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    Flying on the Same Plane, Lake and Gallego Clash Over Border Politics

    Arizona’s high-profile Senate race has not yet begun in earnest, but on Thursday, the Republican Kari Lake and Representative Ruben Gallego, a Democrat, were already trading barbs — in midair.Ms. Lake, the former news anchor who refused to concede her loss in the state’s governor’s race last year, and Mr. Gallego, a progressive congressman from the state’s capital, ended up on the same flight from Washington, D.C., to Phoenix, where they began wrangling over the border wall.The clash happened just days after Ms. Lake filed to run for the seat, which is now held by Kyrsten Sinema. Ms. Sinema, who left the party in December to become an independent, has not said whether she is running for re-election.Ms. Lake took a shot at Mr. Gallego on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, asking if he still believed that the border wall was “racist” and accusing him of “facilitating an invasion.”“Hey @KariLake we’re on the same plane! Just come back from first class to coach and we can chat,” responded Mr. Gallego, who was sitting just behind the divider for business class. “Happy to walk you through all my legislative work to deliver key resources to AZ’s border communities.”On the plane, Mr. Gallego posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, tagging Ms. Lake.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesOnce the plane had landed and Mr. Gallego was stepping off it, Ms. Lake ambushed him with questions, wearing a lapel mic while a phone camera recorded, according to people familiar with the exchange. Mr. Gallego announced his bid for the seat in January. In the Republican primary, Ms. Lake will face Mark Lamb, a right-wing sheriff and an ally of former President Donald J. Trump.Ms. Lake, a hard-right Republican, was in Washington this week meeting with several G.O.P. members of the Senate. She is scheduled to hold her first rally as a candidate next week. More

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    Kari Lake Files to Run for Kyrsten Sinema’s Senate Seat in Arizona

    Kari Lake, the Republican former news anchor who refused to acknowledge her loss in the Arizona governor’s race last year, filed paperwork on Tuesday to run for Senate, setting up what is expected to be one of the most competitive Senate races in the country as Republicans try to win back the chamber.The incumbent, Senator Kyrsten Sinema, who left the Democratic Party last year to become an independent, has not confirmed whether she will run for re-election, but a prominent Democrat, Representative Ruben Gallego, is already challenging her. Mark Lamb, a right-wing sheriff and an ally of former President Donald J. Trump, is also running.On Tuesday, Ms. Lake was in Washington, where she met with several Republican members of the Senate, including John Cornyn of Texas and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, according to people familiar with the discussions who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss private conversations.She also met with Senator Steve Daines of Montana, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Mr. Daines is considering an endorsement for Ms. Lake, which may convince moderate donors to give the conservative firebrand a second look.A person close to Ms. Lake confirmed that she had filed paperwork to open her Senate campaign. She is scheduled to hold her first rally as a candidate next week.Ms. Lake lost the governor’s race to Katie Hobbs by about 17,000 votes, a little over half a percentage point. She was one of many Republicans, including several in Arizona, who lost close contests last year after running on Mr. Trump’s lie that the 2020 election had been stolen. While most of those Republicans conceded their own losses, Ms. Lake followed Mr. Trump’s lead and continued to insist that she had won even after her legal challenges were rejected.Her campaign circulated testimonials from supporters who claimed to have been disenfranchised by technical problems with voting machines, but a New York Times review found that most of them had been able to vote. She filed a lawsuit in December alleging deliberate misconduct by election officials — though she did not provide evidence of that, or of any unintentional disenfranchisement. A judge rejected her claims later that month.In February, when she said she was considering running for Senate, she was still claiming to be the rightful governor and raising money for lawsuits. The Arizona Supreme Court refused to hear her case in March, and in May, a lower-court judge threw out a challenge she had filed over the verification of signatures for mail-in ballots.During her campaign, she followed Mr. Trump in both style and substance, using the news media as a foil after working for years as a local television anchor in Phoenix. She repeatedly promoted Mr. Trump’s election lies, won his endorsement and in the Republican primary, defeated Karrin Taylor Robson, a rival supported by the state’s G.O.P. establishment. More

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    Trump Is Said to Have Told Blake Masters He’d Lose Senate Primary to Kari Lake

    Neither potential candidate has entered the race to unseat Senator Kyrsten Sinema in Arizona.Former President Donald J. Trump on Sunday called Blake Masters, the failed Arizona Senate candidate considering a second run next year, and told him he didn’t think Mr. Masters could win a primary race against Kari Lake, the former news anchor who ran unsuccessfully for governor last year, according to two people briefed on the conversation.Mr. Trump’s delivery of this blunt political assessment — which could indicate that Mr. Trump may endorse Ms. Lake if she has a relatively open path to the nomination — is at odds with Mr. Trump’s posture so far this political cycle, in which he has shown more restraint in endorsing candidates than he had in the 2022 midterms.Mr. Trump’s call on Sunday came days after a report that Mr. Masters, a 37-year-old venture capitalist, was preparing to make a second run for the Senate in the swing state after his loss to Senator Mark Kelly, the Democratic incumbent, in 2022.Ms. Lake, who lost a bitter contest with Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, is looking at announcing a Senate campaign in the first half of October, two people familiar with the matter said. The race to unseat Senator Kyrsten Sinema, a former Democrat who last year became an independent, is expected to be a crowded one in a state where the Republican Party is fractured.Last year, Mr. Trump endorsed both Mr. Masters, a political newcomer and an anti-immigration hard-liner who has close ties to the populist New Right, and Ms. Lake, who embraced Mr. Trump’s false claims of a stolen election with particular intensity.Mr. Masters parlayed Mr. Trump’s endorsement and around $15 million from the billionaire Peter Thiel into a victory in a hard-fought Republican primary. At the time, Republican leaders resented Mr. Trump’s intervention, believing he had propped up a weak candidate.Mr. Trump went on an endorsement spree ahead of the 2022 midterms, backing several candidates who won their primaries only to go on to lose what Republican leaders considered to be winnable Senate races, including Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, the former football star Herschel Walker in Georgia and Mr. Masters.By contrast, so far in this cycle, Mr. Trump, the dominant front-runner for the G.O.P. presidential nomination, has endorsed only one Republican Senate candidate who isn’t an incumbent, and it was a safe choice: Representative Jim Banks of Indiana, who is backed by the Republican establishment and is regarded as a lock for that seat.Mr. Trump’s comparative caution is by design and serves not only his own interests but also those of the same Republican leaders who despaired of his interventions in 2022 midterm primaries.A spokesman for Mr. Trump, Steven Cheung, said he would not comment on any private conversations “that the president may or may not have had.” Mr. Masters did not respond to a request for comment.The call between the former president and Mr. Masters was described by two people familiar with it who insisted on anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the private conversation. One of the people said Mr. Trump had not definitively ruled out supporting Mr. Masters’s candidacy and that in conversations with others, Mr. Trump had left open the possibility that Ms. Lake might not run.In a statement shared by an aide, Ms. Lake said, “I am strongly considering getting in the race and will be making my final decision in the coming weeks,” and cast herself as someone who would be loyal to Mr. Trump in the Senate. Sheriff Mark Lamb of Pinal County is already in the race.A person close to Mr. Masters who was not authorized to speak publicly stressed that Mr. Masters “believes the party needs a candidate with a proven ability to fund-raise and campaign and is prepared to run in the absence of such a candidate.”Mr. Masters has told associates that he thinks another “bloody” primary would hurt the party’s chances of winning the seat — and that a battle against Ms. Lake would surely be bloody, according to the person close to him. Mr. Masters has also privately questioned whether Ms. Lake will run, that person said.The person said Mr. Masters had seriously considered announcing his candidacy shortly after Labor Day but that no plans were set.Mr. Trump’s skepticism about Mr. Masters long predates their weekend conversation. The former president has told associates he thinks Mr. Masters was a “bad candidate” in 2022, according to two people who have spoken to the former president.Among Mr. Trump’s complaints about Mr. Masters was that he had tempered some of his comments related to Mr. Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. When Mr. Masters said in a debate in October 2022 that he hadn’t seen evidence of widespread fraud in the state, Mr. Trump called him, in a moment captured by a Fox News camera.“If you want to get across the line, you’ve got to go stronger on that one thing,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Masters. “That was the one thing, a lot of complaints about it.” Then he mentioned Ms. Lake, then the Republican nominee for governor.“Look at Kari — Kari’s winning with very little money,” Mr. Trump said. “And if they say, ‘How is your family?’ She says, ‘The election was rigged and stolen.’ You’ll lose if you go soft. You’re going to lose that base.”Regardless of Mr. Trump’s motivations, his more cautious approach to endorsements has been appreciated by party leaders. Mr. Trump has told several people that he made too many endorsements in the 2022 midterms — including some for people who have yet to endorse him in his own race for president — and that he plans to be less involved this time, according to two people with direct knowledge of his comments.Mr. Trump has established a strong relationship with Senator Steve Daines of Montana, the chair of the Senate Republicans’ campaign arm. Mr. Daines’s endorsement of Mr. Trump for president months ago was a strategic move: It gave him entree with the Republican Party’s most influential figure in the hopes of getting him to support the committee’s favored candidates, or at least to refrain from attacking them.To that end, Mr. Trump has quietly helped Mr. Daines by telling two House Republicans running for Senate — Representatives Matt Rosendale of Montana and Alex Mooney of West Virginia — that he would not endorse them in Senate primaries in their states. In West Virginia, Mr. Daines has issued a statement supportive of a different candidate: the state’s governor, Jim Justice.A person with direct knowledge confirmed those conversations, adding that part of Mr. Trump’s motivation for delivering the messages was his anger at the anti-tax Club for Growth, a one-time ally that more recently has attacked him. The Club for Growth is spending money to support Mr. Mooney and potentially could do the same for Mr. Rosendale. Mr. Trump’s conversations with Mr. Rosendale and Mr. Mooney were first reported by CNN.A spokesman for Mr. Rosendale could not be reached for comment.In a statement attacking Mr. Justice as part of the “big-spending D.C. swamp uniparty,” Mr. Mooney’s campaign manager, John Findlay, noted that “the congressman has endorsed President Trump and would of course like to have his endorsement again.” He added, “As of now, President Trump has chosen to stay neutral.” More

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    Arizona Judge Tosses Kari Lake’s 2022 Election Lawsuit

    Lawyers for Ms. Lake, a Trump ally who lost the governor’s race, claimed Maricopa County did not properly review mail-in ballot signatures. A judge said the arguments “do not clear the bar.”An Arizona judge threw out a lawsuit filed by Kari Lake over her defeat in last year’s race for governor, ruling that she had failed to prove that the state’s most populous county, Maricopa, had neglected to review voters’ signatures on mail-in ballot envelopes.The decision, issued late Monday, is the latest legal setback for Ms. Lake, a Republican who was backed by former President Donald J. Trump in one of the nation’s most prominent governors’ races in 2022.During a three-day bench trial last week in state Superior Court in Maricopa County, Ms. Lake’s lawyers argued that election workers worked too quickly to properly review 300,000 signatures that accompanied mail-in ballots.But in a six-page decision, Judge Peter A. Thompson wrote that the process had complied with state law, which requires signatures to be compared to ones in public voter files, but does not include specific guidelines for how much time a worker must spend on each ballot.“Plaintiff’s evidence and arguments do not clear the bar,” he wrote, adding: “Not one second, not three seconds, and not six seconds: No standard appears in the plain text of the statute.”At a news conference on Tuesday in Arizona, Ms. Lake said that she would appeal the ruling and that her lawyers were exploring various pathways forward.“We can’t trust the buffoons running our elections in Maricopa County anymore,” she said, later adding, “You’ve not seen the last of our case.”The case was the latest in a string of court losses over the election for Ms. Lake, who has claimed, without evidence, that mail-in voting compromises election integrity. Other claims in her lawsuit had previously been rejected by the court.Ms. Lake has suggested she may run for office again. This year, she said she was considering a run for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Senator Kyrsten Sinema, who left the Democratic Party in December to become an independent.Clint L. Hickman, the chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, which helps oversee elections in the county, praised the judge’s decision in a statement on Monday.“Wild claims of rigged elections may generate media attention and fund-raising pleas, but they do not win court cases,” he wrote. “When ‘bombshells’ and ‘smoking guns’ are not backed up by facts, they fail in court.” More

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    Arizona Supreme Court Turns Down Kari Lake’s Appeal in Her Election Lawsuit

    The justices refused to hear Ms. Lake’s claims disputing her loss in the governor’s race, but sent one part of her lawsuit back to a trial court for review.Arizona’s Supreme Court on Wednesday denied a request from Kari Lake to hear her lawsuit disputing her loss last year in the governor’s race. The lawsuit was based on what the court said was a false claim by Ms. Lake, a Republican, that more than 35,000 unaccounted ballots were accepted.In a five-page order written by Chief Justice Robert Brutinel, the court determined that a vast majority of Ms. Lake’s legal claims, which had earlier been dismissed by lower courts, lacked merit.“The Court of Appeals aptly resolved these issues,” Chief Justice Brutinel wrote, adding that the “petitioner’s challenges on these grounds are insufficient to warrant the requested relief under Arizona or federal law.”But the justices on Wednesday ordered a trial court in Arizona’s most populous county, Maricopa, to conduct an additional review of that county’s procedures for verifying signatures on mail-in ballots, keeping one part of her lawsuit alive.The decision dealt another setback to Ms. Lake, a former television news anchor whose strident election denialism helped her to gain the endorsement of former President Donald J. Trump.Ms. Lake tried to put a positive spin on the ruling, contending on Twitter that remanding the signature verification aspect of her case back to the trial court was vindication.“They have built a House of Cards in Maricopa County,” Ms. Lake wrote. “I’m not just going to knock it over. I’m going to burn it to the ground.”Ms. Lake had argued that “a material number” of ballots with unmatched signatures were accepted in Maricopa County. The Supreme Court agreed with the appeals court ruling on the matter, effectively saying that she would have to show the numbers that prove the election outcome “would plausibly have been different, not simply an untethered assertion of uncertainty.”She fell to Katie Hobbs, a Democrat who was Arizona’s secretary of state, by just over 17,000 votes out of about 2.6 million ballots cast in the battleground state — less than one percentage point.Representatives for Ms. Hobbs, a defendant in Ms. Lake’s lawsuit, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday.Ms. Lake has repeatedly pointed to technical glitches on Election Day, which disrupted some ballot counting in Maricopa County, to fuel conspiracy theories and baseless claims.Stephen Richer, the Maricopa County recorder and a Republican who helps oversee elections, said in a statement, “Since the 2020 general election, Maricopa County has won over 20 lawsuits challenging the fairness, accuracy, legality and impartiality of its election administration.”He added, “This case will be no different, and will simply add another mark to Lake’s impressively long losing streak.”Ms. Lake’s chief strategist, Colton Duncan, vowed that Ms. Lake’s lawyers would expose more fraud and corruption.“Buckle up, it’s about to get fun,” he said. More

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    Arizona Sues After County Puts an Election Skeptic in Charge of Voting

    Cochise County, a hotbed of conspiracy theories, transferred election duties from a nonpartisan office to the county’s elected recorder, a Republican.An Arizona county is being sued by the state’s Democratic attorney general after it transferred voting oversight to the county’s Republican recorder, who has cast doubts about past election results in a place where former President Donald J. Trump won nearly 60 percent of the vote in 2020.It is the latest clash between Democrats in statewide office and Cochise County, a deeply Republican area in southeastern Arizona, where conspiracy theories about voter fraud and irregularities still swirl.The county’s nonpartisan elections director, Lisa Marra, announced in January that she would resign, citing threats against her after she refused to comply with rogue election directives from the Republicans who control county government, including plans to count ballots by hand after last year’s midterm elections. She recently accepted a position with the secretary of state’s office.The county’s board of supervisors then made David W. Stevens, the Republican recorder, the interim elections director, with the board’s two G.O.P. members supporting the new power structure in a Feb. 28 vote, and its lone Democrat opposing it.On Tuesday, Kris Mayes, who was narrowly elected as Arizona’s attorney general in November and took office in January, filed a lawsuit against the county and called the power shift an “unqualified handover.”Understand the 4 Criminal Inquiries Into Donald TrumpCard 1 of 5Intensifying investigations. More

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    Kari Lake Teases Arizona Senate Run

    Ms. Lake, a Republican who lost to Katie Hobbs in the state’s governor’s race, previewed opening salvos against Senator Kyrsten Sinema and Ruben Gallego.WASHINGTON — Kari Lake, the fiery former news anchor who narrowly lost a race for governor of Arizona last year, said in an interview that she is considering a Republican campaign for the U.S. Senate in Arizona next year.She has also scheduled campaign-style events this month in Iowa — home to her party’s first presidential nominating contest — that typically signal White House ambitions.Additionally, she is still contesting her November defeat in the Arizona governor’s race, despite her claims of misconduct being rejected in court. She has continued raising money to help finance legal bills related to her court challenges, and has also given several paid speeches, but declined to say for whom.Ms. Lake’s maneuvering in recent months has signaled that she’s eager to build out her fledgling political résumé following a midlife career shift.After spending decades as a local television reporter and anchor, Ms. Lake burst onto the political scene last year after winning a brutal primary election with a potent mix of election lies and cultural grievances. Her skills as a polished and ruthless communicator helped her come within 17,000 votes of winning Arizona’s most politically powerful office as a first-time candidate — and earned her the praise of former President Donald J. Trump, whose style she has often imitated.“Here’s your headline: Kari Lake is on the warpath,” Ms. Lake said in an interview Thursday night.But it was unclear exactly where that path would lead.Seated in the corner booth of a Washington hotel bar, Ms. Lake drank a pint of Guinness and previewed opening salvos in a potential Senate race, attacking both Senator Kyrsten Sinema, who left the Democratic Party in December to become an independent, and Representative Ruben Gallego, a Democrat who is running for Ms. Sinema’s seat, as “radical leftists.”Politics Across the United StatesFrom the halls of government to the campaign trail, here’s a look at the political landscape in America.2024 G.O.P. Field: Nikki Haley is expected to join the race for the party’s presidential nomination soon, but other contenders are taking a wait-and-see approach before challenging former President Donald J. Trump.Democrats’ Primary Calendar: The contest to become the party’s presidential nominee has long been shaped by where it begins: Iowa. That process could soon be overhauled.First Acts: From the symbolic to the substantive, here is what nine new governors elected last year have done in their first weeks in office.Rural-Urban Rivalries: The relationships between big cities and rural-dominated state legislatures have often been hostile. But a dispute in Nashville suggests the nation’s partisan divide is making things worse.Ms. Lake attempted to cast doubt on Ms. Sinema’s reputation as a moderate, pointing to data that showed the Arizona incumbent often votes with President Biden. An NBC poll last year showed that American voters were split over whether Mr. Biden was moderate or liberal.“She’s the furthest thing from an independent,” Ms. Lake said. “Someone somewhere said she did a couple of courageous things, well, she should do courageous stuff here every day. If you are blessed to be elected by the people, when you show up in Washington, D.C., you should be doing courageous acts every damn day.”A spokeswoman for Ms. Sinema declined to comment.Ms. Lake also attacked Mr. Gallego, a progressive Democrat from Phoenix, as a socialist and highlighted complaints by a former staff member, Ne’Lexia Galloway, who criticized him after leaving her job last year for not doing more to “speak up about the injustices” to people of color in his district. A spokeswoman for Mr. Gallego declined to comment.Ms. Lake practiced similar attack lines against Mr. Gallego, who would be the state’s first Latino elected to the Senate, during a rally last week in Arizona and on Twitter.Mayor Corey Woods of Tempe, who is Black, defended Mr. Gallego, saying Ms. Lake’s claims were misleading.“I’ve personally known Ruben Gallego for 15 plus years and I know he always stands up for what’s right,” Mr. Woods, who endorsed Mr. Gallego on Wednesday, posted on Twitter last week.Mr. Gallego also appeared to be gathering support from the Black community. Roy Tatem Jr., the former leader of the East Valley NAACP in Phoenix, spoke at a Gallego campaign event last week. Pastor Aubrey Barnwell, head of the African American Christian Clergy Coalition, delivered the invocation at the same event.A handful of other high-profile Arizonans have told Republican officials that they are considering Senate campaigns, including Mark Lamb, the sheriff of Pinal County; Jim Lamon, a wealthy businessman who ran for Senate in 2022; Blake Masters, the party’s Senate nominee who lost to incumbent Senator Mark Kelly last year; and Karrin Taylor Robson, a businesswoman who lost to Ms. Lake in the governor’s primary.Ms. Lake expressed confidence that she would easily beat any field of Republican opponents and declared that her popularity among conservative voters in the state was rivaled only by that of Mr. Trump.She disputed the notion that she was a divisive figure inside her party, saying she reached out to rivals after her primary victory last year but that many didn’t return her calls.She also played down the ill will she stirred with her attacks on John McCain, the longtime Arizona senator and 2008 Republican presidential nominee who died in 2018.In August, she claimed during one speech that her candidacy “drove a stake through the heart of the McCain machine,” while making a stabbing motion with her arm. In the final days of the race, video surfaced from an event a year earlier when she asked if there were any McCain Republicans in the audience and ordered them to “get the hell out.”Ms. Lake said in the interview that some Republicans had taken the barbs more personally than the former senator would have.“I think McCain would have laughed,” Ms. Lake said. “I truly do.”Ms. Lake said her top priority remained challenging the results of the race for governor, despite court rulings against her and the swearing-in of her Democratic opponent, Katie Hobbs, on Jan. 2.Ms. Lake’s claims that officials in Maricopa County, Ariz., had deliberately caused ballot printers to malfunction in order to purposefully sway the election were rejected in December following a two-day trial in Phoenix. Ms. Lake has appealed the decision.Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson ordered Ms. Lake to pay $33,000 in fees to cover the cost of expert witnesses hired by Ms. Hobbs. More

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    Arizona Judge Rejects Kari Lake’s Effort to Overturn Her Election Loss

    Kari Lake, a Republican who was defeated by Katie Hobbs in the Arizona governor’s race, had made false election claims the centerpiece of her campaign.A state judge on Saturday rejected Kari Lake’s last-ditch effort to overturn her defeat in the Arizona governor’s race, dismissing for lack of evidence her last two claims of misconduct by Maricopa County election officials.The ruling, after a two-day trial in Phoenix that ended Thursday, follows more than six weeks of claims by Ms. Lake, a Republican, that she was robbed of victory last month — assertions that echoed the false contention that was at the heart of her campaign: that an even larger theft had stolen the 2020 presidential election from Donald J. Trump.Ms. Lake and her supporters conjured up what they called a deliberate effort by election officials in Maricopa County, the state’s largest county, to disenfranchise her voters. But they never provided evidence of such intentional malfeasance, nor even evidence that any voters had been disenfranchised.In a 10-page ruling, Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson acknowledged “the anger and frustration of voters who were subjected to inconvenience and confusion at voter centers as technical problems arose” in this year’s election.But he said his duty was “not solely to incline an ear to public outcry,” and noted that, in seeking to overturn Katie Hobbs’s victory by a 17,117-vote margin, Ms. Lake was pursuing a remedy that appeared unprecedented.“A court setting such a margin aside, as far as the Court is able to determine, has never been done in the history of the United States,” Judge Thompson wrote.He went on to rule flatly that Ms. Lake and the witnesses she called had failed to provide evidence of intentional misconduct that changed the election’s outcome.“Plaintiff has no free-standing right to challenge election results based upon what Plaintiff believes — rightly or wrongly — went awry on Election Day,” the judge wrote. “She must, as a matter of law, prove a ground that the legislature has provided as a basis for challenging an election.”Undaunted, Ms. Lake insisted her case had “provided the world with evidence that proves our elections are run outside of the law,” and said she would appeal “for the sake of restoring faith and honesty in our elections.”Ms. Lake, a former Phoenix television news anchor, lost to Ms. Hobbs, a Democrat who is the Arizona secretary of state, and who rose to national prominence when she resisted efforts by Trump loyalists to overturn the vote in 2020.The Aftermath of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6A moment of reflection. More