MAGA election denier Kari Lake who’s running for U.S. Senate in Arizona after losing the 2022 gubernatorial election to Katie Hobbs is touting former President Donald Trump‘s landside win in yesterday’s Republican primary. Trump won 77.9% of the votes (451,704) in Arizona, notching 43 delegates.
To support the notion of Trump’s dominance in Arizona, Lake shared a video of an empty street, presumably in Arizona, and captioned it: “The streets would be lined with loud & happy supporters if Trump drove by—but with Biden it’s a ghost town. 81 million votes, my a**.”
The streets would be lined with loud & happy supporters if Trump drove by—but with Biden it’s a ghost town.
81 million votes, my ass. https://t.co/ArKSrizYzH
— Kari Lake (@KariLake) March 20, 2024
Note: President Biden won 89.5% of the votes (353,606) at yesterday’s Arizona Democratic primary.
What Lake, the Trump campaign, and the Republican National Committee (RNC) are not touting is that former GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley (former South Carolina governor and Trump’s former US ambassador to the United Nations) won 18.7% of the votes (108,108) after suspending her campaign two weeks ago.
Add Biden’s 353,606 with Haley’s 108,108 and it’s more than 461k votes, which would trump Trump’s 451k in the state that has traditionally gone Republican in presidential elections. Note: The 2016 election saw Donald Trump win by a narrower margin than other recent GOP nominees and in 2020 Joe Biden won the state by 0.3%.
There is no indication, of course, that Biden — whatever the disatisfaction with Trump among a subset of GOP primary voters — could capture Haley’s share in a general election. But the Haley vote represents a wildcard in the Grand Canyon state that MAGA forces like Lake and the RNC aren’t talking about.