PHOENIX — Arizona starts its first day of early voting Wednesday and ends it with a pivotal moment in its battleground Senate race, as Republican Kari Lake and Democrat Ruben Gallego are set to face off in their first and only debate for the seat left open by retiring Sen. Kyrsten Sinema.
Like the presidential contest, the Senate race offers deep contrasts in a state that’s been divided neatly in half for years. And despite the uncertainty in the close race for the White House, both Senate candidates are more than happy to associate themselves with the top of their ticket.
Gallego, a veteran, son of immigrants and five-term member of the House, is challenging Lake, a pro-Trump former newscaster who narrowly lost the 2022 governor’s race to Democrat Katie Hobbs.
In an interview with NBC News after a Sunday night town hall with veterans in Scottsdale, Gallego said it helps sharing the ticket with someone like Vice President Kamala Harris rather than President Joe Biden, who dropped out of the race in July.
“It is, honestly, night and day, in terms of what I’m hearing from people,” Gallego said on how Harris is perceived compared to Biden.
“With all due respect to our president, this is a new level of politics and outreach that they haven’t seen before, and I think that’s extremely important for people to understand, especially in a place like Arizona, which is a very big swingy state,” Gallego added. “I think people that still haven’t made a decision are very open to her.”
Gallego endorsed Harris in the 2019 Democratic presidential primary when she was trying to garner support on the left, at a time when he was defining himself as a “true progressive voice” in Congress.
Now, he has tried to cultivate support within conservative circles, reaching out to people turned off by Lake’s — and Donald Trump’s — discourteous comments about Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican who died in 2018. Both have referred to McCain, a decorated veteran who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam and the 2008 GOP presidential nominee, as a “loser.”
In July, Gallego launched a “Republicans and Independents for Ruben” coalition, which featured former McCain staffers. Paul Hickman, a former state director for McCain, said he’s endorsing Gallego because “I know that his fellow combat veteran Ruben Gallego carries that same spirit of leadership” as McCain.
Asked to respond to her rhetoric during an interview in her campaign office on Tuesday, Lake attempted to flip the script on Democrats. “There truly are Marxist policies that are being pushed right now,” she said.
”They talk about a threat to democracy and they have a woman at the top of the ticket who didn’t receive a single vote. That’s a problem. Not one vote did Kamala Harris receive; that to me, seems like a real threat to democracy,” she added.
On the campaign trail, Lake has attacked Gallego personally — calling his Mexican American father, who has dealt drugs, “a Colombian drug trafficker” and suggesting that Gallego has kept his divorce records from his first wife redacted because he is “hiding something bad.”
“The reason we are doing this is because we are trying to protect our son,” Gallego said when pressed by NBC News on Sunday.
“We know that if she [Lake] gets any information about our son, she will release it,” he added, noting that he’s been endorsed by his ex-wife, Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego. The couple separated and divorced shortly before the birth of their son in 2017, and Gallego is now married to a Democratic lobbyist, with whom he has one child.
Lake has also blasted Gallego on his record, accusing him of voting for “open border” policies, alleging that he has “refused to compromise” and work across the aisle. Lake also called for additional resources for border patrol agents and construction of the border wall — but sidestepped questions about specific areas of compromise to pass legislation with Democrats.
Pressed about Republicans blocking a bipartisan deal at Trump’s urging that would have funded enhanced border security and tightened asylum restrictions, Lake shot back: “That’s not why I opposed it.”
“I looked at it and said, this is going to codify bad policy and make it harder for us to truly secure the border,” she added. “That bill was a — $115 billion, that was going to be sent overseas to kill people, disguised as a border bill … $115 billion to be sent to Ukraine.”
Lake was referring to the bipartisan foreign aid package passed by Congress that sent military aid and resources to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. After initially demanding border and foreign aid be tied together, congressional Republicans blocked attempts by Democrats to pass the border bill even on its own.
After several contentious exchanges on policy and consistent public polling showing her trailing Gallego and running behind Trump at the top of the ticket, Lake told NBC News that she would answer only one more question.
Given the opportunity on Tuesday to state that she and the former president both lost their most recent elections, Lake did not. She also would not say whether she will respect the outcome of this year’s election and vote to certify the presidential election results on Jan. 6, 2025, if elected to the Senate.
”If you were playing a soccer game and they said to the soccer team, ‘Before this election, will you agree with every single call the ref makes and agree with everything that happens in this game?’ nobody would say yes. We want to have a lawfully run election,” Lake said.
“If we have a lawfully run election? Absolutely,” she continued. “So let’s see. We hope we do.”
Arizona was ground zero for election denialism after the 2020 vote, and Trump and allies put forth a flurry of legal challenges and efforts to overturn Biden’s victory. Ultimately, all of the efforts were dismissed.
In 2022, Lake challenged her loss to Hobbs, taking it all the way through the Arizona legal system. A Maricopa County judge, appointed by a former Republican governor, threw out Lake’s lawsuit, finding that the court did not find clear and convincing evidence of widespread misconduct that she alleged had affected the result of her election. She appealed the ruling.
The daughter of a teacher and a nurse, Lake grew up in Iowa as one of nine siblings. She was a fixture in Arizona homes as an anchor for the Phoenix Fox station for 22 years.
Now, Lake routinely criticizes the press, saying Tuesday that the media is “lying” in order to elect her opponent.
“The media has done a horrible job of covering Ruben Gallego, and they’re lying about this, somehow, crossover vote,” Lake said — referring to voters who could split their ticket, voting for Trump and Gallego on the same ballot. “The polling is much like what we saw in 2016: polling that’s meant to move the voter into doing something.”
Public polls have consistently shown Lake trailing Gallego in the race, while Trump has had slim advantages within the margin of error in recent surveys of the presidential race. On Tuesday, AARP released a survey conducted by a team of bipartisan pollsters that showed Trump with 49% support to Harris’ 47% — while Gallego led Lake 51%-44%.
Lake, who has routinely claimed that independent polls and other institutions are not credible, on Tuesday called her internal polling “the real scoop” on the state of her race, saying that it shows her ahead of Gallego or tied. “I trust the good stuff, without any bias,” she said.
“It’s going to be a tight race,” Lake acknowledged. “I believe that Republicans, independents and Democrats are fed up with the direction this Democrat Party has pushed our country, and they are voting for us.”
Gallego, meanwhile, has tried to reinvent himself as a moderate candidate since launching his Senate campaign in January 2023, in an attempt to appeal to a broader swath of voters in the diverse state.
“I think No. 1, that’s a very D.C. perspective, that I’ve had this progressive record,” said Gallego, who was a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus until February.
In 2018, Gallego rallied alongside Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in Phoenix, saying facetiously: “President Trump is going to build a wall. It’s called the progressive wall — it’s all my brothers and sisters holding hands to stop Donald Trump.”
He recently began criticizing some of his party’s agenda, advocating for things like “a better economy” and fixing the “broken border,” which he blamed on the Biden administration and former presidential administrations.
In her campaign headquarters, a combative Lake brushed off the conservative-edged endorsements Gallego touts, claiming that the only reason the Phoenix Police Association, an organization that also endorsed Trump, threw their support behind Gallego is because they’re “worried about the DOJ taking over.”
In June, an investigation by the Justice Department found that the Phoenix Police Department had used excessive force and violated constitutional rights, particularly those of homeless people. The investigation also found that the department had discriminated against Black, Hispanic, and Native American people. Since then, the department has pressed Phoenix officials to sign a “consent decree,” which would effectively allow the federal government to reform the Phoenix police.
Just after receiving the endorsement, it was revealed that Gallego had written a letter to the DOJ urging them to drop the consent decree. Gallego defended that decision in an interview with NBC News last month, arguing a consent decree would be costly for the city of Phoenix.
“We can have police accountability, and we can actually have police safety for them and the community. But it doesn’t necessarily have to have a consent decree,” said Gallego. Asked if anyone from his campaign had been in contact with the Arizona Police Association about his letter to the DOJ, urging them to drop efforts on the consent decree, Gallego said no.
Lake took a different view. “Everyone who saw that realized it was a quid pro quo, like they needed help, and Ruben Gallego finally jumped in. He’s done nothing for police.”
She noted that she has “many of the great police endorsements” and that she’s “OK” without this one. She has backing from the four other major police organizations in the state.
Despite some recent moves to the center, Gallego does support gutting the filibuster to codify abortion protections into law, unlike Sinema, who bucked her party to uphold the 60-vote threshold in the upper chamber.
Arizona is one of 10 states where abortion is on the ballot this fall, with voters deciding whether to add a state constitutional amendment to legalize the right to the procedure through fetal viability, or about 24 weeks of pregnancy. (Abortions are currently legal until 15 weeks in Arizona unless a doctor determines there is a medical emergency.)
Lake maintains that she does not support a federal abortion ban, but she did at one point express discontent that the state’s 1864 abortion ban was not being enforced. Arizona legislators passed a bill repealing the old ban, which Hobbs signed as a compromise measure while criticizing the 15-week law that remained on the books.
“I think the 15-week abortion ban — not an abortion ban, but a 15-week abortion law that we have — is actually a good law,” Lake said Tuesday. “I believe that is the best policy. But women are going to decide, men are going to decide in this state, and as their U.S. senator, that will be the law, period.”
