Katie Hobbs, Who Defied Trump in Arizona, Tops Kari Lake for Governor

[maestrob]

Ms. Hobbs, Arizona’s secretary of state, narrowly defeated Ms. Lake, a former newscaster whose campaign was built on lies about the 2020 election.


By Jazmine Ulloa
Nov. 14, 2022

PHOENIX — Katie Hobbs, who as Arizona’s secretary of state stood up to efforts by allies of former President Donald J. Trump to overturn the 2020 election, has clinched a victory in the state’s race for governor, according to The Associated Press.

Ms. Hobbs, a Democrat, narrowly defeated Kari Lake, a right-wing former newscaster who was talked about as a future leader in a Trump-dominated Republican Party, in a bitter and closely watched race that became a final test of whether candidates molded in Mr. Trump’s image could win in battlegrounds. Ms. Lake, one of the most prominent purveyors of Mr. Trump’s lies about his 2020 election, followed several other election-denying candidates in defeat.

In a statement on her win, Ms. Hobbs reached out to voters who did not support her. “I will work just as hard for you — because even in this moment of division, I believe there is so much more that connects us.”

After the race was called on Monday night, Ms. Lake did not concede defeat, instead suggesting, without citing evidence, that the vote was marred. “Arizonans know BS when they see it,” she tweeted.

The contest was a study in contrasts of both style and substance, but the stakes for American elections and democracy were evident from the first.

Ms. Lake was a magnetic performer who began her campaign echoing Mr. Trump’s baseless claims that the 2020 election had been “crooked” and “corrupt.” She borrowed and sharpened Mr. Trump’s tactic of using the news media as a foil, routinely videotaping her interviewers or denigrating their news organizations. She taunted Ms. Hobbs as a “coward” and ridiculed her as “chicken” through the contest’s final days for refusing to debate her onstage.

She disparaged the late Senator John McCain, who championed a maverick brand of Republicanism, as a “loser” — again echoing Mr. Trump — and claimed that she and her followers had driven “a stake in the heart of the McCain machine.”

Voters rejected election deniers. Every 2020 election denier who sought to become the top election official in a critical battleground state lost at the polls this year. Voters roundly rejected extreme partisans who promised to restrict voting and overhaul the electoral process.

Ticket-splitters made a comeback. While ticket-splitting has declined substantially in recent elections, some voters seemed more inclined to support candidates of different parties this year, emphasizing candidate quality over partisan identity.

Ms. Hobbs, a mild-mannered elected official, rose to national prominence when she stood steadfast against efforts by Trump loyalists to overturn the vote in 2020. On the stump, she often pointed to her refusal to give in to the “insurrectionists” — protesters who at one point surrounded her home — as a sign that she was “battle tested.”

Ms. Hobbs often sought to stay out of the spotlight, and held fast to her decision not to debate Ms. Lake, saying she did not want to give a platform to an election denier and her lies. But even some of Ms. Hobbs’s own voters and allies expressed concerns that she was evasive and awkward in the limelight.

In the final stretch of the race, Ms. Hobbs continually reminded voters of the larger issues at play, underscoring Ms. Lake’s staunch position against abortion and casting her own candidacy as essential to protect the future of elections. She told voters that supporting her amounted to choosing “sanity over chaos.”

For her part, Ms. Lake attacked the news media and campaigned on culture-war issues, barnstorming the state with the other three top Republicans on the ticket and with right-wing supporters, including Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser, and Senators Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Josh Hawley of Missouri.

At a campaign rally just days before the election, Ms. Lake invited Wendy Rogers, a state lawmaker, on to the stage. Ms. Rogers was censured by the State Senate after giving a speech at a far-right conference with ties to white supremacy. Referring to Ms. Rogers, Ms. Lake said she would never back away from “fighters who love this state.”

In the end, it was Ms. Lake who struggled to defeat Ms. Hobbs.

Ms. Hobbs finished with a substantial lead Tuesday night, and Ms. Lake failed to overtake her by Wednesday as her campaign and many Republican strategists had anticipated. Over the next few days, Ms. Lake escalated tensions as officials in Maricopa County, which encompasses Phoenix and is the state’s most populous and politically powerful county, tallied votes, including a record-breaking 290,000 ballots that were dropped off on Election Day.

She and other top Republican candidates made baseless suggestions that election officials were incompetent and hinted at malfeasance. As her path to victory only narrowed, Ms. Lake turned to considering whether to accept defeat, huddling with advisers through the weekend and getting advice from Mr. Trump, who falsely suggested Democrats were trying to steal her victory as they had his in 2020, according to a person familiar with Mr. Trump’s call to the candidate on Sunday.

On his Telegram channel and his social network, Truth Social, on Monday, Mr. Trump appeared to push forward with the theory: “Wow! They just took the election away from Kari Lake. It’s really bad out there!”

The Republican Party of Arizona and other right-wing allies have been preparing for the possibility of a lawsuit, collecting testimonials from voters who claim they had problems at the polls on Tuesday, most related to a printing problem that temporarily prevented tabulators from counting ballots. Republican election officials in Maricopa County have rejected any accusations of fraud or foul play and urged Ms. Lake to tone down her comments, insisting that the long process would ensure accuracy and that the election system was fair.

Ms. Lake lost by about 0.8 percentage points in a year in which high inflation, President Biden’s low approval numbers and historical trends favored Republicans. By contrast, Gov. Doug Ducey, who is term-limited as governor, trounced his Democratic opponent by more than 14 percentage points in the 2018 midterm elections, when the national environment gave Democrats the edge. If Ms. Hobbs’s lead shrinks to 0.5 percent or less of the total votes cast, it would prompt an automatic recount based on a new Arizona law.

The outcome of this year’s race for governor carried serious potential implications for the 2024 presidential race.

Arizona’s governor is empowered to give final approval to the certification of the winner of the presidential election there, as well as to the selection of Arizona’s slates of presidential electors. The governor could also be either an ally or an adversary of right-wing Republican legislators who have already sought to give themselves the right to decertify the 2020 election and to appoint their own presidential electors.

Arizona has been at the center of conspiracy theories about the 2020 election since Mr. Biden won the state by more than 10,000 votes. All four of Arizona’s top Republican nominees on the statewide ballot, including Ms. Lake, ran in the mold of Mr. Trump and advanced his false claims of widespread election fraud.

Former President Barack Obama, who stumped with Ms. Hobbs, and other top Democrats framed the midterm elections in Arizona as a battle to preserve American democracy.

Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, vowed to do all she could to keep Ms. Lake out of office, and her leadership PAC invested $500,000 in a television ad urging Arizona voters to reject Ms. Lake and Mark Finchem, the party’s nominee for secretary of state, and their election denialism. Mr. Finchem was defeated by Adrian Fontes, a Democrat and former Maricopa County recorder, making him one of several election deniers who were running to take over elections who lost at the polls.

Ms. Hobbs will be the first Democratic governor to serve the state since Janet Napolitano resigned in early 2009 after her confirmation as homeland security secretary during the Obama administration. This wasn’t Ms. Hobbs’s first tight race. When she was elected secretary of state in 2018, she won by less than one percentage point.

Both Ms. Hobbs and Ms. Lake emphasized their work ethic and humble roots. Ms. Hobbs, who was born and raised in Arizona, came from a middle-class family that she said knew “the value of a dollar” and sometimes relied on food stamps. She went on to become a social worker and later served in the Arizona House of Representatives and the Arizona Senate as minority leader.

Ms. Lake, the youngest of nine children raised in eastern Iowa, said she worked as a janitor to pay her way through college. She became a journalist and spent more than two decades as a news anchor for a Fox affiliate in Phoenix.

Former friends and colleagues of Ms. Lake described her as a liberal and a Buddhist who had a close circle of gay friends before she entered politics. But as she ran for office, she refashioned herself as a Christian conservative, among other things by assailing drag performers as bad influences on children.

In late October, Ms. Lake tweeted an open letter thanking Ms. Cheney for the television ad, claiming it was having an impact opposite to its intended effect, boosting her campaign donations and website traffic. It was an allegation she liked to repeat on the stump.

On Monday, just before The Associated Press called Ms. Lake’s defeat, Ms. Cheney responded: “You’re welcome, @KariLake.”

Maggie Haberman and Alexandra Berzon contributed reporting.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/14/us/p ... ernor.html

[Rach3]

Educated voters rejected MAGA.Unfortunately, there are not enough of them as 2016 proved, as did Ohio, Florida,NY,Indiana,Wisconsin,Texas,others in 2022.

Interesting analysis of Arizona suburbs:

https://wapo.st/3AGdVn6