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    • Ruben Gallego’s lead over Kari Lake is narrowing in the US Senate race
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    Ruben Gallego’s lead over Kari Lake is narrowing in the US Senate race

    Online Niel Posted on

    Democrat Ruben Gallego held a much smaller lead over Republican Kari Lake Wednesday morning in Arizona’s U.S. Senate race as the state’s ballot results continued to redden amid a national surge for the GOP.

    Unofficial results showed Gallego’s early lead cut in about half, with about 40 percent of the vote still to be counted. With Republicans showing far greater strength across the country than many pollsters expected, Gallego’s revised lead looked fragile.

    Publicly available polls in the race showed Lake, a former Fox 10 news anchor, cutting into Gallego’s long-held lead in the race to replace retiring U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., in the final weeks of the campaign. He maintained a 3 percentage point lead in the polls over the past week.

    Democrats have already lost control of the Senate, and incumbent Democrats were still locked in tight races in Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin Wednesday morning. In those contests, more votes have already been counted than in Arizona.

    Gallego, a five-term member of Congress, hopes to become the first Latino elected to the position and only the 13th nationally if they win.

    Lake could become the first Republican woman elected to the Senate from Arizona.

    If he wins, Lake would do so without any help from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. He and his allies treated Lake as an electoral afterthought and never invested in the race.

    Whoever wins succeeds Sinema, who won the seat in 2018 as a Democrat, breaking a 30-year electoral drought for that party.

    Gallego led in 79 of 87 publicly available polls since Sinema dropped out of the race in March, but Lake has cut his lead by a few percentage points in the final weeks of the race.

    Green Party candidate Eduardo Quintana was a distant third.

    Election 2024: See Arizona election results | Live election day coverage

    Sinema left the Democratic Party in December 2022 and her fundraising stopped soon after, but for more than a year she has been coy about her re-election plans. That left open the unprecedented possibility of a three-way race involving an incumbent who was not in a major party.

    Sinema fell to a distant third in public polls before officially dropping out of the race in March.

    A few weeks after Sinema left the Democrats, Gallego officially joined the race and never faced an opponent for the nomination.

    He left the liberal Congressional Progressive Caucus and changed his rhetoric on border issues.

    Gallego acknowledged that Arizona cities are “on the front lines of this border crisis.” It was a far different tone from the one he used in Congress in 2017 when he wrote, “Trump’s border wall is trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.”

    Instead, Lake’s road to the GOP nomination was a bumpier ride.

    After her narrow loss in the 2022 gubernatorial race, Lake continued to push to overturn the election in court. This did not happen, but it kept Lake in the public eye, holding on to a vision that was increasingly out of step with public opinion.

    She was quickly seen as likely to run for Senate, but did not officially enter the race until October 2023. Six months earlier, Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb entered the race but struggled to raise money with an advance .

    Lake chimed in with a video endorsement from former President Donald Trump, setting the tone for a race shaped on his agenda.

    Above all, that meant border security and the completion of Trump’s border wall as the nation’s top priority. She blamed illegal immigrants for inflation, Arizona’s housing shortage and crime everywhere.

    She quickly solidified the support of many Republicans already in the Senate, with the prominent exception of McConnell.

    McConnell continued to cite concerns about the “quality of the candidates” in several Senate races in 2024, and political action committees aligned with him never invested in those contests, including Lake’s candidacy.

    It wasn’t the only turbulence involving her party.

    In January, Lake ousted the Arizona Republican Party chairman after he leaked a secretly recorded conversation 10 months earlier. Jeff DeWit told Lake that there are “very powerful people who want to keep you out” of the Senate race and urged her to name her price for staying out of the race.

    She rejected his offer, and the recording surfaced just before the party’s annual meeting. Republican operatives said the leaked tape served as a warning to others wary of Lake.

    At a candidate forum in May, Lake called Lamb “a total coward when it comes to election integrity,” a slight that prompted nine of the state’s 14 other sheriffs to condemn her remark. Lamb threw his support behind Lake after she lost the July primary and appeared on stage with her at least once.

    But other prominent Arizona Republicans have warmed to their support for Lake.

    Former Arizona Governor Doug Ducey endorsed her after she won the primary, but did not make major appearances with her. Karrin Taylor Robson, Lake’s closest Republican rival in 2022, also followed this pattern.

    And when Lake tried to suggest he was only joking when he disparaged the late U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., in a series of comments in 2022, his daughter Meghan McCain made it clear that the feud with the McCains is not funny, if not moderate Republicans in general, he continued.

    Gallego, meanwhile, used his time and millions to define himself for months on screens across the state. He counted himself as rising from poverty in Chicago, attending Harvard University, and fighting for his country as a Marine in Iraq. Now, Gallego often said, he promised to “fight” for Arizona workers in Washington.

    At the same time, his Democratic allies reminded viewers that Lake supported an 1864 territorial law that banned abortion in almost all circumstances. The issue took on new relevance after the Arizona Supreme Court upheld that law in April.

    Lake found himself torn between acknowledging that 19th-century law is “where the people are” and maintaining her personal opposition to a procedure she likened to “the execution of a child in the mother’s womb”.

    Lake didn’t have the resources to consistently fend off the attacks, but he found his footing in their October debate.

    She aggressively pressed Gallego about his voting record in Congress, saying he was more concerned with naming those who crossed the border illegally than doing anything about it.

    Gallego countered that he supported the bipartisan border security bill that Sinema helped broker and Trump sank. Lake memorably called the bill “300 pages of pure garbage” before tossing it into a trash can placed next to her podium.

    In the final weeks of the campaign, Gallego and his ex-wife, Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego, lost a court battle to keep their 2016 divorce filing sealed. Lake promoted the release of the dossier as a looming bombshell, even though Kate Gallego had long ago endorsed it for the Senate.

    But the file largely confirmed what was known and reported at the time: Ruben Gallego left his wife weeks before she gave birth to their son.

    This story will be updated as election results are reported.

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