Does Lake Really Run for Real Power? Why many GOP candidates think it is too late to win the 2020 election, or why he doesn’t
The CNN poll, which was released on Wednesday, showed that most Republicans don’t think Biden won the election.
It isn’t a surprise that a lot of Republicans running for office believe this. Could any of the candidates run states where elections tend to be close? For the most part, the answer is no. Most election deniers running for governor have only a small chance of winning or are from states former President Donald Trump easily won.
Lake is well known and runs for real power when it comes to elections, but it is still a competative place. Two election certification officials in Arizona will deny the reality of a 2020 election if she and Finchem win.
Three polls out this past week were all close to being within the margin of error. A CBS News/YouGov poll had Lake and Hobbs tied at 49%. Fox’s poll put Lake at 45% and Hobbs at 44%. Marist College had Lake at 46% and Hobbs at 45%.
Lake is running considerably stronger than Blake Masters, the the state’s GOP nominee for US Senate. Masters trails his opponent by 5 points in the average of all polling.
Losing gubernatorial campaigns in swing or blue states have been a hallmark of 2020 election denial. Blue-state Republicans Dan Cox in Maryland and Geoff Diehl in Massachusetts are getting blown out by their opponents in the polls, even though the current and departing governors of their respective states are Republicans.
You might be tempted to think that Lake has a chance because voters in the Grand Canyon State believe the 2020 election was stolen. It does not look like that is the case. A Fox survey found that only 22% of voters think votes in the 2020 election will be fair.
Only a tiny percentage of voters think the upcoming election in Arizona will be fair and accurate. 23% are not sure, while the vast majority are sure it will be.
Nevada Democrats Need a Red Wave, And They Are Going to Be Frozen. But What Do They Tell Us About Their Electoral Candidates?
Lake has a secret. She used to be a television anchor and part of it may be that is is is paying off. She seems to be doing a good enough job reaching voters in the middle of the electorate.
Republican candidates are in a dead heat with Democratic incumbents for governor, Senate, House and several state-wide offices in large part by making fresh inroads with Latino voters. In the final days of the 2022 campaign, Nevada is proving to be the most competitive state in the country.
It’s also the case that Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson voted against certifying the 2020 election and is a slight favorite to win another term against Democratic Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes. Likewise, Nevada’s Adam Laxalt has raised questions about the 2020 election and played a leading role in post-election legal efforts to reverse Biden’s victory in the state. He is in a run for a seat with a Democratic senator.
If the next presidential election is between Biden and Trump it will make a big deal out of Arizona being in the mix again.
Nevada holds promise and peril for Democrats. Democrats are fighting to hold on to the coalition of multi-ethnic people in a purple state so they don’t lose to the Republicans.
Latino voters in Nevada vote Democratic. Donald Trump won 35% of the Latino vote here in 2020, and lost the state by about 2 points. However, small inroads with this voting bloc by Republicans could swing tight races in their favor. “We’re going to have a red wave because we’re focused on the issues that concern Latinos,” said Jesus, who is a conservative activist in the state and advises Adam Laxalt’s campaign.
Progressive activist LaLo Montoya estimates he’s knocked on 10,000 doors around Las Vegas in the months leading up to Election Day. He told NPR that he was hoping to motivate and inspire people when he did this.
PLAN Action is a progressive group that focuses on helping low and moderate income families. He’s like many of the Democrats in Nevada. I’m very nervous about everything, I think we do our best. We’re going up against a lot of misinformation.
In a state that’s been hit hard by inflation the Republican candidates are focused on the economy. Even Democratic voters like retiree Mike Sanchez concede life is pretty punishing right now in this predominantly working class state, with skyrocketing housing costs and the second highest gas prices in the country. It’s high all over. You go anywhere. nchez said it’s a problem.
“Because Democrats just kind of seem like they’re not helping them out,” she said. “They’re not going to make people want to like join the (police force) by like demoting their pay.”
Ruy Teixeira is a liberal scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute who has studied shifting demographics and how they can change politics. He says Democrats face a two-fold problem with Latinos right now: the party is not meeting their economic needs in real-time, and many feel socially alienated from the party’s values. “The Democratic Party has become a much more culturally liberal party, pretty much down the line: race, gender, crime, immigration, what’s taught in the schools, you name it.”
Democrats likewise see Latinos at the heart of their party’s future. Democrats in the state are lobbying the Democratic National Committee to change the presidential nominating calendar to make Nevada the new first-in-the-nation state for 2024.
Defiance is on the Way of the 2020 Election: Detecting Trump in Maricopa County, Fla. Using a Photo of Cyber Ninjas
The voters who poured into a Phoenix high school to hear from former President Barack Obama were looking to send a message of defiance Wednesday night.
They said they are determined to defeat former President Donald Trump’s hand-picked slate of election deniers – including gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake, Senate nominee Blake Masters and Secretary of State nominee Mark Finchem – and will not allow their state’s voters to be intimidated by activists who turned up to monitor ballot drop boxes late last month – some of them armed, masked and wearing camouflage.
As president joe Biden said in his speech in Washington DC that democracy is at stake, it is in Arizona where democratic institutions are the most fragile, in a state that is likely to be a pivotal battleground in the upcoming presidential election.
Maricopa County was the site of repeated “audits” after the 2020 election – including the sham partisan review conducted by the now-defunct firm known as Cyber Ninjas. Both political parties are now girding for another potential battle over the election results in a state Biden won by less than 10,500 votes. And the GOP candidates at the top of the ticket are setting that tone.
Joann Rodriguez, a registered Democrat from Maricopa County, said it was scary that “radical Republicans” in her state were able to elevate candidates like Lake and Masters, who won their primaries in part by echoing Trump’s falsehoods about the 2020 election.
“What are they running on, aside from Trump’s talking points that the election was stolen?” Rodriguez said something. She said a lot of Trumpers are driving their trucks with flags around her neighborhood. “And they’re walking around with guns on their hips, showing up at the ballot boxes or showing up at the election sites – for what reason? Is it possible that their intimidation tactics are going to work?
The First Lady of Arizona: Barack Obama Arrived at a Midterm Election in a Dead Heat with Lake. A Conversation with Jacobi and Greenberg
Hobbs touted her record as secretary of state Wednesday night. “I stood for democracy when I refused to give into the insurrectionists who surrounded my home after I certified the 2020 election and I’m still doing it today in this race for governor,” she said.
A poll released this week shows her in a dead heat race with Lake. Nathan L. Gonzalez rates the race as a toss-up.
The state was on edge as Obama arrived in Arizona less than a week before the midterm election to campaign for fellow Democrats, including Sen. Mark Kelly, who is in a close race with Masters. The fact that those top statewide contests may be decided on a razor’s edge is what brought Obama to the Grand Canyon State as he seeks to fire up the Democratic base and make sure that young voters and Latino voters – who will be critical to victory in Arizona – turn out in a midterm election year.
The fate of democracy is being argued about by both Biden and Obama but the VP had to argue from the opposite side of the country since he wasn’t invited to campaign in top swing states.
The political climate and concerns about the integrity of the election results is what brought a registered Republicans to Obama’s rally. He told an interviewer he was voting against the Trump ticket because he wasn’t voting for Democrats.
Greenberg stated that the Republican Party today is not the same as he is a part of. “That’s more like the American Nazi Party and I can’t put up with that – the lie.”
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/03/politics/arizona-election-deniers-kari-lake-obama-midterms/index.html
The Arizona Legislature is a Tinkerbox of Election Controversies: A First Look at Attorney-General Robertson-Jacobi Appeals
Arizona’s status as a tinderbox of election controversies is underscored by the fact that two lawsuits have already been filed in federal court on behalf of voters who felt intimidated by the aggressive patrols at ballot drop boxes late last month.
Because of the ruling, the group’s members are also now barred from speaking to or yelling at voters who drop off their ballots, and they may not photograph or film voters at the drop boxes. The Justice Department weighed in on a case that was brought by the League of Women Voters. In a legal brief submitted to the federal government, federal prosecutors said the right-wing group’s “vigilante ballot security” efforts were likely illegal and raised serious concerns of voter intimidation.
That dynamic is even more pronounced in a state like Arizona where Trump acolytes control the Republican Party and have censured figures like outgoing Republican Gov. Doug Ducey and former Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake for what they said was insufficient loyalty to the former president.
Michelle Gonzales, a registered Democrat from Maricopa County, said she believes that people came to see Obama Wednesday night “so they could feel hopeful” about the democratic process amid all the noise.
“With everything, all the rhetoric going on, I think it’s important to really hear from someone – that we trust and we believe in – that we can be hopeful about this election,” she said. There are a lot of people outside here. Thousands of people waiting. I just want to believe that people want to believe in something better – that they have morals and values that we all should have as human beings and not elect these liars and con people.”
Counting Election Ballots in Key Midterm Election Campaigns: Benson, Benson and Karamo in Michigan, and Washoe, Nevada
Secretary of state contests — typically low-profile races that determine who helps administer elections in a state – have drawn national attention and millions of dollars in political spending this year as several Republican nominees who doubt the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election pursue the jobs.
But the presence of election deniers on general election ballots in key battlegrounds has set off alarms for voting rights advocates because of the pivotal role these offices will play in affirming the outcome of future elections, including a potential 2024 rematch between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.
Georgia: The Georgia contest features one of the country’s best-known election chiefs – Republican Brad Raffensperger, who refused Trump’s request to “find” the votes needed to overturn his loss in the Peach State. A special grand jury is investigating that campaign by Trump and his allies.
Michigan: The race pits the incumbent, Democrat Jocelyn Benson – a leading national voice countering election denial – against Republican Kristina Karamo, who has made false claims about the 2020 election and who was behind the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.
Karamo, a community college professor who secured an endorsement from Trump last year, has said he won the election, and she signed on to an unsuccessful Supreme Court lawsuit that challenged Biden’s victory in four states.
Election officials in the swing state of Arizona are still processing and counting hundreds of thousands of ballots cast during this year’s midterm elections, leaving the results of key races in limbo.
In Maricopa County, about 180,000 ballots will be turned in on Election Day. When I was there it was the standard number.
In Washoe County, Nevada’s second-most populous, there were about 10,000 ballots counted on Friday, and CNN estimates there are roughly 12,000 remaining.
Arizona’s Elections Management: “That’s a Way of Life,” a Former World War II Veteran Revealed by Gates
Some smaller rules and procedures are different between Arizona and Florida, but it’s mostly the same when it comes to deadlines and processing rules. Regardless, Florida has become a popular point of comparison for those on the political right criticizing Arizona’s elections management.
Whatever the reason, election officials have to process and tabulate all those ballots. bipartisan teams will check signatures and ballots.
Gates said that it was offensive for Lake to say that the people behind him were slow-rolling when they were working long hours.
Protesters turned out to be a problem for the vote counting center in 2020. Gates said the threats have continued for the members of the elections board.
He explained that the method of life he and his colleagues have is now a way of life. “It shouldn’t be for all the election workers and election officials across the country, but that is now a way of life.”
I would tell them to stop and think about my grandpa. My grandpa was a World War II veteran who was in Europe,” Gates said. He was not fighting for someone’s right to text someone or pick up a phone. He was fighting for the right of each and every one of us to vote and select our own leaders. So my grandpa would not be cool with that.”
Delaying the 2020 Election: The Innocuous Truth About Reply to Corrupt Corrupt Practices in Arizona and a Partisan Attack on the Left
Control of the US House still hangs in the balance. But it is clear that even if Republicans win a majority, it will be by a far more slender margin than GOP leaders had hoped. Kevin McCarthy had hoped to become the next House majority leader but the unexpected outcome has caused recriminations and second-guessing on his part.
GOP sources said that it is unlikely that McConnell would delay next week’s leadership contests as he is locked down enough support to remain leader.
The biggest reason the vote counting is taking so long is the way that each state handles the ballots outside of those cast at polling places on Election Day, including both early votes and mail-in ballots.
When races are within a percentage point or two, those outstanding ballots are enough to keep the election from being projected. Of course, the lag was anticipated – it took news organizations until the Saturday after Election Day in 2020 to declare Joe Biden the winner in the presidential race, following a massive increase in mail-in voting amid the pandemic.
In Arizona, CNN and other news networks have not called the Senate race between a Democrat and a Republican or the governor’t race between a Democrat and a Republican.
Gates thinks the county will be done counting by early next week if they continue to tally around 60,000 to 80,000 ballots a day.
Some of the criticisms and conspiracy theories are similar to the wild and baseless allegations that were made in Arizona after the 2020 election, such as false claims about felt-tipped Sharpies.
There were false claims on the internet that a woman wearing glasses in the counting facility was the Democratic nominee for governor and current secretary of state.
The GOP gubernatorial nominee who embraces former President Donald Trump’s lies that the 2020 election was stolen said on a right-wing talk show Thursday that he hates that they’re dragging their feet and delaying the inevitable. They don’t want to put out the truth, which is that we won.” There is no evidence that the election officials were deliberately delaying the reporting of results.
Counting Mail-In Ballots in Nevada & Arizona: Attorney General and Secretary of State Jamie Rodriguez and the Oath Keepers Campaign
If mail-in ballots are postmarked by the day before the election, then Nevada state law allows them to be received through Saturday. But many ballots now arriving are being disqualified because they were postmarked after Election Day.
Jamie Rodriguez, interim registrar of votes for Washoe County, said the county disqualified 400 mail-in ballots on Thursday – about two-thirds of the mail-in ballots the county received – because they were postmarked late.
The California Republican is in for a fight if he fails to win support from the pro- Trump House Freedom Caucus that is withholding their support for his speakership bid.
House Freedom Caucus Chair Scott Perry met with McCarthy in his office on Friday. He said that he didn’t know if McCarthy has the caucus’ support for speaker.
The razor-thin elections for Nevada’s Senate seat and Arizona’s governorship have yet to be called on Saturday as counties in both states work to whittle down the tens of thousands of ballots that still need to be counted.
The attorney general race is on the ballot, as well as a railed against the news media by Mr. Hamadeh, who is going against Democrat Kris Mayes. And in the race for secretary of state, Mr. Finchem, a Trump-backed conspiracy theorist who has identified himself as a member of the Oath Keepers militia group in the past, is trailing Adrian Fontes, a Democrat and the former recorder of the state’s largest county, Maricopa.
Ms. Lake and Mr. Masters have made predictions on the social media site. Ms. Lake told Fox News that she had a lot of faith in her ability to be the next governor of Arizona. Mr. Hamadeh, after taking a small lead in his uncalled race, posted a photo on Twitter of himself at a rally and seemed to claim victory, writing, “I want to thank the people of Arizona for entrusting me with this great responsibility.” He has lost some ground and is still in a close race.
According to the email sent to supporters on Thursday, the Masters campaign has seen troubling issues during the election and asked for contributions to help with legal battles.
On Twitter, Mr. Finchem jokingly asked his followers to “make sure” Ms. Hobbs and Mr. Fontes weren’t “in the back room with ballots in Pima or Maricopa.” Mr. Fontes responded by writing, “Stop with this conspiracy garbage.”
Both Ms. Hobbs and Mr. Fontes have called on supporters to respect the vote-counting process. The pattern of incoming votes are what we expected, according to Ms. Hobbs.
The final results could take longer because of a new Arizona law that requires an automatic recount in electoral contests where the margin between the top two candidates was less than 0.25 percent.
An adviser at the Democracy Fund, Tammy Patrick was an election official for ten years and worked mostly as a federal compliance officer. A lot of voters in the state of Arizona live in Maricopa, the home of Phoenix.
The nuts and bolts of elections in Arizona don’t have changed much according to Patrick. But she says voter behavior and political realities have.
Patrick thinks that this distrust could be the reason more voters decide to drop off their ballot at a polling site on Election Day.
Patrick thinks that an “extraction” machine could speed up the process. Many counties in Florida, in particular, use an inhouse device that cuts the top of an envelope with a laser and then opens the envelope with air, which makes it much easier to remove the ballot.
Voters must correct their mail ballot problems if it is to be counted. This can mean validating that a ballot is truly from them by adding a missing signature, or by addressing signature-match issues. The deadline for voters to “cure” their ballots in Nevada is Monday, November 14, according to state law.
A State Senator’s View of Rural Elections: Reply to the RNC, Arizona, and the Arizona Attorney General Robertson-C. Gates
Addressing the specific accusations from the RNC statement, Gates said: “I would prefer that if there are concerns that they have, that they communicate those to us here. I’m a Republican. Three of my colleagues are Republicans. If you want to make baseless claims, you should raise these issues with us.
“The suggestion by the Republican National Committee that there is something untoward going on here in Maricopa County is absolutely false and again, is offensive to these good elections workers,” he said.
On Friday night, the RNC and the Republican Party of Arizona tweeted a statement criticizing the county’s process, and demanding that it require “around-the-clock shifts of ballot processing” until all of the votes are counted, along with “regular, accurate public updates.” The groups warned that they would not hesitate to take legal action.
It usually takes between 10 and 12 days to complete the count. That’s not because of anything Maricopa County has decided to do. Because of how Arizona law is set up, we follow the law to make sure our count is accurate, this is what we do here at Maricopa County.
The Arizona officials, who have sought to conduct a hand count audit of rural election results, are in talks about a scaled down version of the plan that may cause chaos and delay in certifying the state’s results.
On Thursday, a state appeals court made clear in a 2-1 vote that it would not be reversing a court order barring the full hand count in time for the plan to be revived for the midterms. But a lawyer for Cochise County The county isn’t giving up on its attempts to conduct hand conduct that goes beyond usual procedures according to recorder David Stevens.
The Night of Kelly: The Case for a Long-Term Democratic Resurrection: The Nevada Senate GOP’s Joe Lombardo Governor
In the days leading up to the Senate GOP elections next week, Trump plans to blame McConnell and try to unify the opposition to the Kentucky Republican according to CNN.
With Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly’s victory on Friday night, Democrats are just one seat away from keeping control of the US Senate as all eyes turn to neighboring Nevada, where the competitive Senate race is increasingly trending in Democrats’ direction.
A string of Democratic wins Friday night marked a stunning reversal of fortune for a party that had appeared to be in serious trouble. Candidates like Kelly and Cortez Masto were laboring under President Joe Biden’s low approval ratings, an unfavorable economic climate – with inflation and high gas prices pinching the budgets of families all across the country – and facing historical trends that tend to lead to steep losses in the first midterm cycle of a new president.
But this has been a complex cycle with many different crosscurrents affecting voter behavior, including the Supreme Court’s decision in June overturning abortion rights that angered many voters across the country. The Republicans were hindered by Trump’s decision to boost far right candidates who were too extreme to appeal to the swing voters who decide elections. In the end, many independent voters and moderates appear to have rejected candidates they viewed as too extreme or too closely aligned with Trump – and Democrats turned out in droves to protect their incumbent candidates.
GOP voters in Nevada elected Joe Lombardo as their next governor, ousting Democrat Steve Sisolak, CNN projected. The unemployment rate in Nevada had peaked at over 30%, and Lombardo reminded voters of their struggles. Though the economy has rebounded, Lombardo had argued that Sisolak’s policies had been too restrictive and had hampered the state’s economic recovery.
The 2020 Maricopa County Election Commission Reports to CNN Investigating a Candidate Called by the Trump Electorate and Critique of Election Denialism
A spokeswoman with the Maricopa County Elections Department told CNN’s Kyung Lah the county office has “redundancies in place that help us ensure each legal ballot is only counted once.”
“Because ballots are tabulated by batch, we are able to isolate the results from those specific locations and reconcile the total ballots against check-ins to ensure it matches. The practice of doing this with political party observers has been in place for many years, the spokesman said.
Bill Gates, the chair of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, rejected Masters’ suggestion that the county should wipe the slate clean and start counting over again, stating that “is simply not allowed for under Arizona law.” The pace of the counting is the same every year.
Gates stated that if they have issues they want to take to court, they have every right to do that.
With his strong personal brand and his ability to raise money, as well as his ties to Giffords, Kelly entered the cycle well poised to beat the Democrats in the purple state of Arizona.
Masters, a first-time candidate, was able to navigate the GOP primary gauntlet with significant financial backing from conservative tech billionaire Peter Thiel, his former boss. He appealed to Republicans by promising to prioritize immigration issues, and in a campaign video released last year, he said he believed Trump won the 2020 presidential election.
But Masters seemed to reverse course after receiving a phone call from Trump urging him to “go stronger” on election denialism, a conversation that was captured in a Fox documentary. In the final week of the campaign, Masters told CNN’s Lah he didn’t believe moderates were bothered by his comments about the 2020 election, insisting that voters were far more focused on their concerns about inflation, crime and the border.
Masters had said he would support a national ban on abortion after 15 weeks, a proposal that was advanced by South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham. That bill includes exceptions for rape, incest and to protect the life of the mother.
Mathematical Aspects of Election Day, Election Weekend, and the Politics of a Candidate in the Arizona Senate Race
It’s Saturday, and election workers are still tallying the votes in pivotal races across the country. Here’s what to know as Election Day turns into Election Weekend:
Masters is a candidate in the Arizona Senate race, and he was one of three people who criticized the tabulation process on Friday.