When the early votes in Arizona started rolling in Tuesday night and Carrie Lake was trailing, she and her MAGA colleagues resorted to a familiar tactic from election night: They called foul.
But overnight, Lake made up for what she lost to Karyn Taylor Robeson, her primary challenger for the Arizona Republican nomination for governor. Now, on the cusp of winning a hotly contested primary, Lake and her allies find themselves trying to explain how the election she’s about to win is still somehow as corrupt and fraudulent as they’d already claimed it was. .
“There is no path to victory for my opponent and we won this race, period,” Lake proudly declared to a group of supporters, but that didn’t stop her from warning them that it was a scam.
“But there are a lot of problems with the system,” the candidate warned, before immediately predicting victory again.
“We will win this when the votes are counted,” the candidate said. “We will not accept our electoral systems as being so messed up.”
Before Lake could even speak, MAGAworld operatives were already at work spreading rumours, without evidence, that election malfeasance was taking place.
Far-right blog The Gateway Pundit wrote that something “suspicious” had happened in the race, adding that it was “another [Brad] Raffensperger especially.”
As Lake pursued Robson late into the evening, others resurrected a range of November 2020 conspiracy theories.
One of them included an allegation that poll workers intentionally handed out Sharpies to voters that would have made their ballots invalid. Second, the alleged election officials printed ballots on thinner-than-usual paper, causing potential MAGA-compliant ballots to be discarded due to ink cracking. Both were debunked shortly after it was raised after the 2020 election, when Pima County in Arizona tweeted, “No ballots will be thrown out due to the method used to color the ovals,” referring to Sharpiegate.
But that didn’t stop Trump supporter Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA contributor Drew Hernandez from launching “Sharpiegate 2.0.”
“I had primal anger today when my family called me and said they had to go over their ballot several times,” said pro-Trump Charlie Kirk, “because the Sharpie bled through the ballot.”
Similarly, far-right Real America Voice correspondent Ben Berquam, citing an alleged voter he spoke with, claimed that the ballots were printed on “thicker paper” this time around.
“Sharpiegate 2.0, here we come!” echoed Turning Point USA contributor Drew Hernandez.
MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, an early and outspoken Lake supporter, tried to square the notion of voter fraud with the belief in Lake’s landslide victory.
“She won, what are you talking about? Of course there was election fraud,” he said in an interview with The Daily Beast on Wednesday. “She won despite the algorithm,” he added, trying to justify the apparent dissonance between the two ideas. “So much corruption in Arizona!”
Lake’s campaign did not respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment, and the race had not yet been announced as of Wednesday evening.
Fittingly for one of the far-right’s most prominent culture warriors and 2020 election conspirators, Lake is now one crucial step closer to the top office of a key battleground state.
In a race that has turned into an expensive and nasty proxy war between factions of the GOP, Lake’s victory amounts to a triumph for the MAGA wing — and a blow to Republicans who were growing optimistic that the party could overcome Trump’s cult of personality and his 2020 election obsession.
A well-known local news anchor turned political sensation, Lake was endorsed by Trump and a number of Trumpworld luminaries and supporters. In turn, it has fueled baseless claims and narratives about the 2020 election and boosted Arizona Republicans’ disastrous attempts to prove that Trump actually won the state.
Meanwhile, Robeson had the support of much of the state’s Republican establishment — including incumbent Gov. Doug Ducey, a Trump foe — along with former Vice President Mike Pence. While taking hard conservative positions on hot-button issues, Robeson notably steered clear of Trump’s 2020 rhetoric and said Republicans need to move on.
Robeson’s camp went all-in on a strategy to paint Lake as fake, highlighting her past liberal views and previous support for Barack Obama. At one point, Robson’s allies ran an ad narrated by a drag queen attacking Lake for dating drag queens before turning on them as part of MAGA’s culture wars.
Although Lake was leading in the early polls of the race, Robeson spent a staggering $15 million of her own money on her campaign, which funded an advertising blitz that helped catapult her within striking distance of Lake.
While some GOP voters in Arizona were puzzled that Trump was endorsing Lake given her history, some found her story — a member of the media turned anti-media crusader — compelling rather than controversial.
Also, many GOP voters in Arizona clearly still have an appetite for red meat about the 2020 election.
The stage is now set in Arizona for one of the most competitive and closely contested gubernatorial races in recent memory. On Tuesday, Democrats nominated Katie Hobbs, the incumbent secretary of state whom Lake called for jailed on baseless fraud charges.
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