Kari Lake and Ruben Gallego went head-to-head in a live debate 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. He was not invited to the debate.
The debate was hosted by the Citizens Clean Elections Commission and livestreamed here Wednesday, Oct 9.
What’s at stake?
The new U.S. senator from Arizona will likely be a deciding vote in a tightly divided congressional chamber.
The seat is currently held by Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, an independent who left the Democratic Party and is not seeking reelection.
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 Senate and House 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.
More on the candidates
Lake, a well-known former television news anchor and a darling of the populist right, has tried but struggled to redefine herself since losing the 2022 race for governor.
Gallego, a Democratic congressman representing parts of Phoenix, has used his financial advantage over Lake to run ads playing up his military service and up-by-the-bootstraps personal story rather than his progressive record in Congress.
Both candidates are working to win over a small share of Republicans and conservative independents who are open to splitting their vote between the parties. This group has been instrumental in the rise of Democrats in Arizona, which has transitioned from a Republican stronghold to a battleground state over the past decade.
They’ve fought to focus voters on the territory most favorable to them.
For Gallego, that’s abortion rights after a state Supreme Court ruling outlawed virtually all abortions until the Legislature rolled it back to 15 weeks. Lake has spoken favorably of stricter limits.
Lake prefers to talk about the U.S.-Mexico border. She paints a dire picture of drug and human trafficking, and she links Gallego to record border crossings and scenes of disorder during President Joe Biden’s administration. She highlights his prior comments critical of a border wall.
Lake is an unflinching supporter of former President Donald Trump and his lie that he lost the 2020 election because of fraud. She has never conceded she lost her own 2022 race for governor, and continued to fight the outcome in court even after launching her Senate campaign. Separately, she’s tried and failed to convince courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year, to outlaw the use of electronic voting machines.
She’s also highlighted Ruben Gallego’s 2016 divorce from Kate Gallego, who is now the mayor of Phoenix. Noting the marriage ended weeks before the couple’s son was born, Lake says Gallego abandoned his wife while she was pregnant. Kate Gallego has endorsed her ex-husband and campaigned with him as recently as last week.
Gallego is a military veteran who has served in Congress for a decade.
The son of immigrants from Mexico and Colombia, he was raised in Chicago by a single mother and eventually accepted to Harvard University. He enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve while he was on a break from Harvard. He fought in Iraq in 2005 in a unit that sustained heavy casualties, including the death of his best friend.
Includes reporting by JONATHAN J. COOPER Associated Press
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