Postby Thad » Tue Jun 28, 2022 12:40 pm
Our primary is still a month out, but the likely Republican nominee for governor is Kari Lake, a woman best known for her long tenure as a local news anchor. And she's pretty much what you'd expect from someone who owes her entire candidacy to a former career with the news media and likes to rant about the corrupt news media: she's an obvious phony who's jumped on the conservative grift and is spouting all the popular right-wing talking points du jour even though she demonstrably doesn't really believe them (or at least demonstrably didn't believe them a few years ago).
Most recently, she's in the news for jumping on the "drag queens are pedophiles" bandwagon, with the result that local drag performer Barbra Seville is like "WTF, Kari, I thought we were friends."
And first of all I'd just like to pause for a moment to acknowledge that "Barbra Seville" is an amazing drag queen name.
Anyway, Lake is trying to silence Barbra Seville through legal intimidation. It's not working.
I don't know WTF's going to happen with the Lake campaign. It's weird, even by Arizona standards. She's an obvious phony and that's what all the attack ads are focusing on (though it's still the primary season so it's stuff like "She voted for Obama!"). Trump's an obvious phony too, but for some reason a large subset of the population seems to really believe he's authentic; I'm not sure Lake can pull that off, I don't get the impression that anyone sees her as authentic. I think she'll get the nomination on name recognition alone, but I have no idea what's going to happen in November. The Arizona electorate, in the aggregate, is center-right, and she's running on the kind of far-right rhetoric that hasn't played very well in statewide races the last few elections. That's what the GOP base wants, obviously, but I think there's a good chance it puts off moderates and independents. At least, I hope so.