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An Arizona Republican who ran against Kari Lake for governor, Matt Salmon, said he would not consider supporting her without "an engraved apology" for her past interactions with him.
A longtime Phoenix-area news anchor, Lake entered the national political spotlight in 2022 when she ran for governor in Arizona as a strongly MAGA-aligned Republican, eventually securing the GOP nomination and the endorsement of former President Donald Trump.
Despite a tight race and much hope for success from the broader Republican Party, Lake lost the race to Katie Hobbs by a slim margin, part of an overall trend in the 2022 midterms of Trump-backed Republicans losing key races. Lake refused to concede that race, leveling numerous accusations of voter fraud and filing several lawsuits that were ultimately dismissed.
She is now running for the U.S. Senate in the 2024 elections, pursuing the seat held by the independent Kyrsten Sinema. Polls so far have indicated that she may be headed for another loss, as Democratic challenger Representative Ruben Gallego has regularly paced ahead of her with prospective voters.
On Monday, The Washington Post reported that Lake has found difficulty courting the support of Arizona Republicans that she had once attacked as "RINOs" (Republicans in Name Only) or not sufficiently conservative during her gubernatorial campaign. Salmon, who served as a U.S. representative for various Arizona districts from 2013 to 2017 and ran against Lake for the GOP nomination for governor in 2022, said that it was highly unlikely that he would be supporting her in the future.
"Short of an engraved apology, I wouldn't consider helping her with anything," Salmon told The Washington Post. "She employs the politics of personal destruction, and she'll say anything—the most vile things in the world—to get ahead. And I'm sorry, I just can't forget that."
Newsweek reached out to Lake's campaign via email for comment.
During the 2022 race for governor, Salmon opposed a proposal by Lake to install cameras in classrooms as a means to track supposedly "woke" teachers. At one point, Lake shared a post on social media in which a user accused Salmon of being "okay with special needs kids being raped" in class, a statement which she later stood by in a radio interview.
At the time, Salmon said that he was not contacted by Lake after he dropped out of the gubernatorial race and said then, as he has now, that he would not be supporting her campaign, citing her treatment of her opponents in the race.
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About the writer
Thomas Kika is a Newsweek weekend reporter based in upstate New York. His focus is reporting on crime and national ... Read more