Democrat Katie Hobbs Defeats Election Denier Kari Lake For Arizona Governor

Topline

Democratic Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs has defeated hard-right Republican election denier Kari Lake in the Arizona governor’s race, delivering Democrats a major swing state win by knocking off one of former President Donald Trump’s most hyped candidates.

Katie Hobbs and Kari Lake.

Olivier Touron/AFP/Getty Images; Brandon Bell/Getty Images

Key Facts

Hobbs held a lead with 50.41% of the vote, followed by Lake at 49.59%.

Hobbs leads 51.3%-48.7% in Maricopa County, which contains Phoenix and most of its suburbs and serves as Arizona’s largest population center, and she holds a strong 60.6%-39.4% lead in Pima County, the state’s second-most populous county and home to Tucson.

The race remained too close to call for almost a week following Election Day, but county officials have tallied hundreds of thousands of additional ballots in recent days.

The governor’s seat was open since Republican incumbent Doug Ducey was term-limited—he endorsed Lake.

The contest was the first Arizona gubernatorial election to feature two women as the major party nominees.

Surprising Fact

Hobbs’ victory caps off a string of wins this year for Democrats in Arizona. Sen. Mark Kelly (D) won reelection, defeating Republican Blake Masters, and Democrat Adrian Fontes won the race to replace Hobbs as secretary of state, overcoming Republican Mark Finchem. The race for state attorney general remains closely divided, with Democrat Kris Mayes holding a narrow lead over Republican Abraham Hamadeh. Arizona has rapidly turned into a swing state in recent years, with Kelly and President Joe Biden winning in 2020 and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D) winning in 2018, a dramatic shift for a once-reliably conservative state that reelected Sen. John McCain (R) by a 24-point margin just 12 years ago.

What We Don’t Know

How Lake will respond—and whether she will concede to Hobbs. As county officials tallied votes over the last week, Lake’s campaign expressed some measure of confidence she would pull ahead of Hobbs, even as her odds narrowed. Lake has also questioned election officials and implied that conservative ballots were deliberately being counted late.

Key Background

Lake was widely seen as one the leaders of a slate of Trump-endorsed candidates who backed his false claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election, along with the likes of Pennsylvania governor candidate Doug Mastriano and Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance. Unlike other GOP candidates, who focused on attacking Democrats on more traditional issues like the economy and public safety, Lake embraced a push for “election integrity,” making Trump’s false fraud claims a front-and-center issue for her campaign. The conspiracy theories driving Lake’s candidacy made attacking Hobbs easy fodder, since she oversaw Arizona’s 2020 election in her role as secretary of state. President Joe Biden carried Arizona by just over 10,000 votes, or about 0.3 percentage points, making him the first Democratic presidential nominee to carry the state since Bill Clinton in 1996. Trump was infuriated by the loss and he pushed Arizona Republicans to investigate a series of conspiracy theories he thought explained his defeat, which culminated in a multi-million dollar, nearly five-month-long election audit that concluded Biden likely won by an even larger margin than what was reported.

Chief Critic

Lake was a frequent target of critical op-eds that appeared in the state’s largest newspaper, the Arizona Republic, which slammed her for statements like calling former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon a “modern-day George Washington” after he was convicted for contempt of Congress. Her recent move to mock the attack on Paul Pelosi and her decision to run a campaign ad featuring a homophobic preacher who believes Islam is “satanic” and that women should serve in “submission” to men also drew condemnation from columnists. Lake, who worked for 22 years as a news anchor in Phoenix, brushed off the newspaper this week as a “leftist rag,” adding, “they’ve been out to get me since day one.”

Contra

Many Democrats expressed frustration with Hobbs late in the campaign, with many questioning her decision to not debate Lake and arguing she should have been more active on the campaign trail. Hobbs campaign manager Nicole DeMont pushed back, telling allies in a reported email: “The Hobbs campaign couldn’t care less what the chattering class in New York and Washington DC thinks about their message and strategy.” Hobbs also faced bipartisan calls late in the campaign to recuse herself from her role as the certifier of the state’s election results, which is part of the secretary of state’s job. She refused.