Kari Lake announces run for Arizona Senate seat

Kari Lake announced her Senate bid Tuesday, entering the race for Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s (I-Ariz.) seat as the heavy favorite for the GOP nomination.

Lake, an ally of former President Trump who has denied her loss in last year’s Arizona governor’s race, will face off against Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb in the Republican primary. Last week, Lake filed paperwork to run in the critical swing state.

“I’m really tired of watching our politicians retreat from every single important battle. They’re cowards,” she told supporters Tuesday evening, vowing to be the most “pro-America senator in the entire country.”

“That’s how we got into the mess we’re in right now, because they have surrendered far too many hills. We are on — we’re on the final hill right now, and I’m not surrendering this hill,” she said.

Trump immediately endorsed Lake in the GOP primary in a video posted on his Truth Social platform.

“When I’m back in the White House, I need strong fighters like Kari in the Senate,” he said in a more than two-minute video. 

Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) is running on the Democratic side, while Sinema has stayed mum on any campaign plans. NBC News reported last month that her political team had been sharing a prospectus aimed at showing what her pathway to reelection would look like among Democrats, Republicans and independents. 

Gallego pointed to Lake’s failed GOP gubernatorial bid in a statement after Lake’s announcement and said he was tackling “the very real problems that impact Arizona families.”

“Arizonans know exactly who Kari Lake is — and that’s why they rejected her the first time around. While she runs her same, tired playbook of undermining our democracy and pushing to ban abortion, I’m focused on addressing the very real problems that impact Arizona families, like creating good-paying jobs, securing our water future, and taking care of our veterans,” he said.

Should Sinema run again, it would set up a high-stakes, three-way race for a seat that both Republicans and Democrats see as key to determining the partisan balance of the Senate next cycle. 

Polling from Noble Predictive Insights, which looked at a three-way race between Gallego, Sinema and Lake, and separate polling from Emerson College Polling, which looked at a three-way race between Gallego, Sinema and Lamb, suggested Gallego would place first in both match-ups. However, 15 percent of respondents in both polls said they were undecided. 

“Lake’s campaign announcement is Senate Republicans’ worst nightmare. She has dangerous views and harmful policies: an abortion ban without exceptions, ending Medicare and Social Security, and fringe conspiracies that are far out of step with normal Arizonans. Even Republicans didn’t want Lake to run because voters rejected her before, and they’ll do so again in 2024,”  said Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate Democrats’ campaign arm, in a statement upon Lake’s announcement.