Ruben Gallego in August 2024. Photo by Gage Skidmore | Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0
U.S. Congressman Ruben Gallego will be Arizona’s newest senator, according to the Associated Press, which called the race for Gallego Monday night.
Almost a week after Election Day, with more than 93% of votes in the state counted, Marine veteran and Democrat Gallego was 2.2 percentage points and 72,626 votes ahead of Lake, a Trump-endorsed Republican and former Phoenix television news anchor.
“Growing up the way I did in the environment I did, growing up poor, being here is something that was literally a dream,” Gallego said during a celebratory press conference Monday night.
His supporters cheered as he reminded them he would be the first Latino senator from Arizona.
“As hard as I fought in the Marines, I will fight as hard for Arizona in Washington, D.C.,” Gallego said.
He promised to work to fix the broken immigration system, as well as to help lower costs for housing, gas and groceries.
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Lake did not concede or make any public statements after the race was called for Gallego.
Even as she ran for Senate, Lake continued to unsuccessfully challenge the results of the 2022 gubernatorial race that she lost by more than 17,000 votes to Democrat Katie Hobbs. Two years later, a day after the Nov. 5 election, the Arizona Supreme Court dismissed her final appeal request.
As vote tallies slowly trickled in over the last six days, Gallego maintained a fluctuating lead over Lake, but pulled further ahead as more votes that favored him were tallied in Maricopa County. Gallego defeated Lake in Maricopa, which is home to some 60% of the state’s voters, by about 5 percentage points.
Gallego increased his lead over Lake significantly on Sunday and Monday, from Saturday when he was up only 1.5 percentage points and 45,054 votes.
As of Monday night, Arizona had tabulated more than 3.2 million ballots, according to the Secretary of State’s Office, and had more than 179,000 left to go.
Lake’s campaign undertook an aggressive effort to recruit volunteers to encourage voters to cure any issues with their ballot so that they could be counted, such as verifying their signature on an early ballot envelope if it had been flagged as inconsistent with previous signatures.
The curing deadline ended Sunday, after the Arizona Supreme Court rejected a request from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Campaign Legal Center, which requested an extension to give voters more time to cure their ballots.
But none of the counties charged with counting the ballots that responded to the high court requested more time for curing, The Hill reported. The ACLU claimed that more than 60,000 ballots had yet to be processed by Sunday’s deadline and therefore could not have been contacted, but counties claimed they all made efforts to contact voters whose signatures were questioned.
Some of Lake’s most ardent followers shared baseless rumors in the days after the election that Democrats were attempting to “steal” a win from Lake. That echoed Lake’s false statements when she lost the 2022 race for Arizona governor to Democrat Katie Hobbs, as well as her evidence-free claims that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump.
Gallego has represented the state’s 3rd Congressional District in the U.S. House since 2015.
He ran on a platform of making life more affordable for the middle and working class, abortion rights and measured increases in border security that include increased manpower and better use of technology.
Lake toed the MAGA line during her campaign, calling for completed construction of Trump’s border wall, mass deportation of undocumented immigrants and an extension of Trump’s tax cuts.
Lake sought to align Gallego with Democratic President Joe Biden and what she called his “open borders,” while Gallego reminded voters that Lake had drastically moderated her stance on abortion in the past year.
In the coming year, Lake faces the prospect of paying yet-to-be determined damages to Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, after she legally conceded fault in his defamation suit regarding Lake’s false claims that Richer helped rig the 2022 governor’s race against her.
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