As she runs for Senate in Arizona, she has also been appearing nationally at events for Trump and other Trump-favored candidates.
As she runs for Senate in Arizona, she has also been appearing nationally at events for Trump and other Trump-favored candidates.
I n mid March, former GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake found herself in unusual territory. Lake was not in her home state of Arizona, where she is running for the U.S. Senate this year. Instead, Ohio Republicans were glad to host the former television newscaster in Milford, where she was campaigning on behalf of Bernie Moreno, former president Donald Trump’s preferred Senate pick in that state’s GOP primary, which Moreno went on to win.
And adding to the intrigue, the Ohio trip came at Moreno’s request: His campaign asked her to fly in to stump for him to juice turnout in Republican-leaning areas of the state, according to people familiar with the matter. The tradeoff? Paying for her travel and helping facilitate meetings for her with Ohio-based GOP donors.
While it’s common for current and even former Republican lawmakers to campaign alongside like-minded GOP candidates, it’s unusual for a Republican Senate candidate — especially one who has never held elected office — to stump for another Republican Senate candidate in a different state. But such trips are becoming par for the course for Lake, who basks in the limelight that comes with being a MAGA-aligned, grassroots Republican celebrity.
This kind of star power is reflected in her base support back home in the Grand Canyon State. In this summer’s Arizona primary, she expects to easily defeat Pinal County sheriff Mark Lamb, who trails her by double digits in recent polls. She then hopes to flip the seat held by retiring Democrat-turned-independent Kyrsten Sinema in what is shaping up to be a high-dollar race against likely Democratic nominee Ruben Gallego in November.
But as Lake’s Senate bid takes shape, some of her critics are keeping a close watch on how much attention she’s paying to her national profile. The end of April 2024 will mark more than 50 out-of-state trips taken by Lake since January 2023, as a look at her book tour and political-event travel shows. That itinerary includes more than a dozen out-of-state appearances since launching her Senate campaign in October, with at least three out-of-state trips scheduled for April alone, raising eyebrows among Arizona Democrats and Republicans alike.
Lake’s campaign declined to comment for this article.
If Arizona’s likely Democratic Senate nominee has a similar travel itinerary, he’s keeping those details close to the vest. A spokeswoman for Gallego, a former U.S. Marine and combat veteran who represents a deeply Democratic district, did not respond to a request from National Review for details on his out-of-state travel during the same period, though it’s likely that he has made at least a few to meet with donors, given his $7.5 million first-quarter haul.
Last month, Gallego posed for a photo next to Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda and Open Society Foundations chairman Alex Soros, the son of billionaire Democratic donor George Soros and a deep-pocketed donor himself who has contributed to the Democratic congressman’s Senate campaign. The cityscape in the background indicates that the photo was taken in New York City, a common fundraising stop for congressional Democrats.
Lake is a bit more open about her out-of-state travel.
Later today, Lake is scheduled to headline what’s expected to be a jam-packed fundraiser for her Senate campaign at Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Fla., alongside co-hosts Roger Stone and Roseanne Barr. Next up in her out-of-state fundraising schedule is an April 20 keynote slot at a county GOP gala in Idaho Falls, Idaho, and an April 23 reception in Huntsville, Ala., where she is scheduled to fundraise alongside Senators Katie Britt and Tommy Tuberville.
To her credit, her national scope has paid off tremendously in building her brand and raising her profile as a recognizable figure across the country. Many of these Lincoln Dinner–type events have decent fundraising potential, as local parties will often pay hefty speaking fees and cover speakers’ travel and lodging. Meanwhile, she is also ramping up in-state fundraisers and events, and most of her out-of-state trips of late are directly related to her Arizona Senate campaign. (Her early-March trip to meet and fundraise alongside Republican senators in Washington, D.C., for example, clearly falls into that category.)
Still, the frequency of her out-of-state trips is unusual and underscores how different a candidate she is from other 2024 battleground Senate GOP recruits this cycle. Take, for example, West Virginia governor Jim Justice, former hedge-fund CEO Dave McCormick in Pennsylvania, real-estate developer Eric Hovde in Wisconsin, and Moreno, a former car dealer — all of whom are independently wealthy and likely don’t depend on the extra few thousand dollars that can flow in from a county GOP event in a small town, or otherwise don’t have the celebrity status that often precipitates invitations to these sorts of grassroots events.
Since her October campaign launch, she has made appearances at events or co-hosted fundraisers in a number of other states: the CPAC investor summit in Las Vegas and a gala in Lubbock, Texas, in October; the Colorado GOP’s centennial dinner; a book-signing in West Palm Beach, Fla., and a reception in Las Vegas in November; a New Hampshire trip and a Naples, Fla., book-signing reception in December; a campaign kickoff with the Nebraska GOP in Omaha in January; and fundraisers in Palm Desert, Calif., and Round Rock, Texas, in February, to name a few.
It’s also worth noting that many of her recent out-of-state trips have been on Trump’s behalf, such as her decision to attend an early-November rally in Hialeah, Fla., aimed at helping the former president counterprogram one of the GOP presidential-primary debates. Then there are her 2024 campaign appearances alongside the former president in Iowa — where she grew up — ahead of the January 15 caucuses, and her appearances alongside him in New Hampshire ahead of the Granite State’s January 23 presidential primary. And then of course the multiple campaign events she co-hosted in March for Moreno in Ohio.
While these campaign events certainly stand out as atypical, a person familiar with the matter maintains that they had real fundraising value, as Lake took time to have private meetings with donors in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Ohio.
At least in part attributable to these trips, Lake is expected to post an impressive first-quarter fundraising haul, though it will be tough to compete with the jaw-dropping $7.5 million that Gallego’s campaign says it raised from January through March. The Democrat’s haul leaves him with nearly $10 million on hand as of this month, a hefty sum for what’s expected to be a hotly contested general-election fight, according to current polling. (Gallego has been in the race much longer, having launched his Senate campaign in January 2023.)
Although Lake narrowly lost the gubernatorial race to Democrat Katie Hobbs in 2022, she continues to insist that she won. Having risen to stardom portraying herself as an enemy of the establishment, she has recently turned to trying to win over her skeptics in Washington.
That effort to adopt a more conciliatory tone with the D.C. types paid dividends with many of the top GOP power brokers on Capitol Hill. National Republican Senatorial Committee chairman Steve Daines (Mont.) endorsed her candidacy in February, and earlier this week he traveled to Arizona for a fundraiser in Paradise Valley. Later this month, Senate Republican whip John Thune (S.D.), who is running to succeed Mitch McConnell as Senate GOP leader, is scheduled to fundraise for her in Scottsdale.
Senate Republican Conference chairman John Barrasso (Wyo.) has also enthusiastically backed her candidacy and even campaigned alongside her in Arizona in February.
“She almost won the governorship, and President Trump was very close to [winning Arizona] last time in 2020,” Barrasso told NR in a brief interview in late February. “She’s a strong candidate and is going to do very well and is going to win in Arizona. I’m supporting her all the way.”
Even ahead of her Senate campaign launch, Lake spent last year crisscrossing the country on her tour to promote Unafraid: Just Getting Started, the story of her “journey from being the most beloved newscaster and broadcast journalist in Arizona to the leader of the largest grassroots movement in the state’s history,” according to the book’s Amazon summary.
That description captures the private worries of some mainstream Republicans — that she is more preoccupied with winning plaudits from Trump-aligned grassroots activists than winning over independent voters. And while her overtures to many establishment types in Washington are redounding to her benefit in the endorsement and fundraising departments, not everyone is buying her pitch.
Writer, podcaster, and TV personality Meghan McCain, the daughter of the late six-term Arizona senator John McCain, has publicly ridiculed Lake’s attempt at extending an olive branch to her family. At a 2022 gubernatorial-campaign event, Lake famously told John McCain supporters to “get the hell out.”
Matt Salmon, who competed against her in the GOP gubernatorial primary, estimates that Lake has texted him seven or eight different times since the fall, asking to get together and discuss her 2024 Senate campaign. Salmon told National Review that he has no interest in engaging with her campaign, especially after the leaked conversation between Lake and Jeff DeWit, the former Arizona GOP chairman who resigned from his post after he asked her to name a price to keep her out of a 2024 Senate run.
“I’d have to have manure for brains to want to meet with somebody that plays those kinds of shenanigans on people,” Salmon said, adding: “I’m not going to meet with somebody who has a proclivity for tape-recording or videoing conversations without the other person knowing it.”
Salmon is doubtful that Lake is making the kind of outreach to independent voters necessary to win a general election in Arizona. And he chided her for acting as if she has already snagged the GOP nomination.
“There’s a whole cadre of people, especially in a general election, that I don’t see her really having made much movement with, and that should be the emphasis,” Salmon said. “When she’s here, it’s not really connecting a lot with people one-on-one. It’s the soapbox thing and the rallies and having the same people come to every rally across the state. I don’t see the group expanding.”
Yet Lake maintains that she has a winning strategy. “I think that we had a great campaign that was about bringing our state together and making it safer, more secure, securing the border,” she told NR last month when pressed on any lessons she may have learned from her 2022 gubernatorial run. “And we’re going to do that now in the U.S. Senate.”