In Maricopa County, Ruben Gallego pulled away from Republican Kari Lake on Sunday night, again drawing a sizable and strong Democratic vote.
A group of about 100,000 voters voted hard for Gallego, and his lead had grown to nearly 67,000 votes as of 7:30 p.m. Sunday. His lead over Mr. Lake has grown from about 1 point to more than 2 points, and the remaining votes are starting to decline.
The race has not yet been called, but Mr. Lake needs to receive at least 62% of the remaining 273,000 uncounted votes to overtake Mr. Gallego.
That’s even less likely given that two-thirds of the remaining ballots came from Democratic-leaning Maricopa and Pima counties.
Earlier in the day, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.), whose seat will be filled by the winner, said she considered Gallego to be her successor.
About 80,000 votes still needed to be counted in Republican-leaning Cochise, Yavapai and Yuma counties. Lake has received about 60% of the vote so far.
However, Pima County still reported 79,000 votes to be counted, with Gallego receiving nearly 60%. Maricopa County estimated there were an additional 97,000 votes cast.
Mr. Gallego currently wins Maricopa County by nearly 5 percentage points, and the most recent round of votes has him winning by double digits.
Mr. Lake narrowed his lead over Mr. Gallego in the three days after voting closed, but his chances of victory disappeared over the weekend.
Mr. Lake’s campaign problems are a familiar one for Republicans in recent election cycles. She lost by the widest margin in the state in Pima County, by nearly 97,000 votes as of Sunday afternoon.
Maricopa County is a close race, but due to its size, she still trails by 94,000 votes.
These population centers more than make up for Mr. Lake’s advantage in other parts of the state, where he leads by about 124,000 votes.
On social media, Lake’s supporters have noted skeptical commentary in Arizona, where he trails President-elect Donald Trump by nearly 160,000 votes.
But polling throughout the campaign consistently suggested Arizona was headed for a party-split outcome.
According to the political website Real Clear Politics, the average final poll results in Arizona show Mr. Gallego leading Mr. Lake by 2.6 points and Mr. Trump leading Vice President Kamala Harris by 2.6 points. They had an 8 point lead.
Lake on Friday slammed Republican Stephen Richer of Maricopa County. He has sued for defamation in a lawsuit in which he did not dispute the allegations, and is waiting to find out what, if anything, he is owed.
London’s Daily Mail reported on Friday that Mr. Lake’s lawyers submitted documents suggesting that Mr. Richer had also considered running for the Senate last year “to make Mr. Cali’s life hell”. It was reported that they were doing so.
In a social media post pointing to the Daily Mail article, Lake said he wanted all legal votes to be counted “without bias.”
Social media accounts associated with Lake’s campaign announced Friday night that they had asked Pima County officials for clarification on the remaining ballots.
2024 Election: View Arizona election results
Gallego kept a low profile during the vote counting process. He said Wednesday he expected to maintain his lead.
“We are closely watching the results as they come in and are feeling very optimistic,” he said in a tweet.
On Sunday, he recognized the Marine Corps’ birthday.
In the final weeks of the campaign, Mr. Lake, a former Fox 10 news anchor, had widened his lead over Mr. Gallego, who had been in the long-standing race to replace Mr. Sinema, according to polls released by the campaign. It was shrinking. In the final week of polls, he maintained a 3 percentage point lead.
Democrats have already lost control of the Senate, but incumbent Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nevada) won a close race. Democrats have already lost seats in West Virginia, Ohio, Montana and Pennsylvania.
Gallego, a five-term congressman, hopes to become the state’s first Latino congressman and one of only 13 elected officials.th If we win, it will be national. Lake could become the first Republican woman elected to the U.S. Senate from Arizona.
If Lake wins, he will do so without the help of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). He and his allies treated Lake as a consequentialist and never invested in the race.
Whoever wins will succeed Sinema, who won the seat as a Democrat in 2018, breaking the party’s 30-year electoral drought.
Gallego has led in 79 of 87 public polls since Sinema withdrew from the race in March, but Lake has narrowed his lead by several percentage points in the final weeks of the race.
Green Party candidate Eduardo Quintana is a distant third.
Sinema left the Democratic Party in December 2022, and the funds he raised dried up soon after, but he remained mum about his re-election plans for more than a year. This leaves open the unprecedented possibility of a three-way race involving an incumbent not affiliated with a major political party.
Sinema slipped to third place in the polls, but officially withdrew from the race in March.
Gallego officially joined the race a few weeks after Sinema left the Democratic Party, but did not face him for the nomination.
He quit the liberal Congressional Progressive Caucus and changed his rhetoric on border-related issues.
Gallego acknowledged that Arizona cities are on the “front lines of this border crisis.” That was a much different tone from when he wrote to Congress in 2017 that “President Trump’s border wall is trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.”
By contrast, Lake’s path to the Republican nomination was a rocky one.
After narrowly losing the 2022 gubernatorial race, Lake continued to press the courts to overturn the election. Although that did not happen, Mr. Lake continued to hold views that were increasingly out of sync with public opinion and gained public attention.
She was immediately seen as likely to run for the Senate, but would not officially run until October 2023. Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb ran for office six months earlier, but struggled to raise money given his head start.
Lake arrived with an endorsement video from former President Donald Trump, setting the tone for a campaign modeled after his policies.
Above all, that meant securing the border and completing President Trump’s border wall was the nation’s top priority. She blamed illegal immigration for inflation, Arizona’s housing shortage and local crime.
She quickly solidified support from many Republicans already in the Senate, with the exception of McConnell.
Mr. McConnell has cited concerns about the “quality of candidates” in several 2024 Senate races, and political action committees affiliated with him have said they will never vote on those races, including Mr. Lake’s candidacy. Didn’t invest.
This wasn’t the only commotion involving her party.
Lake ousted the Arizona Republican Party chairman in January after leaking a secretly recorded conversation 10 months earlier. Jeff DeWitt told Lake there were “very powerful people trying to keep you out of the Senate race” and urged him to specify what he would pay to stay out of the race. did.
She rejected his offer and the recording surfaced just before the party’s annual meeting. Republican operatives said the leaked recordings served as a warning to others to be wary of Lake.
At a candidate forum in May, Lake called Lamb “a total coward when it comes to election integrity,” and nine of the state’s 14 other sheriffs condemned Lamb’s comments. Lamb cheered Lake on after he lost in the July primary, appearing on stage with Lake at least once.
But other prominent Arizona Republicans were lukewarm in supporting Lake.
Former Arizona Governor Doug Ducey endorsed her after she won the primary, but did not attend any high-profile appearances with her. Lake’s closest Republican rival in 2022, Karyn Taylor Robson, followed a similar pattern.
And while Lake tried to suggest that he was joking when he disparaged the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in a series of comments from 2022, his daughter Meghan McCain said it wasn’t funny. , made it clear that his feud with McCain was no joke. Mr. McCain continued, if not the broader group of moderate Republicans.
Meanwhile, Gallego spent his time and millions of dollars defining himself on screens across the state for months. He played a role in which he rose from poverty in Chicago, attended Harvard University, and fought for his country as a Marine in Iraq. Now, as Gallego often said, he promised to “fight” in Washington for Arizona’s working class.
At the same time, Democratic allies reminded viewers that Lake supports the 1864 Territorial Act, which prohibits abortion in almost all circumstances. The issue took on new relevance after the Arizona Supreme Court upheld the law in April.
Lake was torn between accepting that 19th-century laws were “no place for people” and continuing to personally oppose the process, which she likened to “the execution of a baby in its mother’s womb.” .
Mr. Lake lacked the resources to consistently refute the attacks, but he found his footing in the October debate.
She aggressively pursued Gallego about his voting record in Congress, saying he was more concerned about what to call people who crossed the border illegally than he was about doing anything.
Mr. Gallego countered that he supports the bipartisan border security bill that Sinema helped broker and that Mr. Trump helped sink. Lake memorably called the bill “300 pages of pure garbage” before tossing it into a trash can placed near the podium.
In the final weeks of the campaign, Mr. Gallego and his ex-wife, Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego, lost a legal battle to keep their 2016 divorce papers sealed. Mr. Lake touted the release of the files as a looming bombshell, even though Kate Gallego long ago endorsed him as a candidate for Senate.
However, the files mainly only confirmed what was known and reported at the time: Ruben Gallego broke up with his wife a few weeks before giving birth to their son.
This article will be updated as election results are reported.
