Arizona Senate candidates Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., and Republican Kari Lake answer questions during the Arizona Clean Election Commission debate at BitFire Studios on Oct. 9, 2024 in Phoenix. Photo by Cheryl Evans | The Arizona Republic/Pool
Republican Kari Lake and Democrat Ruben Gallego both tried to convince Arizonans on Wednesday that they were the only reasonable choice for the U.S. Senate, while accusing the other of extremism.
“We’re getting the extreme makeover version of Ruben tonight,” said Lake, a former longtime Phoenix news anchor, who is endorsed by Donald Trump and a notorious purveyor of the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.
“She’s failed the basic test of honesty,” Gallego, a U.S. Marine who has represented the state’s 3rd Congressional District in the U.S. House since 2015, said.
Both candidates lobbed attacks at one another, with Lake mentioning Gallego’s father, a convicted drug dealer, and Gallego accusing Lake of spending more time wooing Donald Trump at Mar a Lago than at the border.
Lake repeatedly spoke over Gallego and the debate moderators.
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Lake claimed that she had moderated her stance on abortion since she praised a near-total ban on the procedure dating back to 1864 last year and Gallego dodged a question about whether he still considers himself a member of the progressive caucus.
Both are running for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Democrat-turned-independent Kyrsten Sinema, who did not run for reelection.
In 2022, Lake lost a bid for Arizona governor. She has been unsuccessfully fighting the outcome of that election ever since, and as recently as July, she still claimed she was the rightful governor of Arizona. Even so, Lake conceded to the court that she had lied about fraudulent ballots being counted in 2022 in a defamation lawsuit filed by Republican Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer.
But none of that is reason to doubt her honesty, she insisted during her sole debate against Gallego on Wednesday evening in Phoenix
“I’ve never lied to the people of Arizona,” Lake said.
Gallego countered that Lake will “say anything to win.”
Abortion
Gallego promised to codify the same protections that were guaranteed by Roe v. Wade into federal law, saying that a woman’s ZIP code should not determine her access to health care.
“It is absolutely abhorrent that my 15-month-old daughter has fewer rights over her body than her mother and her grandmother,” Gallego said.
Lake, in line with Trump’s promises on the campaign trail, said the issue should be left up to the states to decide, claiming she was in agreement with the late progressive Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Arizonans this fall will decide whether to codify abortion rights into the state constitution via the Arizona Abortion Access Act.
Lake said that, if she is elected, she would respect the will of the voters and would not vote for a federal abortion ban.
That’s a big shift from just two years ago when Lake declared she was “1,000% pro-life,” said abortion is “the ultimate sin” and “execution,” and called a 160 year old near-total abortion ban previously on the books in Arizona a “great law.”
The border
Lake said that a vote for her is a vote for border security, while a vote for Gallego would mean “tear(ing) open the borders.”
“We’ve got 20 million people pouring in, they’re taking jobs, they’re taking housing. This is why nobody can afford housing,” she said.
She claimed that 20 million undocumented immigrants have poured into the country during the Biden-Harris administration, including 400,000 convicted criminals.
But those numbers are false. A May 2023 study from the Center for Immigration Studies estimated that there were roughly 12.6 undocumented immigrants living in the United States, including about 2 million who arrived between 2021 and 2023.
Recent numbers released by Immigration and Customs Enforcement did show that the agency had more than 425,000 non-citizens convicted of crimes on its “non detained” list — but many of the people on the list didn’t come to the U.S. within the past four years, and some of them dated back four decades.
Gallego criticized Lake for speaking out against a bipartisan immigration and border security bill proposed in the U.S. Senate this year, saying she didn’t want to see any progress made on the issue because she needed to use border security as a talking point.
Lake said that her first priority in office would be to expedite the completion of Trump’s border wall. Gallego countered that he supported construction of a border wall in some areas, but that it would have to be backed up with increased manpower and technology for the wall to do any good.
The economy
Lake blamed inflation in Arizona and across the country on the American Rescue Plan, one of Biden’s COVID bills, which Gallego supported.
“Only the government can create inflation,” Lake said.
Although some economists agree that the plan did contribute to inflation, experts say that consumers would still be dealing with inflation spurred by the COVID pandemic, even if the plan hadn’t been implemented.
Gallego said he would ease the pressure on consumers by increasing the minimum wage to $15 per hour and tying increases to inflation, while also blocking mergers like one in the works between Albertsons and Kroger that would give the grocery giants a monopoly.
Lake said she would vote to extend the Trump tax cuts, while Gallego said he would support extending them only for the middle class, while discontinuing cuts for large corporations.
Following the debate, Lake did not take questions from the media, but sent surrogates to take questions from reporters, including Turning Point USA leader Charlie Kirk, her campaign manager and Mercedes Schlapp, with the Conservative Political Action Conference.
Schlapp criticized Gallego for only answering a few questions from reporters, adding that Lake’s “speaking directly to the people” of Arizona during the debate was sufficient.
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