Donald Trump ally Kari Lake announces Arizona Senate seat bid

Kari Lake, a candidate who ran to be governor of Arizona and refused to concede defeat, says she will seek the state’s Senate seat in 2024’s election.

Ms Lake parroted her ally Donald Trump by insisting her loss in 2022 was the result of widespread fraud.

She enters a close race, which could feature incumbent Sen Kyrsten Sinema and Democrat Rep Ruben Gallego.

Speaking to supporters at a rally in Arizona on Tuesday, Ms Lake spent much of her speech criticising Joe Biden.

The 54-year-old Republican hit out at the president’s policies on the US border with Mexico, attacking media organisations as “un-American” and praising Mr Trump’s tenure in the White House.

“We’ve got one year to save this country and we’ve got to go in a different direction, people. We’ve got to go away from Joe Biden,” she said. “We need to get America first patriots in the Senate.”

“There is an invasion at the Arizona border RIGHT NOW. Kyrsten Sinema and Ruben Gallego repeatedly voted AGAINST funding the border wall. They have rubber-stamped this open borders agenda. Arizonans are sick of it,” she later added in a post to X, formerly known as Twitter.

Ms Lake, who ultimately lost last year’s gubernatorial election by a margin 17,000 votes, launched an unsuccessful legal challenge of her defeat. The court refused to hear the challenge in full, saying in March that there was no evidence ballots had been wrongly added to the final count.

But her stance won the support of Mr Trump, who backed her bid in a video message at Tuesday’s rally and offered his “complete and total endorsement”.

“In the Senate we have to have a big strong majority to help me push our America First agenda through and to push it through really fast,” Mr Trump said. “Kari is one of the toughest fighters in our movement.”

Ms Lake faces little competition so far to seize the Republican nomination. Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb is the only other member of the party to enter the race so far.

But polling suggests a tough competition between Ms Lake, Sen Sinema and Rep Gallego. The state, which was once consistently Republican, was won by President Biden in 2020.

Sen Sinema was elected as a Democrat in 2018, flipping the seat held by retiring Republican Sen Jeff Flake. But she left the party last year to sit as an independent, saying she took the move to fight what she called a “broken partisan system”.

The 47-year-old has yet to announce whether she will seek a second term.

Rep Gallego, a former US marine who some polls suggest holds a narrow lead in the race, was quick to hit out at Ms Lake’s announcement. Writing on X, he accused her of “undermining of our democracy”.

“That’s why voters rejected you the first time around and we’ll do it again,” he said.