Arizona U.S. Senate race remains tight with few changes

Two significant sets of votes from Maricopa County did little Wednesday night to change the status of Arizona’s U.S. Senate race, with Democrat Ruben Gallego still holding a lead over Republican Kari Lake that has remained largely unchanged.

The latest unofficial results from the state’s population center slightly increased his lead, which Lake halved overnight.

In Maricopa County alone, hundreds of thousands of ballots remain to be counted. With Republicans demonstrating far greater strength across the country than many pollsters had expected, Gallego’s revised leadership appeared fragile.

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Gallego said on social media Wednesday that he hopes to maintain his leadership.

“We are closely monitoring the results as they come in and feel very optimistic,” he said in a tweet earlier in the day.

In her own posts, Lake urged her supporters to abandon the primary in a race she expects to remain close.

“This race is coming to an end! We need ALL HANDS ON DECKS to fix the ballot and ensure every Arizonan’s vote is counted,” she said.

Publicly available polls in the race showed Lake, a former Fox 10 news anchor, chipping away at Gallego’s long-standing lead in the race to replace retiring U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., in the final weeks of the campaign. He maintained a 3 percentage point lead in the polls last week.

Democrats had already lost control of the Senate, and incumbent Democrats were still locked in tight races in Nevada and Pennsylvania on Wednesday night. Many more votes have already been counted in those contests than in Arizona.

Gallego, a five-term member of Congress, hopes to become the state’s first Latino elected to office, and only 13^th nationally if he wins. Lake could become the first Republican woman elected to the Senate from Arizona.

If she does win, Lake will do so without any help from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. He and his allies treated Lake as an afterthought in the election and never invested in the race.

Whoever wins will succeed Sinema, who won the seat in 2018 as a Democrat, breaking the party’s 30-year electoral drought.

Gallego led in 79 of 87 public polls. since Sinema left the race in March, but Lake has trimmed his lead by several percentage points in the final weeks of the race.

Green Party candidate Eduardo Quintana was in third place.

Sinema left the Democratic Party in December 2022 and her fundraising stopped soon after, but she has been cagey about her re-election plans for more than a year. That left open the unprecedented possibility of a three-way race involving an incumbent who was not affiliated with a major party.

Sinema dropped to a distant third in the polls before officially dropping out of the race in March.

Weeks after Sinema left the Democratic Party, Gallego officially entered the race and never faced any challenger for the nomination.

He left the liberal Progressive Caucus of Congress and changed his rhetoric on border-related issues.

Gallego acknowledged that Arizona cities are “on the front lines of this border crisis.” It was a much different tone than the one he used in Congress in 2017, when he wrote: “Trump’s border wall is trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.”

In contrast, Lake’s path to the Republican nomination was more rocky.

Following her narrow defeat in the 2022 gubernatorial race, Lake continued to push for the election results to be overturned in court. This did not happen, but Lake remained in the public eye, holding a viewpoint that was increasingly at odds with public opinion.

It soon became clear that she might run for Senate, but she did not officially enter the race until October 2023. Six months earlier, Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb entered the race but struggled to raise money with a head start.

Lake delivered a video endorsement of former President Donald Trump, setting the tone for a race modeled after his agenda.

Above all, this meant border security and completing Trump’s border wall as the country’s top priority. She blamed illegal immigrants for inflation, Arizona’s housing shortage and widespread crime.

She quickly won the support of many Republicans already in the Senate, with the exception of McConnell.

McConnell continued to cite “candidate quality” issues in several 2024 Senate races, and political action committees affiliated with him never invested in those contests, including Lake’s candidacy.

This wasn’t the only shock that affected her party.

In January, Lake ousted the chairman of the Arizona Republican Party after a secretly recorded conversation that took place 10 months ago was leaked. Jeff DeWit told Lake there are “very powerful people who want to keep you out” of the Senate race and urged her to name a price to stay out of the race.

She declined his offer, and the recording appeared shortly before the party’s annual meeting. Republican operatives said the leaked tape sent a message to those who were wary of Lake.

At a candidate forum in May, Lake called Lamb “a complete coward when it comes to election integrity,” a disdain that prompted nine of the state’s 14 other sheriffs to condemn her remark. Lamb supported Lake after losing the July primary and appeared on stage with her at least once.

But other prominent Arizona Republicans have been lukewarm in their support for Lake.

Former Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey endorsed her after she won the primary but did not make any high-profile appearances with her. Karrin Taylor Robson, Lake’s closest Republican challenger in 2022, also followed suit.

And when Lake tried to suggest she was only joking by disparaging the late U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., in a series of comments from 2022, his daughter Meghan McCain made it clear that it wasn’t funny and feuding with the McCains if not moderate Republicans more broadly, continued.

Meanwhile, Gallego spent months using his time and millions to make his presence known on screens across the state. He presented himself as a man who rose from poverty in Chicago, went to Harvard University and fought for his country as a Marine in Iraq. Now, as Gallego often said, he vowed to “fight” for working-class Arizonans in Washington.

At the same time, his Democratic allies reminded viewers that Lake supported an 1864 territorial law banning abortion in almost all circumstances. The issue took on new urgency after the Arizona Supreme Court upheld the law in April.

The lake was torn between accepting that 19th-century law is “not where the people are” and maintaining her personal opposition to the procedure, which she compared to “the execution of a child in the womb.”

Lake did not have the resources to consistently fend off attacks, but she found her footing in the October debate.

She aggressively pressed Gallego about his voting record in Congress, saying he was more concerned with what to call those who crossed the border illegally than with doing anything about it.

Gallego countered that he supports the bipartisan border security bill that Sinema helped broker and Trump helped defeat. Lake memorably called the bill “300 pages of pure garbage” before tossing it into a wastebasket set up near her podium.

In the final weeks of the campaign, Gallego and his ex-wife, Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego, lost a legal battle to keep their 2016 divorce case secret. Lake viewed the publication of the case as a bombshell, even though Kate Gallego had long supported his candidacy for the Senate.

But the materials, for the most part, only confirmed what was known and reported at the time: Ruben Gallego left his wife a few weeks before she gave birth to their son.

This story will be updated as election results are reported.