The far-right Trump supporter Kari Lake still refuses to accept her defeat in the 2022 race for Arizona governor but will nonetheless run for US Senate next year.
“We need to get a senator in there who is going to fight back and put America first,” the Republican told the Wall Street Journal.
A campaign announcement is expected on 10 October, NBC News reported.
Lake’s declaration sets up a three-way battle for a seat that could decide control of the Senate, currently held by Democrats 51-49.
The incumbent, Kyrsten Sinema, is a former Democrat who now sits as an independent. The most likely Democratic challenger is Ruben Gallego, a congressman and member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
Lake lost last year’s Arizona gubernatorial race to the Democrat Katie Hobbs, but refused to concede defeat, claiming electoral fraud. She told the Journal she would continue to fight that quixotic battle, saying: “I’m a mom, I can multi-task.”
The Journal also said Lake would head for Washington next week, to meet “Republicans across the ideological spectrum”.
“I’d like to meet them to show them that I’m a very reasonable person who loves my state,” she said.
Lake has, however, attained national prominence from the far right of her party, seeing her name raised as a possible running mate for Donald Trump should he win the Republican nomination again next year. In California on Wednesday night, she performed surrogate duties for Trump at a primary debate that he skipped.
Steve Daines of Montana, the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which oversees candidate selection, told the Journal that Lake was “a talented campaigner with an impressive ability to fire up the grassroots”.
Unmentioned – as in Lake’s recent book, Unafraid – were Lake’s documented donations to John Kerry and Barack Obama, and reported campaigning for the latter Democratic candidate for president, before she became an ardent Republican.
Arizona’s other sitting US senator, the former astronaut Mark Kelly, is a Democrat. But the state has become a key battleground in congressional and presidential elections.
Sinema infuriated progressives by blocking voting rights reform, among other issues, before changing her affiliation last year. She has not yet announced a re-election run.
A three-way race would almost certainly split the non-Republican vote. As the progressive strategist Rachel Bitecofer recently pointed out: “91% of Arizona Republicans voted for Kari Lake in 2022 and they’ll do so again in 2024. It’s our vote that will split.”
That mirrors concerns at the presidential level about the possible impact of a third-party candidate on a likely Biden-Trump rematch.
On Thursday, Axios pointed to a possible upside of a Lake candidacy: “The race will have implications in the presidential campaign and give President Biden an opportunity to run against the ‘ultra Maga’ mindset that Lake represents.”
A spokesperson for Gallego told the Journal that Lake’s “extremism should disqualify her from public office – and it will. Again.”
