About
Kari Lake is a former Fox News anchor in Phoenix who resigned in 2021 to run for governor of Arizona. Though she lost to her Democratic opponent, Katie Hobbs—the secretary of state in 2020 who certified President Biden’s legal win in Arizona—the “MAGA darling” is running again in 2024, this time for the U.S. Senate.
A conspiracy theorist known for spreading misinformation, Lake followed Trump’s lead by refusing to concede once she lost the gubernatorial race. During that campaign, she called for Hobbs to be “locked up” over unspecified election crimes in 2020 and with little apparent irony, also advocated for imprisoning journalists she claims had lied about election results.
Lake also made her anti-abortion stance well known in 2022, releasing a video in which she says she does “not believe in abortion,” that “life begins at conception,” and that she doesn’t “think abortion pills should be legal.” However, now that she’s running for the Senate and public opinion is against a total ban, she is again echoing Trump in flipflopping on the issue. “Her sharp pivot has aligned her with her close ally, former President Donald Trump, who has also undergone an election-year shift on abortion,” as CNN reported.
Since the 2020 election, Lake has thrown herself into spreading the Big Lie and spewing far-right vitriol, a strategy that has helped her sudden rise in politics almost as much as have Trump’s endorsements. In early 2024, she forced the resignation of the head of the GOP in Arizona by threatening him with the release of secret recordings she had made of their confidential conversations.
In 2022, The New York Times reported that Lake’s “hard line against abortion” and routine use of “strident language on the stump”—along with her slick TV persona—allowed her to overshadow her more subdued (but ultimately victorious) opponent and gain points with MAGA voters. The Atlantic refers to her as “Trumpism’s leading lady.”
The Big Lie
- Lake falsely claimed that Biden didn’t win 81 million votes in the 2020 election (though he did).
- In September 2021, Lake parroted a lie that the Democratic Party uses absentee ballots to rig elections.
- She claimed fraud because Trump was initially winning on election night—before all the votes had been counted.
- Lake promoted baseless accusations about Dominion Voting Systems’ equipment.
- In September 2021, Lake called for the “decertification” of the 2020 election, which is impossible from a legal standpoint.
- Lake has said she would not have certified the 2020 election results, even though a Republican-led audit determined that Biden actually won by an even larger margin than in the original count..
- According to The Verge, Lake received $2.1 million in political advertising support from anonymous donations to 1TEN, a firm owned by Jake Hoffman. A former Turning Point USA employee, Hoffman was one of Arizona’s fake electors who attempted to submit fraudulent votes for Trump in 2020. He was also banned from Facebook for operating a troll farm.