action committees aligned with him never invested in those contests, including Lake’s candidacy.

    This was not the only turbulence that affected his party.

    In January, Lake ousted the chairman of the Arizona Republican Party after leaking a secretly recorded conversation ten months earlier. Jeff DeWit told Lake there are “very powerful people who want to keep you out” of the Senate race and urged her to name her price for staying out of the race.

    She rejected his offer and the recording surfaced just before the party’s annual meeting. Republican operatives said the leaked recording alerted those who were suspicious of Lake.

    At a candidate forum in May, Lake called Lamb “a total coward when it comes to election integrity,” an affront that led nine of the state’s 14 other sheriffs to condemn his comments. Lamb threw his support behind Lake after she lost the July primary and appeared on stage with her at least once.

    But other prominent Arizona Republicans have been lukewarm in their support for Lake.

    Former Arizona Governor Doug Ducey endorsed her after she won the primary, but did not make high-profile appearances with her. Karrin Taylor Robson, Lake’s closest Republican rival in 2022, also followed this pattern.

    And when Lake tried to suggest she was just joking when she disparaged the late U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., in a series of 2022 comments, her daughter Meghan McCain made it clear that was not not funny and that the feud with the McCains, even moderate Republicans in general, continued.

    Gallego, meanwhile, used his time and millions to define himself for months on screens across the state. He portrayed himself as emerging from poverty in Chicago, reaching Harvard University and fighting for his country as a Marine in Iraq. Now, Gallego often said, he promised to “fight” for Arizona workers in Washington.

    At the same time, her Democratic allies reminded viewers that Lake supported an 1864 territorial law banning abortion in almost all circumstances. The issue took on new importance after the Arizona Supreme Court upheld the law in April.

    Lake found himself torn between recognizing that 19th-century law is “not where the people are” and maintaining her personal opposition to a procedure she likens to “executing a baby in its mother’s womb.”

    Lake lacked the resources to systematically refute the attacks, but she found her place in the October debate.

    She aggressively pressed Gallego on his voting record in Congress, saying he was more concerned about the names of those crossing the border illegally than taking action.

    Gallego countered that he supports the bipartisan border security bill that Sinema helped negotiate and Trump helped sink. Lake called the bill “300 pages of pure garbage,” before tossing it into a trash can placed near his podium.

    In the final weeks of the campaign, Gallego and his ex-wife, Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego, lost a court battle to keep their 2016 divorce filing sealed longer. Lake presented the release of the dossier as a bomb waiting to happen, even though Kate Gallego had long supported him for the Senate.

    But the filing largely confirmed what was known and reported at the time: Ruben Gallego left his wife weeks before she gave birth to their son.

    This story will be updated as election results are announced.

    Umito
    View all posts

    You Might Also Like