Kari Lake (R) announced that she is once again mounting a legal challenge against her loss in 2022’s Arizona gubernatorial elections, the Daily Beast reports.
Lake says that her team “now have the video” to support claims of misconduct in Maricopa County.
She added: “I will never back down. That election was stolen from the people and there will be no way that I back down from that. I just won’t, because it’s wrong, what happened.”
“A judge on Monday dismissed the only remaining legal claim in Republican Kari Lake’s challenge of her loss in last year’s race for Arizona governor, affirming the election of Democrat Katie Hobbs,” the AP reports.
Cook Political Report: “GenZ/Millennial voters (defined as those between the ages of 18-41), not only turned out at higher levels than they did in 2018, but they were the only age group that increased their support for Democratic candidates from 2018.”
“After 2008, many assumed that Obama’s personal connection with younger voters would transfer to the Democratic Party’s candidates in subsequent elections. That didn’t happen. Instead, what seems to be driving younger voters to the polls isn’t love, but anger. In 2018, Donald Trump’s presence in the White House was a motivating factor for these voters. In 2022, anger over the abortion decision was the most likely catalyst for turnout.”
New York Times: “Denying the results of the 2020 election and casting doubts about the nation’s voting system cost statewide Republican candidates 2.3 to 3.7 percentage points in the midterms last year, according to a new study.”
Politico: “Democrats avoided an electoral wipeout in the 2022 midterms. One way they did so was by reassembling a history-defying coalition of young voters who turned out at rates more commonly seen in presidential elections.”
“The Arizona Supreme Court on Thursday sanctioned attorneys for Kari Lake, the 2022 Republican candidate for governor, ordering them to pay thousands of dollars for repeating ‘unequivocally false’ election claims in court,” NBC News reports.
“Turnout in last year’s midterm elections fell from a century-high point of 50 percent in 2018 to 46.6 percent in 2022, and Census data released Tuesday suggest the drop was concentrated among Black voters, younger voters and college graduates,” the Washington Post reports.
“Black voter turnout dropped by nearly 10 percentage points, from 51.7 percent in 2018 to 42 percent in 2022… White voter turnout slipped by only 1.5 points to 53.4 percent. The 11-point turnout gap between White and Black voters is the largest in any presidential or midterm election since at least 2000.”
“A draft Republican Party autopsy report on the 2022 midterm elections examining why the GOP failed to win the U.S. Senate and posted smaller-than-expected gains in the House does not mention Donald Trump or his role as the de facto leader of the party,” the Washington Post reports.
“GOP leaders are avoiding Trump in part because RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel has vowed to be neutral in the 2024 Republican primary as the former president seeks a second term. Comments praising or criticizing Trump would break that vow, some of the people involved in the report said.”
“House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) is privately telling big-dollar donors that bad candidates for governor and Senate were a top reason the GOP didn’t win more House seats in 2022, emphasizing that quality candidates matter up and down the ticket,” Axios reports.
“The Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to take up former Maryland gubernatorial candidate Dan Cox’s (R) challenge to the timing of officials’ tabulation of mail-in ballots in his election,” The Hill reports.
“An Arizona appeals court has rejected Republican Kari Lake’s challenge of her defeat in the Arizona governor’s race to Democrat Katie Hobbs, denying her request to throw out election results in the state’s most populous county and hold the election again,” the AP reports.
“In a ruling on Thursday, the Arizona Court of Appeals wrote Lake, who claimed problems with ballot printers at some police places on Election Day were the result of intentional misconduct, presented no evidence that voters whose ballots were unreadable by tabulators at polling places were not able to vote.”
A new Stanford Business School study finds that election-denying Republicans in statewide races outperformed their co-partisans in the GOP primary by roughly 2%, while they underperformed in the general election by about 2.3%.
Key takeaway: “The general-election penalty is larger than the margin of victory in battleground states in recent close presidential elections, suggesting that nominating election-denying candidates in 2024 could be a damaging electoral strategy for Republicans.”
“At the same time, it is small enough to suggest that only a relatively small group of voters changed their vote in response to having an election-denying candidate on the ballot.”
A legal group plans to file bar complaints Thursday against four lawyers representing Kari Lake in voter fraud litigation, NBC News reports.
“For two days, Kari Lake traversed this state with a clear message. She falsely claimed the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. She baselessly insisted that votes were rigged against her in her run for Arizona governor last year. And she warned without evidence that future races will be compromised,” the Washington Post reports.
Said Lake: “If you lose, lose with dignity. You shake the other person’s hand and walk away. I didn’t lose, so I’m not doing that.”
“Early last year, the Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg sat for lunch with Rick Caruso, a billionaire mall tycoon who was preparing his run for Los Angeles mayor,” Politico reports.
“Katzenberg told Caruso he understood why he was running. He made clear his support for Congresswoman Karen Bass in the race.”
“And then came the warning: If Caruso took the high road, Katzenberg said that he would, too. But, ‘If you take the low road,’ a person familiar with the conversation recounted, ‘I’m going lower.'”
“The threat was a quintessential demonstration of political power from Katzenberg — one of the country’s premier Democratic donors, and for decades a kingmaker for aspiring politicians. But it also illustrates the nuance with which the former Walt Disney Studios chairman and DreamWorks co-founder was now using his influence.”
“Arizona’s top election official has asked the attorney general to investigate Kari Lake, the Republican candidate who lost her bid for governor in 2022, over potential campaign violations involving the disclosure of voter signatures,” the Washington Post reports.
“The complaint could set up a legal showdown in the battleground state between a prominent conservative election denier backed by Donald Trump and two newly elected Democrats who campaigned with messages of strengthening public trust in elections.”
“Steve Bannon took election denialism to an unhinged level on his podcast this week, when he didn’t just indulge in the baseless claims of election fraud favored by former President Donald Trump, but went so far as to tell Kari Lake ‘you’re the frickin’ governor of Arizona,’” Mediaite reports.
Amanda Carpenter: “In 2024, nearly half of the Democratic caucus—23 senators—is up for re-election. Of those, eight are considered vulnerable: five in battleground states (Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Virginia) and the other three in solidly red states (Ohio, Montana, West Virginia). Republicans, on the other hand, have only 11 senators up for re-election in the 2024 cycle, and all of them represent states Trump won in 2020…”
“So even though it’s early and elections are unpredictable, the map math is hard to deny: Republicans stand a much better shot of taking control of the Senate than Democrats do of keeping it in 2024.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.