Tim Steller's column: Arizona's GOP voters should seek alternative to Kari Lake

The spin started circulating last week, right after Kari Lake admitted she was liable for defamation.

Lake is the leading candidate for the GOP nomination for U.S. Senate, and she’s a favorite of the MAGA crowd, so some were quick to say the admission wasn’t what it seemed.

Even lawyer Abe Hamadeh, a Lake supporter who narrowly lost the 2022 election for Arizona attorney general, tried to explain it away.

“Kari Lake called Richer and his army of Soros attorneys (sic) bluff,” Hamadeh said on X, the former Twitter. “A default isn’t a surrender or an admission of guilt. She outmaneuvered Richer. She’s telling him to put his cards on the table.”

Actually, the default is an admission — that in her many claims that Richer deliberately rigged the 2022 election, she defamed him. As someone who has recently fought hard and won a libel lawsuit against me, I can’t imagine admitting liability in such a case willingly.

And it is hard to believe that Republicans would defend her admittedly defamatory attacks on Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer. She repeatedly said that he deliberately printed Maricopa County ballots on the wrong size paper and “injected” 300,000 illegal ballots into the race — even after that was shown to be baseless in her own lawsuits over the election.

Such an admission should matter. But beyond the legal questions, the episode also brings up political questions, like why Lake remains so popular among Republicans when there are others who don’t carry the heavy baggage she does.

Lake has so dominated discussion of the U.S. Senate race, that many casual observers probably don’t even realize there is competition for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate. Lake has encouraged this by describing this as a two-way race between her and Democratic U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego.

In fact, 18 Republicans submitted statements of interest to run for the party’s nomination, and some fraction of that number will turn in enough signatures to make the primary election ballot. Two have turned in signatures so far — Lake and Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb.

Gallego is the only Democrat who has turned in signatures before the April 1 deadline.

However many Republicans end up on the primary ballot, none will have such a recent courthouse admission of wrongdoing as she does.

Alternatives to Kari Lake

I consulted a professor at the University of Arizona’s James E. Rogers College of Law to be sure I was reading these court documents right. That professor, Christopher Griffin, said “there may be a difference between accepting responsibility and admitting liability.”

Lake has clearly done the latter while trying not to do the former. In fact, in a video put out after accepting default judgment against her, Lake claimed that “I won’t be taking part” in the lawsuit anymore.

It was as if the lawsuit were beneath her dignity. But in fact, her lawyers spelled out a strategy of trying to go after Richer’s medical records as part of an effort to minimize damages in the next stage of the case — she’ll definitely be taking part.

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“By having this default, you’re going to move straight to a hearing on what the damages would be,” Griffin said. “The position taken by the Lake motion is, ‘We think you’re going to have a hard time proving a causal link between the statements made and the harms you’re alleging.’ “

Maybe Richer will have a hard time showing that link, and maybe not. But isn’t it weird that more people aren’t talking about alternatives to Lake? Like her avatar Trump, she seems to suck up all the attention in her vicinity, even when there are other candidates.

Lamb is the most viable, but probably would take a distant second place to Lake if the election were held today. In a February poll published by Noble Predictive Insights, the survey of 1,002 registered voters found that Republicans preferred Lake to Lamb by a 54 % to 21 % margin.

However, in that same poll, among all voters not just Republicans, 49 % of them viewed Lake negatively, while 40 % viewed her positively. Lamb’s favorability was 47 %, versus 26 % unfavorability.

In other words, Lake’s candidacy is a special taste savored by Republicans but spit out by most others.

Constant attention for Lake

Lamb’s campaign advisor, Ed Morabito, told me part of his candidate’s problem is that Lake attracts so much attention from the news media and bigwigs outside Arizona. Donald Trump has endorsed Lake, as have 19 GOP U.S. senators and the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

“Our campaign is robust,” Morabito said. “The challenge is that the media gives Kari Lake a large megaphone. A lot of folks outside the state, including the NRSC, they’ve endorsed Kari.”

The chair of the Pima County Republican Party, Dave Smith, likened the choice for Republicans to that of “a coach with two No. 1 draft picks, both in the quarterback position. What do I do? I like them both.”

Both Lake and Lamb, he noted, have charisma and appeal to GOP primary voters.

“Part of the beauty of this campaign is we’re seeing two different forms of charisma in two quality people,” he said.

Now, I am, of course, not a fan of Lake — especially for her many lies about the election results of 2022. Last week’s events mean we can say that she has admitted those were lies.

As a person who leans left politically, I’m not a big fan of Lamb either. He’s built his career, as former Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu tried to before him, on alarmism about the U.S.-Mexico border. I particularly take exception to his baseless claim that border-crossers get gift cards worth up to $5,000 when they cross into the United States.

But at least Lamb has won elections — two of them — as compared to Lake’s none. And most importantly this week, he hasn’t defamed anyone in the process of claiming that he won elections that he lost.

I’d hope that Republican voters would take this into account and reject the spin that her lies don’t matter.