2024 election guide: U.S. Senate candidates Ruben Gallego and Kari Lake
By Yana Kunichoff,
4 hours ago
From highway funding and the border to what federal resources are available to mitigate the impact of increasingly common summer heat emergencies, there are a range of big-picture issues where federal policy has deeply impacted the lives of people living in Southern Arizona.
The future of those issues will depend on which political party holds a majority in the U.S. Senate. And who Arizona voters send to Washington D.C. will play an important role in tipping the scale in the congressional chamber and in national politics — deciding seminal federal laws from abortion access to immigration and border policies.
Kari Lake and Ruben Gallego will go head-to-head as the Republican and Democratic party candidates seeking to represent Arizona in November’s election for one of the state’s two U.S. Senate seats. Eduardo Quintana will be running for the Green Party seat; he won the primary election as a write-in candidate with 282 votes.
Congressman Ruben Gallego speaks at a Biden/Harris campaign event in Tucson on April 12, 2024.
Lake and Gallego took part in a debate Oct. 9 hosted by the Citizens Clean Elections Commission; Quintana says he was not invited to the debate because he was a write-in candidate. In a statement, the Arizona Media Association said any candidate who received at least 1% of the total ballots cast for the race would be invited to the debate; Quintana received less than this amount. The Arizona Attorney General’s office said they received a complaint from Quintana and were in the process of referring it to a county attorney due to conflicts of interest, including that Attorney General Kris Mayes endorsed Gallego. Clean Elections said in a statement that they support the decision made by the Arizona Media Association to establish criteria for debates.
The closely-watched Senate race has seen millions in fundraising money flow to top contenders Lake and Gallego. Lake has raised about $10 million while Gallego has raised upward of $30 million in 2024 so far, according to campaign finance data compiled by Open Secrets , a nonprofit that advocates for transparency in campaign spending. Quintana has not raised any campaign funds, according to the Federal Election Commission campaign finance website. He told Arizona Luminaria that his campaign is primarily self-funded.
The seat is currently held by Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, an independent who left the Democratic Party and is not seeking reelection.
Kari Lake responds to a question from an attendee of a campaign event following her speech and Q&A on the University of Arizona campus on April 11. 2024. The event was organized by the UA Young Republicans club. Credit: Michael McKisson
What’s at stake?
The new U.S. senator from Arizona will likely be a deciding vote in a tightly divided congressional chamber.
Arizona’s elected senator will serve a six-year term. As part of their role, they can help sink or advance bills key to infrastructure, defense and social services, and vote for or against presidential appointments.
This year, Arizona Sens. Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema helped steer billions in federal funding to address local wildfire prevention, study drought relief methods and invest in clean-energy school buses across the state.
What types of laws get passed, and what areas and issues receive federal funding, depends on the votes of the Senate and House of Representatives at the federal level, as well as which party controls these chambers.
This election year, voters have told Arizona Luminaria that two key areas they want to see a future senator address are abortion health care access and immigration.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority voted to overturn Roe v. Wade and gut constitutional protections for abortion, the Senate could be one pathway to returning some nationwide access to the medical procedure. A recent bill introduced in the Senate, for example, would keep local governments from limiting access to abortion services when a delay could risk a person’s health.
In May, Noble Predictive Insights polled 1,003 registered Arizona voters. The poll showed that 49% of Arizona voters said abortion should be legal under certain circumstances, 40% said abortion should be legal under any circumstances, and 11% are against abortion access in all circumstances.
As Arizona ports of entry continue to be among the busiest in the nation, the Senate also plays a crucial role in border-related laws and federal funding, as well as policy changes that can change the future of immigration in America.
At a time when disillusionment and distrust of both the Republican and Democratic parties is high, independent voters are expected to play an important role in the Senate race. Unaffiliated voters, which include independents, trail Republican registered voters by less than 60,000 people, according to July 2024 voter registration numbers , the latest available from Arizona’s Secretary of State’s office.
Kari Lake is a former television news anchor for Phoenix channel Fox10 News. She refused to concede her loss in the 2022 gubernatorial election to now-Gov. Katie Hobbs, and is aligned with former President Donald Trump who endorsed her candidacy. Lake has repeated conspiracy theories and personal attacks to deny the results of elections deemed fair and transparent by multiple judicial orders. Lake has said she is against abortion in the past, but stops short of saying she opposes abortion in her current platform. She has never held elected office and says her lack of political experience will shake up the status quo. She defeated Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb in the primary. She put forward a vision of America if she was elected that included access to affordable housing and public safety. “If there’s any kiddos watching, I don’t want you to worry, I want you to dream really big,” she said at the Oct. 9 debate. “I want you to know we are going to turn this country around and your American dream will become reality.”
Ruben Gallego
Ruben Gallego, who ran unopposed in the Democratic primary, has served in the House of Representatives since 2014 and currently represents Phoenix’s District 3. The son of Latino immigrants and a former Marine Corps member, Gallego supports access to abortion healthcare, protecting housing affordability and water supplies, preserving public lands and increased public and financial support for veterans, according to his campaign website. “We are a true story of the American dream,” says Gallego of his family. On immigration, Gallego has said he would push for more border enforcement alongside increased funding for border communities. Gallego has been an outspoken critic of Trump. In this campaign, he has stressed a bipartisan approach: there is no Republican or Democratic divide among soldiers at war, he said at Wednesday’s debate. “Americans… just want a better future,” he said. Following the deadly Charlottesville rally in 2017, Gallego said neo-Nazis had been “encouraged and come out of the closet since the presidency of Donald Trump.” Ahead of the former president’s 2019 impeachment, Gallego also warned that Trump was eroding the rule of law and democracy in the U.S.
Eduardo Quintana
Eduardo Quintana is chairperson of the Green Party of Pima County and co-founder of Tucsonans for a Clean Environment. He was the president of the union while employed at Raytheon. He is endorsed by the Arizona Green Party. Quintana supports stopping the genocide in Gaza, phasing out fossil fuels for renewable energy sources, and introducing proportional taxation. He also says third party candidates are important because they open up the space for what is possible in politics. “I don’t think anything I would propose would pass the Senate, but I don’t think that means it would be a waste of time,” he told Arizona Luminaria. “I would use the Senate as an organizing hub.” His campaign slogan is “People. Planet. Peace.” Quintana won the Green Party primary as a write-in candidate, meaning his name did not appear on the official ballot received by Green Party voters.
On the issues
To help Arizona voters understand where the Senate candidates stand, Arizona Luminaria reached out to each campaign with questions on three key topic areas and gave them one week to respond.
Arizona Luminaria spoke to Quintana via phone but has not received responses from either the Gallego or the Lake campaigns.
In cases where the campaigns did not respond, Arizona Luminaria has included information from the debate, campaign websites, video appearances and social media statements to give voters a sense of where candidates stand on the issues.
The economy:
Kari Lake: The primary target of Lake’s economic platform is cutting government spending. Lake says she will reduce federal spending until tax revenues are higher than what the government is spending. That approach will help cut back inflation, which she says is leaving Americans “struggling just to afford everyday necessities.” As the national debt is slowly paid off, said Lake’s platform, she will turn to spending more on Americans. “We want to get back to a place where Arizona is affordable,” said Lake during her debate with Gallego Oct. 9.” It starts with bringing down the cost of everything.”
Lake has also spoken about the rise in housing costs, echoing a topic that has become a part of presidential candidate Donald Trump’s platform this election year. “I’m not going to promise that we are going to bring back $88,000 median homes,” she said at a campaign appearance with Turning Point USA in Mesa. “But I am going to promise that we’re going to turn this around and we’re going to bring back the Trump economy.”
Lake also put forward cryptocurrency as “a key hedge against government overreach and financial control,” and said she would vote to extend the Trump tax cuts that experts say skewed tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans.
Ruben Gallego: Gallego touted his efforts to help pass the Inflation Reduction Act, a significant piece of legislation passed under President Joe Biden. In particular, Gallego pointed to reductions in drug prices as one of the wins; a Medicare analysis of the impact of the act on healthcare access notes it capped out-of-pocket yearly prescription drug costs for Medicare recipients at $2,000 in 2025 and expanded the low-income subsidy program.
Gallego also said the minimum wage should be $15, and pegged to inflation.
Eduardo Quintana: A fairer economic system would include work structures that encourage employee ownership and workplace democracy, according to Quintana’s platform. That means making sure that everyone has basic access to economic security by restructuring income distribution to include labor such as parenting, housekeeping and community volunteer work. “In my opinion, it is a human right to eat, drink clean water, breathe clean air and have shelter,” he said in a phone call with Arizona Luminaria. “I don’t believe that anything that can make a decision over whether you live or die should be for profit.”
Immigration and the border:
Kari Lake: Lake has made the border and immigration a significant part of her platform. In a 10-point plan on how to secure the border, Lake puts forward increased investment in the border wall, additional technological surveillance and limiting asylum. She has also regularly used disparaging terms for immigrants, and focused on stories of different individual immigrants committing a crime. “I will make sure every criminal illegal alien is locked up or kicked the hell out of this country,” said Lake . In Wednesday’s debate, Lake focused on the need to deport people who had entered America over the last three and a half years: “in order to save our homeland, we must send them back to their homeland,” she said.
Ruben Gallego: Gallego supports deploying more Border Patrol agents to the border, helping undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children gain access to college education and is against the Trump-era separation of migrant children from their families at the border. Gallego has stressed his background as the son of immigrants, and his knowledge of border communities that he says are not “war zones” as portrayed by television news.
“I have voted for border walls in the past because, where appropriate and with the proper manpower and staffing, it does work,” said Gallego. “I do not support open borders.”
Eduardo Quintana: Quintana supports “cultural, ethnic, racial, sexual, religious and spiritual diversity” and promises to promote respectful relationships between people across the human spectrum. “We believe that the many diverse elements of society should be reflected in our organizations and decision-making bodies,” says his platform. He also supports the leadership of people who have been traditionally left out of leadership roles. Quintana also says he hopes to work with organizations around the world to foster economic justice. On immigration, Quintana said climate change and American foreign intervention around the world were creating conditions that pushed people to migrate. “If we don’t like immigrants we need to stop creating them,” he told Arizona Luminaria. “We need to start moving towards seeing immigrants as seeing people that are going through a humanitarian crisis that we many times caused.”
Abortion health care access:
Kari Lake: Lake said she “wants to do everything she can to help women choose life,” but stops short of saying she is against abortion. She also notes that public opinion largely supports access to abortion up to 15 weeks. She does not support a federal ban on abortion. Lake has also stressed that she is the only mother in the race for the Senate.
In a proposal that dovetails with her economic platform, Lake said she would support pregnant young women having access to parenting classes and financial support, thereby ensuring “women know they have a real choice and not be pushed into an abortion.”
Ruben Gallego: Gallego supports access to abortion health care as a fundamental right, and said he would work to codify Roe v. Wade, which generally protected the right to abortion. In the Senate, Gallego voted for legislation that would guarantee the right for pregnant people to travel across state lines to obtain abortion care, and also supports access to contraception. He also co-sponsored legislation that protects medical data of a person seeking abortion care, which is one route through which an individual could be prosecuted for seeking an abortion in a state where the procedure is illegal. Gallego also said he will support efforts to waive the filibuster (a rule that requires 60 votes in the Senate to pass most legislation) to codify Roe v. Wade.
Speaking at a campaign event, Gallego said he was supporting reproductive rights in part for his young daughter. “She is going to grow up in this country with less rights than her grandmother did,” he said. “This is the United States of America and there are women that have to flee their states to get basic medical care.”
Eduardo Quintana: Quintana supports medical, reproductive and personal autonomy, and promises to restore and ensure women’s rights. That includes a broad support for feminism and gender equity, says Quintana’s platform. “I support women’s right to choose, I support women’s right to control their own bodies,” he said. “I’m totally against any kind of government intervention.”
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