Why Kari Lake’s Campaign Failed and How It Could Still Succeed

Isaac SchorrDec 22nd, 2022, 9:52 am
 
Kari Lake

Brandon Bell/Getty Images

Kari Lake and her team were measuring drapes well before her five-point victory in the Republican primary over Karrin Taylor Robson.

Lake quit her job as a prominent Phoenix area news anchor in 2021 to run for governor and secured Donald Trump’s endorsement in part through her tough talk on border security, but in large part as a result of her wholehearted embrace of his claim to being the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election. After a debate during which Robson refused to affirm that the 2020 contest had been a “corrupt, stolen election,” Lake called said refusal “disqualifying.” She even speculated that her opponent in the general, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, might have to campaign from behind bars for having masterminded said corrupt, stolen election.

One source with knowledge of the campaign’s thinking, a longtime Republican operative in the Grand Canyon State, told me the Lake team was making plans for her inauguration in June; the primary wasn’t held until August 2.

“It was the most overconfident group I’ve probably ever met in politics,” he explained, describing Lake’s senior staff as “arrogant, smart, but running in the wrong state.”

That arrogance, in concert with a petty insistence on antagonizing other factions of the party, string of high-profile gaffes, and an undisciplined candidate with her eyes set beyond Phoenix, ultimately doomed Lake’s campaign for governor. That same recipe, however, might just deliver her an even greater prize.

The War Room

The Lake campaign Twitter account, following the lead of Trump and other combative Republicans, calls itself a “war room,” conjuring images of Eisenhower and his generals poring over D-Day invasion plans, or Bill Belichick huddling with his coordinators before the Super Bowl.

Well over a month after Lake’s loss to Hobbs, the troops inside the Kari Lake War Room beat on, boats against the current. Whether those behind it are “the best,” however, is up for debate.

According to one source, three to five people boasted access to the war room account. At least one of those, according to multiple sources, is also behind the pugilistic “Columnated Election Denier” Twitter account (@DominofromAZ) formerly known as “Columnated Ruins.”

For a quick diagnostic on whether this individual would be adept at appealing to the general electorate in a purple state, consider the following sampling from said account:

“Being white is awesome and you won’t make me feel guilty about it,” “College is turning white women into woke zombies,” “Barack Obama has devoted his entire adult life to trying to start a race war. He’s basically a black Charles Manson,” “They’re right about #January6th being a coup. It was a coup against Donald Trump and a Republican legislature’s attempts to investigate a stolen election.”

The lack of discernment and discipline from those in charge of operating the Kari Lake account was reflected by its comportment.

It would sneeringly reply to critics with follower counts in the double-digits. It would brag about its own following. It attacked John McCain, the longtime Republican senator and war hero who dominated the state party for decades.

“The war room account and the way it acted toward people shows it was a very petty campaign, and people were too focused on just getting their jabs in when they could, instead of thinking if they should,” said the source familiar with the campaign’s operations, who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity.

That lack of self-control online contributed to Lake’s image as a chaos candidate.

“It created this feeling of chaos and anger in her campaign and in how people viewed her and her candidacy. And that’s what people saw on the ballot when they voted in November,” he explained. “It feels like the chaos was reflected even in how the account was run… watching it lately, it will just complain to anybody who randomly mentions Kari Lake’s name!”

In the days since November 15, when it became clear that Hobbs had prevailed, the war room account has shed whatever guardrails it once maintained.

It has made demonstrably false claims that Maricopa County officials were using a heat map of Republican voters to steal the election from her. It has doubled down on the allegation that Lake’s old TV station was in on the conspiracy to rig the election for Hobbs because it accidentally tested a graphic showing Hobbs with a lead live on-air in October. It has seesawed between praising ABC15’s Garrett Archer for his “invaluable” work, which it counted as a “wonderful resource” to the public, and speculating that “there’s a reason” why Archer is dressed up “as an expert to spin numbers that don’t make sense.” More than anything, though, the account revels in pointless rows with small accounts.

And it insists that Lake, who is currently fighting a losing battle in the Arizona court system, might still be its next governor.

“They said we wouldn’t get this far,” tweeted the war room on Monday, after a judge ruled that Lake could have the opportunity to prove two of the charges she’s made against officials for allegedly rigging the gubernatorial contest against her. “They need to stop doubting @KariLake.”

The Candidate

If there’s anything to be said for Kari Lake the candidate, it’s that she didn’t lack for political talent. Lake could make a leading question look imbecilic, deliver an impassioned case for even the most preposterous of her beliefs, and was tireless on the campaign trail.

But Lake’s raw political talent did not trump the harm caused by her brazen arrogance, which bled down through the ranks of her campaign.

“You could tell that she loved herself,” said the longtime Arizonan operative, who met Lake on several occasions, and described her as “very charismatic and kind” in person. “The problem wasn’t that she wasn’t competent. It was that she could not stop the self-love. She could not stop acting like a child.”

Lake’s gaffes were all Kinsley gaffes, examples of the candidate making the mistake of telling the truth.

When she bragged after the primary that her campaign had put “a stake through the heart of the McCain Machine” and commanded “McCain Republicans” to “get the hell out” at a campaign event, she was telling the truth about what she thought of McCain Republicans, still a large faction of the state party; they weren’t just in the passenger seat of the GOP, they’d been defenestrated.

When she endorsed Jarrin Jackson, an openly anti-semitic candidate for state senate in Oklahoma, she was signaling her affection for angry anti-establishment “fighters,” if not Jew-haters. When she endorsed Doug Mastriano, the January 6 rally attendee running for governor in Pennsylvania, she was doubling down on her raison d’etre for running.

In both cases, she was suggesting, before ever having held elected office, that she was a national figure, whose very word might swing races in other states.

These demonstrations of her true colors not only alienated distinct groups Lake needed to win her race, but betrayed that what Lake most wanted wasn’t to serve Arizonans, but a national pulpit.

And while her put-downs of the press delighted even skeptical conservatives — and Barack Obama admitted Lake had a penchant for “snappy lines” — the constant and deliberate warring tired voters and contributed to her image as a chaos candidate.

“People like if you fight once or twice, but when you’re constantly doing it, and she was seeking out opportunities just to kind of act like a jerk, even when a reporter would ask a totally legitimate question,” said the source with knowledge of the Lake campaign’s thinking. “The Bret Baier moment on Fox News, that was huge.”

In July, just prior to the primary election, Lake appeared on Baier’s show. How one evaluated her performance in that appearance was a kind of Rorschach test. Lake’s Republican opponents saw it as confirmation that she would be unpalatable in a general election. Her proponents thought it showed exactly why she had to be the nominee.


The former group might have been right about the riot act hurting her with the general electorate, but the most important member of her audience concurred with the latter.

“Arizona Gubernatorial Candidate Kari Lake was absolutely fantastic in her interview with a very unfair Bret Baier on Fox News. She absolutely destroyed him on the subject of the 2020 Presidential Election Fraud and ‘Irregularities,'” declared Trump on Truth Social. “Kari is the kind of tough minded and smart person our Country needs if we are ever going to be great again!”

The Truck and the Van

In the original Toy Story, there’s a triumphant scene at the end where the two (toy) protagonists, Woody and Buzz, forgo a moving truck where the rest of their comrades are to land in a minivan where their owner sits. “We’re not aiming for the truck,” shouts Buzz, a smile plastered on his face. Kari Lake’s campaign for governor was never about the truck.

“Kari could have been governor even after the loss,” argued the operative, who supported Lake in the general election. “If she had just conceded gracefully, that would have taken away a lot of the reason why people voted against her in the first place.”

Lake would have been well-positioned to run for governor again in 2026 or run for Senate in 2024. But conceding would have blown her foremost objective, which was joining Donald Trump on the GOP’s national ticket in 2024.

“That’s the whole reason she did this run for governor,” posited the operative, who said her staff understood this to be the ultimate objective, with the gubernatorial contest and a short but impactful term in office serving as stepping stones to that end. Lake’s team declined to comment on the contents of the story, instead inquiring if I was covering her ongoing lawsuit to prove mass election fraud in Arizona’s Maricopa County.

Since election day, Lake has not just challenged the results of her last campaign but begun a new one in earnest, flying to Mar-a-Lago to personally appeal to the former president. Not that she was shy about her ultimate aims before; she once insisted on personally vacuuming a red carpet for Trump at an event for her campaign.

Though Lake never made it to the stepping stone of serving in office, it’s not entirely clear that step will be necessary; her at once obsequious and bombastic campaign might have been more than enough to earn Trump’s favor. The list of candidates who are willing to completely embrace all that comes with Trump — rather than merely accept it — is short, and almost none of them bring the combination of skills and right-wing (as opposed to conservative) bona fides.

“The Republican Party has to accept the fact that America First is the future,” proclaimed Lake on Charlie Kirk’s program earlier this week. “There is no other alternative.”

Arizona saw it a different way.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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