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Headed into the 2022 midterm elections, Senate Republicans were optimistic. All the party needed was a net gain of one seat to flip the chamber and enjoy the benefits of a majority. Historical models suggested such a result was all but inevitable, and Sen. Rick Scott, in his capacity as chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, boasted that his party had a path to a majority with 55 seats.
Voters had other ideas. In fact, Republicans ended up with a net loss for the election cycle, as Democrats expanded their Senate majority.
As the dust settled and GOP officials took stock of what went wrong, many in the party came to a straightforward conclusion: Too many Republican nominees — especially in competitive battleground states — were unelectable, unlikable, and unqualified. Ahead of the 2024 cycle, GOP insiders concluded, they’d simply need better candidates.
The problem, of course, is that the decision isn’t entirely up to GOP insiders. For example, Arizona will hold one of the nation’s most closely watched U.S. Senate races next year, and Republican officials desperately want an electable nominee with broad appeal on the statewide ballot. In light of the overnight news from the Grand Canyon State, that now appears unlikely. NBC News reported:
Republican Kari Lake kicked off her campaign for the Senate on Tuesday night with a boisterous rally in Scottsdale, Arizona, rattling off conservative talking points and playing an endorsement video from former President Donald Trump.
If Lake’s name sounds at all familiar to audiences outside of Arizona, it’s because her failed gubernatorial race last year generated considerable national attention.
Lake’s pitch to voters last year was built largely on a ridiculous foundation: She wanted people to know about her absurd conspiracy theories about the 2020 elections. New York magazine’s Jon Chait noted last fall, for example, “Lake is a paradigmatic example of a stop-the-steal candidate. Her dedication to the lie was so resolute that Trump urged fellow stop-the-stealer Blake Masters to follow her example. (‘If they say, ‘How is your family?’ she says, ‘The election was rigged and stolen,’’ he gushed.)”
As regular readers might recall, Lake’s over-the-top radicalism and aggressive commitment to conspiratorial lies became so notorious that she was even lampooned on “Saturday Night Live.”
After her defeat, Lake added her own race to her election conspiracy theories, insisting that she was elected governor, despite the actual election results showing otherwise.
In other words, ahead of the 2024 cycle, the new Trump-backed frontrunner for the GOP’s nomination in one of the nation’s most important Senate races has demonstrated an overt hostility toward democracy — which isn’t quite what Republican strategists were hoping to see.
Complicating matters is that the rest of Lake’s political vision isn’t exactly geared toward the American mainstream. As my MSNBC colleague Ja’han Jones explained in his latest piece, the newly announced candidate has also taken far-right positions on, among other things, reproductive rights.
What’s more, during her 2022 campaign, Lake explicitly told supporters of the late Sen. John McCain — in Arizona, no less — that she didn’t want their support.
With a background like this, I suspect Democrats will be pleased to see her new Senate candidacy, since Lake will likely be a weaker nominee than other, more electable GOP candidates. But while that reaction is understandable, I’d remind those partisans that Lake ran a reactionary and conspiratorial campaign in 2022 that repelled Democrats, independents, and swing voters — and she nevertheless ended up with 49.67% of the vote, barely losing to Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs.
In other words, Lake’s radicalism shouldn’t necessarily be seen as disqualifying. Watch this space.