PHOENIX – Arizona begins its first day of early voting on Wednesday, ending with a pivotal moment in the battleground Senate race as Republican Kari Lake and Democrat Ruben Gallego face off in the first and only debate for the seat left open by retirement. Senator Kyrsten Sinema.
Like the presidential race, the Senate race presents deep contrasts in a state that has been neatly divided in half for years. 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 of Representatives, is challenging Lake, a pro-Trump former news anchor who narrowly lost to Democrat Katie Hobbs in the 2022 gubernatorial race.
In an interview with NBC News after a Sunday evening town hall with veterans in Scottsdale, Gallego said he was helping split the ticket with someone like Vice President Kamala Harris, not President Joe Biden, who dropped out of the race in July.
“In terms of what I’m hearing from people, it’s honestly night and day,” Gallego said of how Harris was perceived compared to Biden.
“With all due respect to our president, this is a new level of politics and advocacy that they haven’t seen before, and I think that’s extremely important for people to understand, especially in a place like Arizona that has such a big swing.” state,” Gallego added. “I think people who are still undecided are very open to it.”
Gallego endorsed Harris in the 2019 Democratic presidential primary as he sought to garner support from the left while establishing himself as a “real progressive voice” in Congress.
Now he has tried to win support in conservative circles by reaching out to people who were repulsed by Lake and Donald Trump’s lewd comments about Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican who died in 2018. Both 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 Republicans and Independents for Reuben, a coalition of former McCain staffers. McCain’s former director of state, Paul Hickman, said he supported Gallego because “I know his combat veteran, Ruben Gallego, has the same leadership spirit as McCain.”
Asked to respond to his rhetoric during an interview at the campaign office on Tuesday, Lake tried to flip the script on Democrats. “There are indeed Marxist policies being put forward now,” he said.
“They talk about the threat to democracy and there is a woman at the head of the ticket who did not get a single vote. This is the problem. Kamala Harris didn’t get a single vote; This seems to me to be a real threat to democracy,” he added.
On the campaign trail, Lake attacked Gallego personally — calling his Mexican-American drug-trafficking father a “Colombian drug dealer” and saying Gallego withheld divorce records from his first wife because they were redacted. “to hide something bad.”
“The reason we’re doing this is because we’re trying to protect our son,” Gallego said when pressed by NBC News on Sunday.
“We know that if he [Lake] If he finds out anything about our son, he will release it,” he said, adding that he was endorsed by his ex-wife, Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego. The couple separated and divorced shortly before their son was born in 2017, and Gallego is now married to a Democratic lobbyist with whom he has one child. .
Lake also blasted Gallego in his remarks, accusing him of voting for an “open border” policy, claiming he “refuses to compromise” and works across the aisle. Lake also called for additional resources for border patrol agents and building a border wall — but dodged questions about certain areas of concessions to pass legislation with Democrats.
Pressed that Republicans were blocking a bipartisan deal with Trump’s call to fund enhanced border security and tighten asylum restrictions, Lake responded: “That’s why I didn’t oppose it.”
“I looked at it and said it’s going to codify bad policy and make it harder for us to actually secure the border,” he said. “It was a bill — $115 billion to be sent overseas to kill people, disguised as a border bill … $115 billion to be sent to Ukraine.”
Lake was referring to a bipartisan foreign aid package passed by Congress that sends military aid and resources to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. After initially calling for the border and foreign aid to be tied together, Republicans in Congress have blocked attempts by Democrats to even pass a border bill on their own.
After several contentious exchanges about policy and a series of public polls that have shown him trailing Gallego and trailing Trump at the top of the ticket, Lake told NBC News he would answer just one more question.
Given the opportunity to announce Tuesday that he and the former president both lost the last election, Lake did not. He also would not say whether he would respect the results of this year’s election and vote to confirm the results of the January 6, 2025 presidential election if elected to the Senate.
“If you were playing a football game and they said to the football team, ‘You’re going to agree with every call the referee makes before this election and you’re going to agree with everything that happens in this game’?” no one would say yes. We want to hold elections legally,” said Lake.
“If we hold an election legally? Absolutely,” he continued. “So let’s see. We hope we will.”
Arizona has been ground zero for electoral denial since the 2020 vote, and Trump and his allies have launched multiple legal challenges and efforts to overturn Biden’s victory. In the end, all efforts were in vain.
In 2022, Lake contested his loss to Hobbs, taking it all the way through the Arizona legal system. A Maricopa County judge appointed by the former Republican governor dismissed Lake’s lawsuit, finding that the court did not find clear and convincing evidence of the widespread violations he claims affected the election. He filed an appeal against the decision.
The daughter of a teacher and a nurse, Lake grew up in Iowa as one of nine siblings. He was a fixture in Arizona homes for 22 years as the anchor of the Phoenix Fox station.
Now, Lake regularly criticizes the press, saying on Tuesday that the media “lied” to pick his opponent.
“The media has done a terrible job of covering Ruben Gallego, and they’re lying about it, somehow crossover voting,” Lake said, referring to voters who could split their ticket and vote for Trump and Gallego on the same ballot. “The poll is similar to what we saw in 2016: the poll is designed to get the voter to do something.”
Public opinion polls have consistently shown Lake trailing Gallego in the race, while Trump has a small margin of error in recent polls of the presidential race. Tuesday, AARP released the survey, which was conducted by a bipartisan group of pollsters It showed Trump with 49%, Harris with 47%, and Gallego with Lake 51% to 44%.
Lake, who has regularly argued that independent polls and other agencies are unreliable, called his own internal poll on Tuesday the “real scoop” on the state of the race, saying it showed him ahead of or tied with Gallego. “I trust in good things without prejudice,” he said.
“It’s going to be a tight race,” Lake admitted. “I believe that Republicans, independents and Democrats are fed up with the direction this Democratic Party is taking 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 to appeal to a wider base of voters in a diverse state.
“I think No. 1, it’s a very D.C. perspective, I’ve got that progressive record,” said Gallego, who until February was a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
in 2018 Gallego rallied with Sen. Bernie SandersIn Phoenix, I-Vt., he scoffed: “President Trump is going to build a wall. It’s called the progressive wall — it’s my brothers and sisters joining hands to stop Donald Trump.”
Recently, he has become critical of some of his party’s agenda, advocating for things like a “better economy” and fixing the “broken border,” which he blames on the Biden administration and past presidential administrations.
At campaign headquarters, a belligerent Lake brushed off Gallego’s pro-conservative endorsements, claiming that the only reason the Phoenix Police Association, also a Trump-endorsing organization, is throwing its support behind Gallego is to “get them worried about the DOJ.”
in June, Ministry of Justice investigation It found that the Phoenix Police Department used excessive force and violated constitutional rights, particularly the rights of homeless people. The investigation also found that the department discriminated against blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans. Since then, the department has forced Phoenix officials to sign a “consent decree” that would allow the federal government to reform Phoenix police.
Immediately after receiving the approval, it was revealed that Gallego wrote a letter to the DOJ urging it to rescind the consent decree. Gallego defended the decision in an interview with NBC News last month, arguing that the consent decree would be costly to the city of Phoenix.
“We can hold the police accountable and actually have police security for them and for the community. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be a consent decree,” Gallego said. When asked if any of his campaign had contacted the Arizona Police Association about the letter he wrote to the DOJ urging them to stop their efforts on the consent decree, Gallego said no.
The lake took on a different look. “Everybody who saw it knew it was a good thing, like they needed help, and Ruben Gallego finally stepped in. He didn’t do anything for the police.”
He noted that he has “great police clearances” and is “fine” without them. It receives support from four other major police agencies in the state.
Despite some recent moves to the center, Gallego supports gutting the filibuster to enact abortion protections, unlike Sinema, who broke with his party to maintain the 60-vote barrier in the upper house.
Arizona is one of 10 states with abortion on the ballot this fall, with voters deciding whether to add an amendment to the state constitution to legalize the right to the procedure through fetal viability, or about 24 weeks of pregnancy. (Abortions are currently legal in Arizona up to 15 weeks unless a doctor prescribes an emergency.)
Lake claims he does not support a federal abortion ban, but at one point he expressed it dissatisfaction that the state’s 1864 abortion ban was not being enforced. Arizona lawmakers passed a bill repealing the old ban that Hobbs signed as a compromise measure while criticizing the 15-week law that remains on the books.
“I think the 15-week abortion ban — not the abortion ban, but the 15-week abortion law that we have — is actually a good law,” Lake said Tuesday. “I think this is the best policy. But women will make the decisions, men will make the decisions in this state, and they will be the law, period, as U.S. senators.