Will Arizonans trust Carrie Lake, a former news anchor, as governor?

PHOENIX – Kari Lake made her way through televised interviews at her election night party, fielding a barrage of questions about her bid to be Arizona’s next governor. The votes were still being counted, and she was up all night. But Ms. Lake, a first-time candidate, didn’t flinch.

Instead, she grabbed a reporter’s microphone, locked eyes with the camera and delivered her campaign message as effortlessly and authoritatively as if she were reporting from the local anchor desk she left last year.

Ms. Lake is among a group of hard-right Republican candidates who are winning primaries this year with a potent mix of campaign lies and cultural grievances. But her refined presentation and ruthless instincts, both honed over decades in television news, put her in a category of her own.

The 52-year-old former journalist has drawn on a reservoir of trust and knowledge to turn former viewers into voters. Donald J. Trump praised her photo-ready discipline, privately telling other candidates to be more like Ms. Lake. Her “say anything” bravado won applause from the base, eager to stick it to the state’s old guard. Her lack of experience in politics and her fixation on fiction for the 2020 election have sent the establishment scrambling to prepare how she might wield power.

Some Republicans have discussed her as a potential vice presidential candidate if Mr. Trump runs again in 2024. National Republican groups plan to pour millions into her race to help the party retain control of a key political battle.

“People love me and I’m not saying this to brag,” Ms. Lake said in an interview last week at her campaign headquarters.

“I’ve been in their homes for the good times and the bad,” she added. “We’ve been together on the worst days and we’ve been together on the best days.”

Polls show Ms. Lake as an underdog in her race after surviving a close primary last week in which Gov. Doug Ducey and most of Arizona’s Republican base opposed her.

But if she can unify her party and broaden her appeal to independent voters, Ms. Lake has history on her side: Arizona Republicans have won six of the last eight gubernatorial races. On Saturday, Mr. Ducey released a statement urging his party to “unify behind our slate of candidates.”

Raised in Iowa, Ms. Lake spent more than two decades on the air at KSAZ-TV, a Fox-owned Phoenix station. From its seat in the nation’s 11th largest television market, which covers about two-thirds of the state’s households, it delivers clean news. She interviewed Barack Obama and Mr. Trump during their presidencies, a rare feat for even the most ambitious local news figure.

But in recent years, she has begun hinting at her personal political leanings on social media. In 2021, she complained about biased media coverage: “I promise you, if you hear it from my lips, it will be true,” she said in a statement announcing her departure from the network.

Ms Lake has since embraced Mr Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, claiming the contest was “corrupted and stolen”. She supported a partisan recount of results in Maricopa County and argued that electronic voting machines are not “reliably secure.”

Her combative campaign touched on other flashpoints of America First populism.

She rallies against vaccine mandates, and one of her best-selling campaign T-shirts features a graphic of a cloth mask on fire. She opposes allowing transgender people to use bathrooms that align with their identities and has attacked drag queens as dangerous to children.

She suggested that the Second Amendment protects ownership of missile launchers and told a summit of young conservative women: “God did not create us to be equal to men.”

Responding to the FBI’s search of Mr Trump’s residence this week, Ms Lake said: “Our government is rotten to the core.”

When a Republican challenger, Matt Salmon, offered a counterpoint to Ms. Lake’s proposal to install cameras in classrooms, she smeared him as a pedophile sympathizer. When he objected, she said his complaints showed he was too weak to be governor.

Mr. Salmon — who has served in Congress, the state legislature and as state party chairman — dropped out of the governor’s race in June and endorsed Ms. Lake’s main challenger, Karyn Taylor Robeson.

“I’ve never run a nastier campaign in my life,” Mr. Salmon said in an interview.

Ms Lake beat Ms Robson by more than four percentage points despite being outspent five to one. She was part of a slate of defeated candidates endorsed by Trump in the primaries, along with Blake Masters, the party’s nominee for the US Senate; Mark Finchem, who is running for Secretary of State; and Abraham Hamadeh, the party’s choice for attorney general.

The group, whose campaigns garnered national headlines for perceived opt-outs, sometimes campaigned together. But when they’re all in the same room, Ms. Lake tends to take the spotlight.

At an event in Phoenix the night before the primary, she was mobbed by supporters seeking selfies, autographs or trying to shake her hand as other Republican candidates looked on.

On the campaign stage, Ms. Lake blurs the line between seriousness and showmanship with the ease of someone who has spent three decades as a television reporter. During her election night speech, she brandished a gavel as she walked across the stage, vowing to “take this to the electronic voting machines when I’m governor.”

“The same God who parted the Red Sea, who moved mountains, is with us now as we save this republic,” Ms Lake said.

Some of Arizona’s political elders are skeptical about how Ms. Lake will fare with independent and moderate voters.

Jan Brewer, a former governor of Arizona and a Republican who supported Ms. Robeson despite being friends with both candidates, described Ms. Lake’s primary campaign as mean, disingenuous and out of touch with public policy.

“She went so far to the right that I don’t know if she can recover,” Ms. Brewer said in an interview. “And if she can’t, we’ll have a Democratic governor.”

Ms Brewer said she would only support Ms Lake if she promised to prioritize politics and tell the truth about the election.

“I want to hear her tell me that she did all this because she wanted to win and that it got a little out of hand,” Ms Brewer said.

Ms Lake said she had plans to reach out to Ms Robson and her supporters in the hope of uniting the party. Her message: “The media wants us to go to war with each other.”

In the general election, both Ms. Lake and the Democratic nominee, Katie Hobbs, Arizona Secretary of State, saw their national profiles rise as Mr. Trump and his allies spread falsehoods about fraud in the 2020 election. Liberal campaigners hailed Ms Hobbs for her role in defending the state’s vote-counting apparatus against a wave of attacks. At the same time, Ms. Lake has become a conservative hero because she helped lead the charge to overturn the results.

Some Democrats backed Ms. Lake to win the primary, including former governor Janet Napolitano, who said Ms. Lake was a “one-trick pony” who would be easier to beat than Ms. Robeson.

“If this is a Trump election and 2020 in Arizona, then the Democrats are going to win,” Ms. Napolitano, a Democrat, said in an interview.

But it’s unclear whether the November election is around 2020. The favorable national political climate for Republicans has some Democrats worried that Ms. Lake is on the verge of a four-year stint as the state’s chief executive.

Roy Herrera, the Arizona state adviser for the 2020 Biden campaign, said he had felt a strange rush of optimism, anxiety and fear about Ms. Lake’s victory.

“We wanted these extreme candidates on the Republican side,” Mr. Herrera said. “Now we’ve got them, and you know, are we sure we wanted this?”

Ms Lake has been through political shifts before. She admits she voted for Mr. Obama in 2008, although she described it as a blip on her otherwise solid Republican voting record. There are signs that she is softening her stance.

She has already become less adamant about abortion. During the primary, she said she wanted to sign a “copycat” of Texas’ abortion law, which bans the procedure after six weeks of pregnancy with no exceptions for rape or incest.

But when asked about the issue last week, she said she supports Arizona’s current law.

“At the time, I wasn’t even aware that we had this law on the books,” she said. “So I don’t think that will ever have to come up.”

After that article was published online, Ms. Lake’s campaign sought to clarify her response. But a spokesman gave a series of conflicting explanations about whether Ms. Lake supported a state law signed this year that allows abortions in the first 15 weeks of pregnancy or a pre-statehood law that banned abortions.

The campaign declined to make Ms. Lake available to address the discrepancy.

Although she called Mr Trump’s endorsement “the most powerful in all of politics”, Ms Lake played down its significance.

“I had a really good chance of winning even before that, to be honest,” she said.

Ms. Lake shot to the top of the Arizona Republican Party with little help from the traditional political infrastructure. She has largely stayed away from consultants and does not employ a campaign manager.

Her most influential aide is Lisa Dale, a longtime friend who is a former professional golfer with a Scottsdale-based real estate business. On the campaign trail, Ms. Lake was often surrounded by agents from Arsenal Media Group, a Republican advertising company, and Caroline Wren, a senior adviser who raised funds for the Trump campaign.

Another constant presence is Ms. Lake’s husband, Jeff Halperin, a videographer who watches his wife’s every move on the campaign trail through the frame of his digital camera, compiling footage for political ads and recording interviews with reporters. Her campaign has occasionally released such clips to show her battles with the media, which she has increasingly described as hostile to her candidacy.

Ms. Lake’s campaign also paid her daughter, Ruby Halperin, a modest salary, according to campaign finance records.

“I don’t think there’s anyone out there who has run a campaign like ours,” Ms Lake said. “We have these people who are high-priced consultants who have been doing it for decades, and their heads are spinning. They don’t know what to do with us.”

There are reinforcements on the way.

Dave Rexrod, executive director of the Republican Governors Association, met with Ms. Lake’s campaign for more than 90 minutes last week. He told her team that the group led by Mr. Ducey had increased its advertising budget for the state to $12 million from $10.5 million.

But if Republicans in power are waiting for Ms. Lake to stop attacking the legitimacy of the 2020 election, they will have to wait a little longer.

“Deep down, I think we all know that this illegitimate fool in the White House — I feel sorry for him — didn’t win,” she said. “I hope Americans are smart enough to know that.