“Can I talk about water?”: Kari Lake dodges election question at “messy” Arizona Senate debate

Kari Lake lost in 2022 when she ran for Arizona governor, falling short by some 17,000 votes. Like her ally Donald Trump, she has spent almost every day since claiming that she won.

But on Wednesday night, Lake, who has significantly fallen behind her Democratic opponent in the polls, didn’t want to talk about the past.

“Can you finally tell the people of Arizona: Did you win or lose that election?” Rep. Ruben Gallego, Lake’s Democratic rival for Arizona’s open U.S. Senate seat, asked during the pair’s first and only debate.

Gallego posed the question during a discussion about climate change, something — the consensus that the Earth is warming due to greenhouse gas emissions — that Lake has dismissed as fake science (“I don’t believe that for a minute,” she previously said about the topic. “I’m not going to be afraid of the weather.”). But, trailing by double digits in several recent polls, Lake opted to return to the climate query rather than address the question that her opponent put to her.

“Can I talk about water really quickly?” she asked. “Because I thought we were gonna do water.”

“Please, talk about water,” one of the moderators replied.

Up to that point, Lake had gone on about fraud — in her own race and in 2020 — to the point that even the former president was making fun of it, as Politico’s Meridith McGraw reported over the summer. “It doesn’t matter what you ask Kari Lake about,” she quoted Trump as saying about his MAGA ally in the Copper State. “How’s your family?’ And she’s like, ‘The family’s fine but they’re never going to be great until we have free and fair elections.”

Trump was another sore point at Wednesday’s debate. Polling well ahead of Lake in his race against Vice President Kamala Harris, “it seems like Donald Trump doesn’t want to campaign with her anymore,” Gallego charged. “He’s not allowing her pictures on any of her billboards.” (For his part, Gallego is distancing himself from Harris, not appearing at her recent rallies and telling NBC News he’s running “independently” of her campaign.)

Lake’s retort: “President Trump, my good friend, has called me ‘Border Kari.’ I love the nickname, and I’m going to go there to Washington, DC, and help him build that border wall and secure the border.”

But bogus claims of election fraud have been so central to Lake’s public persona that she dabbled in it even as she sought to deflect questions on the subject. Gallego accused her of trying to disenfranchise Arizona voters by denying her 2022 loss and Trump’s 2020 defeat: “How could you trust someone like that who’s willing to lie to you all the way to the end?"

Lake could not help but take the bait. She “never lied to the people of Arizona,” Lake asserted, before citing voter concerns over the lies she’s told —“about hiccups and loopholes and problems that happen on Election Day” — as reason to continue discussing allegations that have been thoroughly investigated and debunked.

Like Republicans elsewhere, though, Lake would prefer to talk about immigrants behaving badly, despite studies repeatedly showing they commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans. She brought up the murder of a 22-year-old in Georgia, allegedly by an immigrant from Venezuela, as reason to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.

“We want to be able to go for a jog in the morning like Laken Riley did and not have to worry about being killed, raped and murdered,” she said.

We also, Lake added later, “want to make sure UVF [sic] is protected.” Coming during a discussion of abortion and reproductive rights, Lake was presumably referring to in vitro fertilzation, not a loyalist paramilitary in Northern Ireland. It was a mistake she would continue to make.

“I have many friends who are here, they’re my friends today because of UVF. And I have many of my friends who have had children and experienced the joy of motherhood and parenthood because of UVF,” Lake said.

In 2022, when she lost the governor’s race, Lake had celebrated the overturning of Roe v. Wade and praised an 1864 state law that banned most abortions. In 2024, like Trump, she is campaigning as a moderate on bodily autonomy.

Wednesday night’s gaffe had critics questioning the sincerity of that pivot.

“Kari Lake cares so little about women’s reproductive health that it’s *IVF* at risk by her party, not *UVF.*,” commented Alexandra De Luca, vice president of strategic communications at the Democratic super PAC American Bridge 21st Century. “Messy!”