If Arizona Democrats aren’t livid with the leadership of the state party, they ought to be. Kari Lake was not one of the pro-Trump further-right candidates that Democrats spent big money to support in primaries — $53 million in 13 races as of mid-September, according to a review by the Washington Post — but the Arizona Democratic Party did choose to take a whack at Lake’s more moderate primary rival, Karrin Taylor Robson, at a key moment during the GOP primary:
NBC News told the story back in July:
Kari Lake watched her lead narrow in the polls and big players in Arizona’s Republican establishment coalesce around her top rival weeks before the state’s Aug. 2 primary for governor.
So Democrats stepped in.
The state party, in an email blast this week, thanked her opponent, Karrin Taylor Robson, for past donations she made to Democratic candidates. The move was quickly interpreted as another example of Democrats’ meddling in midterm election primaries to help draw the general election opponent believed to offer the easier matchup in November — in this case Lake, an election denier endorsed by former President Donald Trump.
“As the Republican primary for governor continues to stir toxic infighting, the Arizona Democratic Party will always be grateful for Robson’s longtime support in helping elect Democrats up and down the ballot, including this November,” Josselyn Berry, a spokesperson for the state party, said in a quotation tacked on to the bottom of the email.
The Arizona Democratic Party knew darn well what they were doing with that release. Kari Lake was a registered Democrat from 2008 to 2012 — they could just as easily have spotlighted that fact. By calling attention to Robson’s donations to Democrats, the Arizona Democratic Party was telling Arizona Republicans, “Robson is not one of you. You should vote for Lake.”
And they did. Lake won the primary by about five percentage points.
Now, keep in mind who the likely Democratic gubernatorial nominee was, as described by the Post’s Ruby Cramer:
It is easy to view Katie Hobbs as Lake’s opposite. The Democrat oversaw the contentious 2020 election in Arizona as secretary of state and served as minority leader in the state Senate, but struggles as a messenger on the trail. At the Arizona Capitol, reporters would often ask her to repeat her answers because sentences would trail off, making her meaning difficult to decipher, one reporter said. During the primary, Hobbs declined to debate her Democratic opponent, despite the fact that he posed little threat to her campaign. (She won with 72 percent of the vote.) She has since refused to share a stage with Lake, producing a weeks-long saga over debate rules and an uncomfortable running contrast. When Hobbs didn’t show at a voter forum earlier this month, Lake stood for more than an hour next to an empty podium labeled “KATIE HOBBS,” in case there was confusion about her absence. “I have no desire to be a part of the spectacle that she’s looking to create,” Hobbs said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” a few days later.
Arizona Democrats knew their nominee was going to be soft-spoken and a poor communicator, and they chose to go up against the well-known former television-news anchor, who had been working in front of the cameras for more than two decades.
And now Kari Lake, enjoying a small lead in recent polling, is terrifying Democrats. Axios writes, “Democratic Party strategists are watching Arizona’s Kari Lake with growing alarm.” Democrats told the New York Times that Lake’s “charisma and on-camera skills make her uniquely dangerous.”
Well, gee, Arizona Democrats, maybe you should have thought of that before you meddled in the GOP primary, then.