Republican U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake gave a stump speech followed by a question-and-answer session at American Legion Auxiliary Post No. 93 in Camp Verde on Friday, Aug. 9.
Lake defeated Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb in the GOP primary by 15.7 percentage points and will face U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego [D-District 3] in the November general election to fill seat being vacated by U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema [I-Ariz.] “I don’t know how we get this victory, if it comes in court, or we just go and swamp the damn vote so much that they can’t,” Lake said, discussing her unsuccessful litigation over the last two years regarding her 2022 gubernatorial loss to current Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, who won by 17,117 votes.
“What are they going to try to tell us, [Vice President] Kamala [Harris] got 200 million votes?” Lake immediately continued. “There’s only so much they can push their false narrative … [former President Donald Trump] told me this one day I called them. I said, ‘You’re not going to believe it. I have been to like this city and that city and these crowds are just unbelievable. I don’t see anybody who’s for the other side.’ He said, ‘Kari, 80% of the country is with us.’ And I thought, well, maybe he’s exaggerating a tiny bit … That was about a year ago. I really believe 80% of the country is with us.”
In Yavapai County, a Republican stronghold, Trump won 63.72% and 62.32% of the vote in 2020 and 2016 respectively. At no point during his presidency did Trump’s Gallup approval ratings rise above 50%.
“If it’s a fairly-run, legally-run election,” Lake responded to the Cottonwood Journal Extra when asked if she would concede if she loses again in November.
“The border czar has never been to the border,” Lake said on the selection of Harris to replace President Joe Biden on the Democratic presidential ticket. Biden quit his reelection campaign last month.
“During her tenure as border czar we’ve seen crossings go up by thousands of percentage points. We’ve seen an invasion unlike we’ve ever seen in our country before.” Lake also described Harris’s running mate for vice president, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, as “the guy who sat by and let his city burn.”
Lake rejected the results of an Aug. 8 poll by HighGround Public Affairs that showed Harris ahead by 2.8 points, within the margin of error “We just have to use that gut [feeling] that Trump is ahead,” Lake said. “We already know that I am ahead, but we got to use our, I don’t know if you call it women’s intuition. [But] if we call it that knowledge that we just get in the truth that God gives us, and realize that the media is full of it, and they’re losing their grip.”
She also said that her internal polling shows her ahead of Gallego. The HighGround poll shows Gallego up over Lake by 11 points.
In response to an audience question, Lake argued that the Latino community is naturally Republican because of their faith and work ethic and that unflattering media coverage is hindering GOP outreach to Latinos.
“What would your stance be on a commodity based cryptocurrency that isn’t necessarily run by the government, but maybe a private entity with government overwatch?” another attendee asked. “I’m definitely open to cryptocurrency, because I want to make sure whatever our currency is, it’s worth something,” Lake responded. “And I worry that what we have right now, and the people we have running the show right now, don’t care about the value of our dollar.”
Lake also called for constructing the proposed Keystone XL pipeline to “get our energy sector back up and running.”
The U.S Energy Information Administration stated on March 11 that “the United States produced more crude oil than any nation at any time, according to our international energy statistics, for the past six years in a row.”
“We’re going to need to pull back some of these crazy regulations that have been heaped on, primarily by Democratic politicians, to make it harder and harder to build housing,” Lake said on her housing policy to the Cottonwood Journal Extra. She proposed giving a $5,000 grant to graduating high school students who take employment in construction.
“I think it’s the fastest way to get the workforce, we need to do things like building homes and doing some of these other critical careers that we’re understaffed in.” Lake also attempted to connect a lack of housing availability to immigration.
“Would you just go to Ireland and set up shop illegally? And expect to be able to live there and get free housing and free health care?” Lake asked the audience. “No … We are a compassionate country. We got to start showing a little bit more compassion for the American citizen. Repatriating people back to their homeland is going to start happening in January of 2025.”
Lake voiced her support for the Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act that was cosponsored by U.S. Sen. Mike Lee [R-Utah], which would require Congress to ratify executive agency policies that affect the economy by more than $100 million. “Lee and I have vowed to each other that we’re going to do everything we can to get that through,” Lake said.
