Democrats increase leads in Arizona's top four statewide races

All four Democrats in Arizona's top statewide races increased their margins over their Republican rivals when the latest vote totals were released Thursday night. The latest percentages are:

U.S. Senate: Sen. Mark Kelly, D, 51.7%; Blake Masters, R, 46.1%.

Governor: Katie Hobbs, D, 51.7%; Kari Lake, R, 49.3%.

Secretary of state: Adrian Fontes, D, 52.7%; Mark Finchem, R, 47.3%.

Attorney general: Kris Mayes, D, 50.4%; Abe Hamadeh, R, 49.6%.

All of those races remain too close to call due to the number of ballots still to be counted.

Remaining ballots could skew more Republican  

Meanwhile, the question of who will be the next governor will likely come down to which voters waited until the last minute to drop off their early ballots.

The answer could swing the election to Republican Kari Lake.

As of Thursday evening, Democrat Katie Hobbs had a 26,879-vote lead over Lake out of more than 2 million ballots counted so far.

But there are still about 500,000 ballots yet to be counted. And the biggest batch of those — close to 290,000 in Maricopa County alone — were those day-of-election drop-offs which are among the last to be tallied.

That’s significant because some Republican candidates urged supporters to deliver their ballots on Election Day this year.

The strategy was based on baseless claims, going back to the 2020 election, that election officials were monitoring the early votes as they came in to see how many fake ballots they would need to inject in the system to rig the election. The idea was to provide them with less time to do that.

If GOP faithful followed through, a big chunk of those day-of drop-offs would skew to Lake — and, potentially, to other Republican candidates whose vote tallies have been running behind those of Democrats.

“I think we all know how the majority of those people were going to vote,’’ Lake said Thursday about those last-minute voters, on a talk show run by conservative Charlie Kirk.

Where top races stand

The way results are released has not changed in years.

The first numbers — the ones posted an hour after the polls close — are ballots from people who mailed them in early enough so they could be processed and counted before Election Day. The record has shown those early returns skew Democratic, even before the latest exhortations by some in the GOP that their party faithful wait until the last minute.

That’s what enabled the first results Tuesday night to show Hobbs with 56.7% of the vote, a figure that was down to 50.7% by Thursday evening.

Ditto the strong lead on election night for Kris Mayes, the Democratic contender for attorney general. But on Thursday, her lead over Republican Abe Hamadeh was just 16,414 votes.

That's also true of state schools chief Kathy Hoffman. While the Democratic incumbent took the lead with the latest count, she is edging out Republican Tom Horne by fewer than 4,000 votes.

All three Democrats could find themselves swamped if what's left to be counted — mostly those early ballots dropped off on Election Day — break for their Republican foes by even 1 percentage point.

Other Republicans at the top of the ticket, however, would need a really strong GOP edge in the remaining votes to emerge successful.

Back to homepage

Subscriber Login

Keep reading with a digital access subscription.

Subscribe now

Incumbent U,S. Sen. Mark Kelly, a Tucson Democrat, was leading Republican Blake Masters by almost 115,000 votes on Thursday evening, with Democrat Adrian Fontes ahead of Republican Mark Finchem by more than 109,000 in the race for secretary of state.

Those numbers also show that some people who voted for Lake and Hamadeh could not support Masters and Finchem.

At least 60% of the ballots remaining to be counted, including those dropped off on Election Day, would need to include votes for Masters and Finchem for them to win.

Lake still criticizing election officials

Lake, in her Thursday talk show appearance, did not accuse anyone of misconduct and trying to rig the final tallies. She said, though, there are reasons to raise questions about elections.

“They’re not being run properly,’’ Lake said. “It’s hurting our state, it’s hurting our people, it’s hurting the faith we have in our system. And we are going to reform it.’’

In fact, she promised that if she wins, on her first day in office she will call a special legislative session to make changes in election laws.

If nothing else, Lake contended the order in which results are released has been a conscious decision by election officials to “pour cold water on this movement’’ and promote the idea trough a cooperative media that the “red wave’’ some Republicans including Donald Trump forecast had fizzled.

Lake singled out the chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, Bill Gates, and County Recorder Stephen Richer for special criticism, although both are her fellow Republicans.

“They are controlling the narrative of election night in this great country and withholding and slow-rolling the results,’’ she said. “I think it’s despicable.’’

At a news conference Thursday, Gates lashed out at Lake's allegation that the county is purposely working to release numbers slowly.

"Kari Lake is saying that because because, frankly, she hasn't followed elections as much as I have for the past 20 years,'' he said, pointing out that before he was an elected official, he was a lawyer for the Arizona Republican Party, watching for days what was going on in close races.

"Quite frankly, it is offensive for Kari Lake to say that these people behind me are slow-rolling this when they're working 14 to 18 hours'' a day, Gates said.

But Lake said she wants something like a task force “to investigate what went wrong,’’ and then she wants systematic changes.

“I want one-day voting, frankly, to get as close to that as possible,’’ she said. “We vote for a whole month here, and it’s outrageous. We’ve got mail-in ballots floating around all over.’’

Such a move could prove difficult to get approved, even assuming Republicans remain in control of the Legislature. That’s because the system of no-excuse early voting, in place since the 1992 election, is wildly popular, amounting to close to 90% of the votes in 2022.

Lake’s criticism also includes the fact that some printers at 60 of Maricopa County’s 223 polling places were not printing some ballots dark enough so that the scanners could accurately line them up to count the votes.

That resulted in about 17,000 voters instead having to drop their ballots into “door 3’’ of the scanner to be counted later or to go to an alternate voting center.

There are concerns that some people, frustrated with the inability to scan their own ballots, never voted.

County officials eventually reset the settings on the printers. But the problem was not discovered until Election Day.

“We want to get to the bottom of how this happened so it never happens again,’’ Lake said.