‘Election Killer’ Kari Lake Is Running Against American Democracy

The Arizona Republic fka The Arizona Republican (still the mouthpiece of the Arizona Republican Party) is busy trying to normalize extremist MAGA/QAnon Republicans, and thus enabling their fascist destruction of American democracy by treating this election as if everything is fine, nothing to see here, same as it ever was. Llike this drivel from media critic Bill Goodykoontz, There’s no debate: CNN’s Dana Bash interviewing Katie Hobbs and Kari Lake was essential TV.

The Washington Post’s media critic, Eric Wemple, poses the correct question: “Why does an election denier get to appear as a regular candidate on CNN?” Election denier Kari Lake pleads with CNN: ‘Can we talk about issues?’ (excerpt):

In this case, Lake wanted to shrug off a series of questions from Bash about her campaign-trail election denialism. As she barnstorms across Arizona in her race against state Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, Lake declines to acknowledge Joe Biden as this country’s properly elected president and has said that she wouldn’t have certified the 2020 results in Arizona.

Now that is a campaign “issue” if ever there were one. And Bash gave it the prominence it deserves, in what counts as significant progress in the media’s handling of election deniers in televised interviews.

The difficulties in this pursuit have long been clear. After writing in April 2021 about the big TV networks allowing election deniers to opine on all kinds of issues before they were pressed on their role in subverting American democracy, we here at the Erik Wemple Blog hatched a proposal: Kick off the interview with election-denial questions, and if candidates don’t acknowledge their errors, end the segment without discussing any other “issues.”

[B]ecause democracy is the uber-issue. Without it, there’s not much point talking about inflation, immigration, abortion or the future of Parler. Put another way: 2020 may be allowed to die as an “issue” just as soon as election deniers concede the truth.

This “Wemple Rule,” let’s call it, should apply to any of the Citizens Clean Elections pseudo-debates on Arizona Horizon PBS by the way.

Dean Obeidallah writes at CNN, Kari Lake’s real opponent in Arizona’s governor’s race is democracy:

Some people have described Kari Lake as a “Donald Trump in heels” [or a dress.] And like the twice-impeached Republican President who endorsed her candidacy to be Arizona’s next governor, the election-denying Lake poses a threat to our democratic republic if she wins.

Lake is one of more than 200 GOP candidates across the country who have denied the legitimacy of President Joe Biden’s 2020 election win over Trump. But as FiveThirtyEight’s Kaleigh Rogers said recently, “(F)ew have made claims of fraud as central to their campaign as Lake.”

She’s in a league of her own, according to the political website, which wrote that “there are election deniers, and then there’s Kari Lake.”

Lake is running not so much for Arizona governor as against American democracy. Speaking to CNN on Sunday, she would not commit to accepting an election loss next month. Rather than calling politicians like her “election deniers,” she and others of her ilk — especially if they win in November — might well be called “democracy killers.” Her serial lies about the 2020 presidential election range in severity from merely kiss-ups to Trump at the most benign to bizarre recitations of dangerous nonsense.

GOP's Kari Lake is less running for governor of Arizona and more running against American democracy. It’s time people like Lake no longer be called “election deniers,” but instead what they truly could be if they win: “democracy KILLERS.” My new @CNN https://t.co/xljONsFPP3

— (((DeanObeidallah))) (@DeanObeidallah) October 17, 2022

On the campaign trail, Lake regularly claims that Biden’s 2020 election victory was “corrupt and stolen.” She scoffed about how Biden took the lead in swing states during the overnight vote count after Trump had led earlier, saying sarcastically: “It’s magic!” (Obviously, results change as votes are tallied, as the longtime former television anchor likely is well aware.)

Lake has promoted baseless conspiracy theories that software used by Dominion Voting Systems altered the election results. In August 2021, she doubled down on her unfounded assertion that Trump won Arizona and that official election results were “wildly inaccurate.”

During a June GOP primary debate, Lake declared without a shred of evidence that 34,000 ballots in Arizona “were counted two, three and four times” and, rather oddly, that 200,000 ballots were trafficked by “mules.” The upshot, she said disingenuously, was that Biden “lost the election and shouldn’t be in the White House.”

And in a precursor of what we might expect on election night, Lake claimed in the run-up to her August primary election that the vote was being rigged — again presenting no evidence.

“We’re already detecting some stealing going on,” she declared. A few hours before polls closed, she repeated the bogus claim of election fraud. After emerging victorious, Lake slightly modified her story, telling reporters: “We out-voted the fraud.”

Lake only supports election results she agrees with, and had she been governor in 2020, she has said that she would have refused to certify Biden’s victory. Lake is basically telling anyone who will listen that she is prepared to use the levers of government to overturn the will of the people.

Dangerously, Lake has also called for imprisoning her Democratic opponent Katie Hobbs — Arizona’s secretary of state — for unspecified alleged election offenses. It doesn’t matter that there’s no evidence that Hobbs has committed any crimes. Apparently standing up for democracy is crime enough for Lake.

Lake has also called for the imprisonment of journalists she claims have lied about the election. She opposes vaccine mandates, she has demonized drag queens and declared at a conservative summit that women are inherently inferior. “God did not create us to be equal to men,” she said.

Perhaps most alarming of all is that despite all of this, polls show Lake and her Democratic opponent Hobbs virtually tied, with three weeks remaining until Election Day.

The voters of Arizona have a clear choice between Hobbs, who fights for election integrity, and Lake, who will bludgeon democracy if given half a chance.

Greg Sargent adds at the Washington Post, Kari Lake’s sugarcoated Trumpism is scarier than the original:

It sounded very much like Trumpism. Appearing on CNN, Kari Lake defiantly refused on Sunday to accept the results of the Arizona gubernatorial election. She fearmongered about the southern border, insisting hordes of criminals are invading the country.

So this means Lake is imitating Donald Trump’s unabashed abandonment of democracy and his demagoguing of migrants as criminals, rapists and drug dealers, right?

Well, yes, but with a twist.

Lake might be finding a new way to move Trumpism forward in the post-Trump era. It replicates the venomous nature of his rhetoric while pretending to appeal to people’s better angels (something Trump ostentatiously avoided). In its cunning and deceptiveness, this version is scarier than the original rendition.

Let’s start with democracy. Pressed on whether she would accept the November election results, Lake refused to say, declaring: “I’m going to win the election, and I will accept that result.” (Lake also spewed nonsense about election fraud in 2020.)

But Lake recast her contempt for democracy in softer terms than Trump’s, saying that “people don’t trust our elections” and that she merely wants to “make sure our elections are safe and secure for Democrats, independents and Republicans alike.”

The state of Arizona recently passed a law requiring proof of citizenship to vote, which the Brennan Center for Justice called “one of the worst voter suppression laws in the nation.” That law was passed in the name of achieving “election integrity.” Mysteriously, however, Lake is still declaring with direct-to-camera sincerity that people continue to have good reason to doubt election outcomes, even to the point of justifying her refusal to commit to accepting a loss.

All this once again confirms that the “election integrity” goal is a pretext for voter suppression, but in Lake’s hands, it’s even worse. With other GOP gubernatorial nominees adopting a similar posture, it lays the groundwork for drawn-out contested election outcomes in 2022, in a bunch of mini versions of 2020, all delivered in sugarcoated packaging.

Civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill captured Lake’s CNN interview perfectly: “The soft focus lens, the closeness to the camera, the falsehoods and outrages offered with preternatural calm and sincerity, really chill me.”

With Lake edging ahead in polls, it’s unclear whether she will face any political penalty for her open suggestion that future election losses should and will be subject to nullification.

On immigration, in true Trumpist style, Lake suggested that as many as 1 million migrants “with criminal records” might have recently entered the country to roam free, and she linked migrants to fentanyl flowing across the border, even though the fentanyl trade is overwhelmingly an affair among U.S. citizens.

When CNN’s Dana Bash tried to fact-check Lake, she rolled right over it:

DANA BASH: DHS says less than 1 percent of migrants encountered at the border have a criminal record

KARI LAKE: I have to disagree with you on that figure … we have murders coming in, we have people with rape records

BASH: The stat that I just cited comes from DHS pic.twitter.com/7Rdq8jEgbw

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 16, 2022

But note this: When Lake was asked whether asylum seekers who “meet the criteria” should remain in the United States, she declined to answer. If Lake won’t say people who qualify for asylum merit it, that hints at support for rolling back the right to apply for it, which would be a radical break with U.S. laws and international human rights commitments.

Once again, Lake served her extreme position with creme brulee-style topping. She insisted we have a “very generous legal immigration system” but that “we can’t afford to take on the world’s problems.”

Lake is telling swing voters that in their hearts they are generous people. At the same time, she is appealing to people’s zero-sum instincts, seemingly entertaining a dramatic rollback of the asylum right while portraying migrants as (at best) uniformly subtracting from voters’ well-being or (at worst) a violent threat to their communities and lives.

In all this, Lake appears — to some degree, at least — to be moving Trumpism forward in a new way. Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia gubernatorial race as a Republican by keeping his appeals to the Trumpist base carefully disguised. By contrast, Blake Masters is running for Senate in Arizona by supercharging the Trumpist appeals with almost cartoonish debasement.

Lake is making similar gestures, while casting them as an effort to appeal to people’s better instincts. That’s a departure from Trump, whose innovation was to communicate to voters they should not be ashamed of their xenophobic, antidemocratic — even cruel and malevolent instincts — but should wear them proudly.

As The Post’s Ruby Cramer reported from the campaign trail, Lake has become a “phenomenon” among Trump voters by portraying Democratic election victories and immigration alike as dire, even existential threats, while using her skills as a former TV anchor [Fox News propagandist]  to make voters comfortable with her political and ideological presence.

If that works in a swing state that was thought to be trending Democratic, it will be sobering for democrats of both the small-d and large-D variety alike.