Kari Lake during the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.Matt Rourke/AP
On Tuesday, the Republican National Convention will hear from Kari Lake, the party’s 2022 nominee for governor of Arizona who is now the frontrunner in the state’s Republican primary for US Senate. Lake is one of the MAGA movement’s biggest stars, and she is running in one of the year’s most high-profile races. If she can make it out of the primary on July 30, she’ll face Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego in a contest that will help determine which party controls the Senate.
But Kari Lake is not just a Republican candidate for US Senate. She also claims to be the “lawful” governor of Arizona—and she’s still contesting that loss in court, 20 months after she officially lost to now-Gov. Katie Hobbs. In an appeal filed last week to the Arizona Supreme Court, Lake asked the justices to either install her in the governor’s mansion or order a do-over election, alleging that Maricopa County improperly verified signatures on hundreds of thousands of ballots. In other words, Lake is trying simultaneously to become Arizona’s senator and its governor. All of which raises an admittedly strange question: What happens if Lake wins her lawsuit?
Let’s say a judge declared Lake the actual governor. Would she continue running for Senate, or would she drop out to serve out the rest of the term as governor? (And, because Arizona has no lieutenant governor, if Lake didn’t finish her term, wouldn’t that mean turning over the newly acquired governor’s office to the Democratic secretary of state Adrian Fontes, who is one of the people that Republicans have accused of having helped steal the 2020 election?) Or what if the judge ordered a do-over election—would Lake drop out of the Senate race to run in it?
As far as I can tell, Lake hasn’t addressed what she would do if she gets the outcome she is purportedly pushing for. I reached out to her campaign twice and haven’t heard back.
It is an unusual questions. Prior to this year, I can’t recall a previous race where this has come up. But in 2024 year, there are actually two such campaigns—Abe Hamadeh, the 2022 Republican nominee for Arizona attorney general, is also seeking a do-over election of that race, while seeking election to Congress.
Chaotic hypotheticals aside, there is a simple explanation for all of this. This is not a serious lawsuit. In fact, Lake’s case is so bad that she already lost a version of it in the state’s district court, appeals court, and supreme court. One of the attorneys who handled her last appeal is currently serving a two-month suspension from the state bar for making false claims in legal filings in that case. Lake is not trying to win—she is appealing her loss because she is stuck. So much of her public identity was built on never accepting Trump’s defeat that Lake can now never accept her own.
