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Well, that was fast. Mere hours after Kari Lake demanded on Tuesday that he step down, Arizona’s Republican Party chair, Jeff DeWit, resigned over the publication of an audio recording in which he appears to attempt to pay the U.S. Senate candidate to drop out of the 2024 race.
In a statement released by the Arizona GOP, DeWit accused Lake of leaking the audio from nearly a year ago, which he called “selectively edited,” to a conservative radio host. And DeWit claimed, without providing evidence, that Lake’s team told him it would release another recording if he didn’t step down.
“I am truly unsure of its contents,” DeWit said of the alleged recording. “But considering our numerous past open conversations as friends, I have decided not to take the risk. I am resigning as Lake requested, in hope that she will honor her commitment to cease her attacks, allowing me to return to the business sector — a field I find much more logical and prefer over politics.”
After the initial release of the audio recording, Lake told NBC News that it was authentic. In a statement posted to X, Lake advisers denied that anyone from her team “threatened or blackmailed” DeWit.
While DeWit’s method of encouraging Lake to get out of the race may have been shady, it fundamentally speaks to a valid concern among some Republicans: that Lake — an election denier who previously lost a race for governor — is unelectable. It would be ironic if efforts to marginalize her made her more powerful within the Arizona GOP.
And she has already started dancing on DeWit’s grave. She posted a link on X (formerly Twitter) shortly after his announcement, claiming she “can’t be bribed” and “can’t be bought.”
This isn’t the kind of dissension you want if you’re the Arizona Republican Party. It has been beset with financial problems over the last couple of years due to poor fundraising and its previous leadership’s spending large amounts on legal challenges to Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss. Now the party is steeped in chaos just as the primaries are set to kick off. When DeWit, a former Arizona treasurer and chief operating officer of Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns, was elected, he portrayed himself as a stabilizing force for the party who was going to right the ship after former chairwoman Kelli Ward’s scandalous tenure.
And like a mirage in the Arizona desert, those hopes just vanished.