Kari Lake lost her bid to become Arizona governor because she failed to get support from tens of thousands of Republican voters, according to a report.
An analysis of public voting records in the November race found that Democrat Katie Hobbs managed to pick up support from more than 33,000 Republican-leaning voters in Maricopa County, who backed GOP candidates in other state elections such as state treasurer.
In comparison, Lake, a Donald Trump-endorsed 2020 election-denier, managed to gain only 5,953 votes from Democrat-leaning voters. Around 6,000 Republican-leaning voters also chose not to vote at all, or wrote in another candidate, rather than support Lake in November.
Lake lost her election to Hobbs by 17,000 votes, meaning the 33,000 votes she failed to achieve from Republicans in Arizona's largest county ultimately cost her the election, rather than her dismissed claims of voter fraud and machine counting irregularities.
"She just ran a terrible campaign," Benny White, one of the authors of the November election study, told the Arizona Republic. "It doesn't help to call Republicans RINOs [Republican in name only]."
For the past two months, Lake has gone through the courts to try to reverse the Arizona gubernatorial election results while focusing on the issues with ballot printers at some polling places on Election Day, November 8.
In December, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson threw out Lake's argument, noting that her campaign failed to provide "clear and convincing" evidence that voter fraud or misconduct from election workers cost her election.
Lake's loss in November to Hobbs was just one of a number of examples where MAGA and election-denying candidates who had the backing of Trump ultimately went on to lose their midterm races across the country because they put off more moderate voters.
Elsewhere, the analysis of Arizona voting records also revealed that Mark Finchem, the Trump-endorsed far-right Arizona candidate for secretary of state, also failed to gain support of nearly 74,000 Republican-leaning voters in Maricopa County in November.
However, Finchem would still have lost his election to Adrian Fontes, even if he kept the support of these Republicans as the Democrat won by more than 120,000 votes overall.
Abe Hamadeh, the Republican candidate for Arizona state attorney general who also blamed his defeat on voter irregularity, lost 33,110 votes from Republican-leaning voters in Maricopa County to Democrat Kris Mayes.
Mayes went on to win the election by just 511 votes, triggering a recount. In the second December count, Mayes' margin of victory over Hamadeh was reduced to just 280 votes.
White and the other authors of the Arizona voting study, Larry Moore and Tim Halvorsen, also concluded that none of the midterm races was affected by widespread voter fraud.
"The conclusion that can be drawn from this data and the various analytical comments is that the election was conducted legally and the results are correct," the study concludes.
Newsweek has contacted Lake for comment.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
Ewan Palmer is a Newsweek News Reporter based in London, U.K. His focus is reporting on US politics, domestic policy ... Read more
