Above: Kari Lake campaigning in Phoenix with Steve Bannon, left, and Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA. Credit: Rebecca Noble for The New York Times.
The New York Times reports,In Arizona, Kari Lake’s next move is splitting factions of the G.Q.P.:
Kari Lake’s defeat in the governor’s race in Arizona has set off a high-stakes tug of war within the Republican Party, as Lake’s right-wing allies pushed her to mount a Trump-style challenge to the results, while some establishment leaders — including a former Republican governor — urged her to concede her loss and move on.
Lake’s next move could prove a turning point for her party and the far-right faction of election deniers that propelled her rapid rise this year. Lake stands as the last high-profile candidate in a class of strident promoters of 2020 conspiracy theories to lose her bid, and many of her followers view her race as a sort of last stand for a battered movement.
But, should she concede her defeat, it could be the latest evidence that Republicans are reading the midterm results, eyeing their political futures and heeding the advice of the establishment that has sought to return some normalcy to elections.
On Tuesday, Blake Masters, the Republican who lost his Senate race in Arizona, called to congratulate Sen. Mark Kelly, the Democratic incumbent. Adam Laxalt, the Republican Senate candidate in Nevada, also conceded his loss Tuesday, three days after the race was called for his opponent, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat.
.@bgmasters has conceded to @SenMarkKelly in Arizona's US Senate race https://t.co/SgW7qz7Vhm
— Jeremy Duda (@jeremyduda) November 15, 2022
“Kari Lake has lost the race in my opinion. There’s no way for her to have a pathway,” former Gov. Jan Brewer, a conservative Republican, said in an interview Tuesday. “If I was in that position, I probably would concede. Our democracy is so important to what our country and state stands for. We vote people in and we vote people out.”
Other establishment Republicans sent a similar signal Tuesday by congratulating Katie Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state, on her victory in the race. Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican who is term-limited, called Hobbs on Monday morning. Brewer said she was planning to call her later Tuesday.
It’s unclear what Lake’s legal challenge would look like. Election officials have said that despite scattered problems, there were no issues that prevented voters from casting ballots on Election Day.
Still, Lake has given no sign that she is preparing to concede. Her only public words so far have been to suggest, without evidence, that the vote was tainted. “Arizonans know BS when they see it,” she tweeted Monday night after The Associated Press called the race.
Arizonans know BS when they see it.
— Kari Lake (@KariLake) November 15, 2022
The Lake campaign is working in tandem with other Republican state campaigns to prepare a legal fight, according two people familiar with the planning who spoke on the condition of anonymity. [What, the My Pillow Guy, Mike Lindell, again? Enough with that fucking idiot.] The campaign and its allies have for days been collecting testimonials from voters that could be used in court.
Before the presidential campaign announcement Tuesday night by Donald Trump, Lake’s most important supporter, she appeared content to keep a low profile Tuesday — and keep people guessing — for at least another day. The adviser, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said Lake was fielding advice from across the gamut of Republican politics but, as she had done her entire campaign, she would ultimately keep her own counsel, as she was doing at home in Scottsdale with her tight circle of advisers.
Lake, a former Phoenix news anchor who Republicans saw as a breakout star this election season, lost to Hobbs by less than 1 percentage point. Online and in her campaign’s war room over the past few days, election-denying firebrands have been urging Lake to fight the results.
Their arguments hang largely on a printing problem that slowed the tabulation of scores of ballots in Maricopa County on Election Day and caused confusion at some polling places. Maricopa County officials, many of them Republicans, have said the issue did not deny anyone the opportunity to vote.
Trump appeared to be among those goading Lake to fight. On Sunday, he called her and falsely suggested Democrats were trying to steal her victory as they had his in 2020, according to a person familiar with the conversation. On social media, he wrote, “They just took the election away from Kari Lake.”
Trump went silent on the matter Tuesday before he announced his bid for president.
Lake’s other election-denying allies — some who were involved in efforts to overturn Trump’s loss in 2020 — continued a drumbeat. [Convicted felon and Coup Plotter] Steve Bannon, the radio podcast host who advised Trump on the effort to overturn the 2020 election results and stumped for Lake and other top Republicans in Arizona, and his guests called on election officials not to certify the results. Right-wing election denial influencer Seth Keshel said on Truth Social, Trump’s social media platform, that Lake, who he said he knows, “won’t be conceding a damn thing,” and [Convicted felon and Coup Plotter] Michael Flynn, Trump’s fired national security adviser, demanded a hand count of the results.
“Spent hours last night working with Lake team on a continuing war for Arizona,” tweeted Floyd Brown, founder of the right-wing publication The Western Journal. Brown is the operative behind the notoriously racist Willie Horton ads during the 1988 presidential campaign and conspiracy theories of the Clinton and Obama eras. “She will not go quietly into the night. She intends to stand and fight.”
Officials in Maricopa County, home to more than half of the state’s voters, said the problems at the polls on Election Day affected ballot tabulation machines in about 70 of the county’s 223 voting centers. They blamed printers that were not making dark enough markings on the ballots. Voters who experienced problems, however, were told to drop their ballots in a secure box, so that they could be tabulated later.
Republicans intervened on Election Day, seeking to extend voting hours. Their request was denied by Judge Timothy J. Ryan of Maricopa County Superior Court, who said parties had not presented evidence that voters were denied the opportunity to vote. The judge agreed to keep the case open, but on Tuesday, Republicans dropped the case.
Republican groups have been collecting stories of voters who witnessed the technical problems at the polls, setting up an online form and email address for voters to submit their accounts. Brown and others associated with The Western Journal also have been publicizing such stories, often in videos being spread on social media.
The affidavits could become fodder for lawsuits claiming the election was troubled.
In 2020, many of the lawsuits trying to overturn the presidential election on behalf of Trump similarly relied — in that case unsuccessfully — on the collection of witness accounts from the polling places making various unfounded or inconclusive accusations.
https://twitter.com/marceelias/status/1540084190548574214
But some establishment Republicans pointed out a case could be difficult to argue when the party had notched other victories: Kimberly Yee, Arizona’s Republican state treasurer, accrued the most votes of any candidate in a contested race. Republicans also won two House seats on Monday that edged them closer to control of the House.
Another factor weighing on Lake’s decision is the race for attorney general. The Republican candidate, Abraham Hamadeh, was trailing his Democratic opponent, Kris Mayes, by around 2,000 votes — well within the 0.5% margin that triggers an automatic recount. Republican campaigns were still working on locating and contacting supporters whose ballots may need to be “cured” of errors before they can be counted.
Some in Lake’s campaign were holding out hope the margin could drop and force a recount, according to an adviser with the campaign.
Turning Point USA, a group whose leaders have been promoting Lake’s campaign, has sent out conflicting messages about what comes next. On his live podcast Monday, Charlie Kirk, the group’s leader, went from expressing optimism about Lake’s chances of winning to shock at her dismal performance. His guest, Wendy Rogers, a state lawmaker who was censured by the state Senate after giving a speech at a white nationalist gathering, seemed introspective: “We wonder now if we were in echo chamber. I don’t know. I’m just beginning to get some perspective.”
A bigger bunch of losers than Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, Charlie Kirk and Wendy Rogers is hard to imagine. This nation needs to rid itself of such losers if it ever wants to return to normalcy.
Discover more from Blog for Arizona
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
AZ Right Wing Watch tweets, https://twitter.com/NicoleSGrigg/status/1593030137456791552?cxt=HHwWgMDUuYieypssAAAA
Maricopa County, AZ Board of Supervisors were called on to resign, nullify the election, use paper ballots & more
Here’s a quick 2:20 video compilation I did of the 1st public meeting post Election Day
This went on for over an hour, so did a quick montage of public comment
“Trump Gang Scrambling to File Suit Denying Kari Lake’s Arizona Defeat”, https://www.laprogressive.com/election-reform-campaigns/kari-lake-arizona-defeat
Diehard Trump Republicans inside and outside of Arizona who cannot fathom that Kari Lake is projected to lose Arizona’s 2022 governor’s race are frantically trying to assemble a lawsuit to block the certification of the victory by Katie Hobbs, a Democrat and Arizona’s current secretary of state.
“We need 3-5 Attorneys. Please call any you think might be interested and see if they are willing to support the cause without the retainers,” said the top item on a Tuesday email sent by the Gila County Election Integrity Team. “The suit will be prepared by experienced legal writers.”
“We need to reach and recruit voters or candidates in other counties to become plaintiffs and get them up to speed,” it continued. “Who can help? Please shake the trees.”
[B]efore Monday’s media projection of her loss, Lake had been telling nationally known 2020 election deniers – such as True the Vote’s Catherine Engelbrecht – that she planned to fight any outcome but a gubernatorial victory.
In her podcast last Friday, Englebrecht said that she had spoken to Lake and was inspired by Lake’s determination to keep fighting – unlike other Trump-endorsed candidates in Arizona who had conceded.
“It’s one of the reasons we came to Arizona because Kari Lake is not quitting in the face of such uncertainty,” said Englebrecht, who, with Gregg Phillips, a fellow conspiracy theorist at True the Vote, had been jailed for contempt of court on Halloween in an unrelated defamation case where they had accused an election vendor of giving China access to voter data.
“Tuesday’s election… didn’t go quite like many felt that it would,” Englebrecht said. “But I submit to you it was sort of the same song, second verse. The things that go wrong on Election Day, and went wrong in 2020, went wrong in 2022. Like [voting] machines going out, not enough paper [ballots], bad chain of custody [of ballots], the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, elections taking far too long to resolve… what we want to avoid is becoming the new normal.”
Phillips said that he and Englebrecht, whose voter fraud fabrications were featured in the misinformation-laced film about the 2020 presidential election by Dinesh D’Souza, 2000 Mules, said the goal was stopping Maricopa County’s certification of the victories by Hobbs and other Democrats in top statewide races. (Phillips, Englebrecht and D’Souza have been sued for defamation for the film by voters who were falsely accused onscreen of illegally casting absentee ballots.)
“Our view of it is that you always have to stop the certification,” Phillips said. “Once the certification happens, pretty much the cat’s out of the bag; it’s hard to put the genie back in the bottle and everything goes wrong. But we have really learned some interesting things here because of this delay [in counting].”
Phillips said the county’s use of an Arizona-based ballot printing and election technology, Runbeck Election Services, to pre-process mailed out ballots – to vet the authenticity of voters’ signatures on the ballot return envelopes – opened up several avenues to argue that Maricopa County did not follow state law.
“We can now define them inside certain large buckets,” he said. “Like chain of custody issues [transporting ballots securely, and] issues that they have in compliance with the law relative to signature verification.”
On Monday’s edition of the J.D. Rucker Show on Rumble.com, a pro-Trump online platform, New Jersey attorney Leo Donofrio outlined another line of legal attack. He focused on the response by Maricopa County to the intermittent breakdown of ballot printers in 30 percent of its 223 voting centers on Election Day.
[T]he “Gila County Election Integrity Team” said they would be meeting on Wednesday and communicating via a group chat on Telegram, another social media site. It urged insiders to reach out to Andy Gould, a state appeals county judge, “to seek behind the scenes support,” and Mick McGuire, a retired general who ran unsuccessfully for the 2022 GOP nomination for U.S. Senate, to see “if he can help also with statewide supporters who would be plaintiffs, or perhaps he would, [as] he is high profile and well liked.”
Throughout the vote counting process and Lake’s attacks on election officials, Hobbs rejected the charges and urged Arizona to be patient.
“Despite what my election-denying opponent is trying to spin, the pattern and cadence of incoming votes are exactly what we expected,” Hobbs said Friday. “In fact, they mirror what [political trends] our state has seen in recent elections. We must remain patient and let our election officials do their jobs.”