‘Border Kari Lake,’ as Donald Trump recently labeled her, handily defeated her Democratic opponent, Ruben Gallego, in the Arizona Senate TV debate last night. Lake, currently running seven points behind Gallego in the Real Clear Politics polling average, painted a picture of Gallego as an aloof, Biden-Harris loyalist more concerned with open borders ideology than security – physical or economic.
Fox 10 Phoenix’s stream began with horrendous feedback noise, something Gallego managed to emulate throughout the debate. Over the course of an hour, he reverted to his monotonous hum of pro-abortion and anti-federalism talking points while failing to land any successful blows on Lake.
Naturally, Gallego resorted to cheap shots about Lake’s attendance at Mar a Lago events, as well as attempting to needle Lake on her dismissal of the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election results. But in refusing to take his bait and pivoting, Lake proved herself a far handier candidate on stage, with the debate moderators even doing remarkably well at staying out of the flashpoints.
The discussion predominantly revolved around immigration and the economy, with Lake pointing out Gallego’s record as an open-borders extremist, and Gallego only furthering the evidence of that by repeatedly trying to shift the conversation to DACA recipients (aka ‘Dreamers’) and their “rights.”
The most certain tell of Lake’s victory was the far-left-leaning Arizona Republic opinion writer Bill Goodykoontz (yes, really), dismissing the entire debate as “awful TV that taught us nothing.”
Goodykoontz whined on Wednesday night: “[Lake] repeatedly went over her time limit and talked over Gallego, often resorting to personal attacks. It was ugly. And she got away with it.”
He further lamented, “Lake simply took the Steve Bannon approach of flooding the zone with junk… making so many rapid-fire insults neither Gallego nor the moderators could respond to all of them. The moderators didn’t fact-check, so it was up to Gallego to call Lake out, but it would have taken all night to do so.”
He concludes: “It’s impossible to say who “won” the debate.”
It isn’t. Kari Lake won by an extremely wide margin. Watch for yourself:
