Inside the cavernous sanctuary of a West Valley megachurch, one year to the day after the November 2020 election, Kari Lake preached to her congregation.
The gospel was election reform — and a false claim that Donald Trump defeated Joe Biden in the presidential contest two years ago. It was followed by a recorded message from Trump himself, endorsing Lake in her bid for the Republican nomination for governor of Arizona.
In just 15 months, Lake has gone from fixture inside many Phoenicians’ homes as an anchor on Fox 10 to a leading figure in Trump’s Make America Great Again faction of the Republican Party.
She’s running an outsider’s bid for the state’s top office, asking voters to choose her for the Republican nomination for governor. Among four GOP candidates, she is the most fervent in her belief the 2020 election was rigged.
Lake, 52, has pledged to clean voter registration rolls, stop ballot harvesting and has gone to court to end the use of electronic voting machines and limit voting to in-person on Election Day, instead of using mail-in ballots. She wants to flood the southern border with law enforcement to keep an “invasion” of migrants at bay and is the only Republican candidate to pledge to work to combat homelessness, offering a plan that provides more resources but also threatens criminal penalties.
A charismatic candidate who is seemingly always camera ready, Lake often takes on the mainstream media from which she earned a paycheck. Lake’s campaign said she was too busy to do an interview for this profile, but she responded to questions via email.
“Arizona is in desperate need of visionary leadership to address the serious problems facing us, including water, education, elections security, crime, inflation and more,” Lake wrote to explain why she is running. “The status quo isn’t working. I’m focused on delivering the transformative leadership we need to tackle those challenges head on.”
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Lake’s media career ends roughly
Lake is a native of Iowa, youngest of nine siblings. She came to Arizona after college, first working at 12 News as a weekend anchor in her late 20s, where she met her husband who is now her campaign videographer, Jeff Halperin. They have two children.
In the late ’90s, she left Phoenix for a stint working in upstate New York before returning for a job at Fox 10, where she stayed for more than two decades.
Lake became a beloved fixture on the nightly newscast alongside John Hook. She interviewed Barack Obama and Trump twice, pinnacle interviews for any journalist. But there were other stories Lake preferred.
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“But the best part of that job was the stories of everyday Arizonans who did amazing things, and being able to be a part of that and connect other people with what they were doing,” she wrote to The Arizona Republic.
Her family lives in the Biltmore neighborhood, and one day several years ago Lake called the city to report a water leak and sinkhole, which is how she first talked to Sam Stone, according to Stone’s recollection. Now her policy director, Stone was chief of staff to Phoenix City Councilmember Sal DiCiccio at the time and he took Lake’s calls. Lake passion for improving the neighborhood around her is what Stone admires in Lake’s campaign.
“She’s the type of person who when she sees a problem, she doesn’t want to let it fester, she wants to go right after it,” Stone said. Lake’s problem-solving spirit and “go for it” attitude, over an incremental approach, convinced him to help her campaign, even as he’s running his own for the Phoenix City Council, Stone said.
Lake has no prior elected experience and has not held a management position in her career in television. She said leadership is really about ”having the courage and fortitude to do the right things even when they’re not easy.”
Toward the close of her TV career, controversy began brewing. Lake was off the air for about a week after using an expletive while broadcasting and in 2018 falsely alleged that the “Red for Ed” movement advocating for better education funding was actually a push to legalize marijuana.
After taking leave in early 2021, Lake’s next on-camera appearance was resigning her job, saying she didn’t believe what she was reading on the teleprompter was the truth or told the full story.
Lake said the network restricted her from telling the public about COVID-19 treatments, but her campaign did not respond to follow-up questions about which treatments or name individuals at Fox who Lake said wouldn’t let her change the scripts. ”It went beyond spin, it became about pushing an agenda, and I refused to be part of that,” she wrote. She said people died as a result of the false narrative and “suffered through unmitigated fear, and didn’t need to.”
One person who worked with Lake, however, rejected those claims, noting it was Lake and other anchors’ jobs to ensure fairness and accuracy in their broadcasts.
Diana Pike, the human resources director at Fox 10 for 20 years before she retired in 2019, said she never heard a single complaint, from Lake nor anyone else, that they were made to say things that weren’t true. Pike said she believed Lake couldn’t take criticism and never accepted responsibility for her gaffes, after which she would disappear from work for days or weeks and force others to fill in for her.
“I think to govern, you have concern and stewardship for your constituents, for your resources,” Pike said. ”She doesn’t have that consideration. She doesn’t. She is charismatic, she’s a good public speaker, but it’s a façade.”
In June 2021, Lake announced her run for governor. Today, Lake is a protégé of Trump and a darling of his Arizona loyalists. She is endorsed by the farthest right of the Republican Party, including state Sen. Wendy Rogers, U.S. Congressman Paul Gosar, and Rudy Giuliani, the former president’s right hand in furthering claims the 2020 election was stolen.
Questions about authenticity
The past year offers a series of seeming contradictions between Lake the candidate for governor, and Lake the broadcaster.
Lake has attacked Sen. John McCain’s legacy, calling the state’s longtime Republican leader a “loser.” One of McCain’s sons, Jimmy McCain, who considered Lake a friend, said he and family members felt betrayed by Lake’s flip.
Lake recently veered toward gay bashing, prompting one of Phoenix’s best known drag queens, Richard Stevens, who performs as Barbra Seville, to publicly blast Lake for hypocrisy.
Before she began a legal attack on early voting and mail-in ballots — the way most Arizonans have voted for over 30 years — Lake for decades faithfully mailed in her ballot. Lake said she “wasn’t previously aware of the potential for fraud.”
She has received criticism for once saying deportation of millions of immigrants wasn’t possible, but now espousing a hardline policy to use state resources to deport migrants.
She claimed she was a life member of the National Rifle Association, though she refused to provide proof of her membership prior to 2021.
And in what is the biggest flip-turned-fodder for her Republican opponents, Lake previously voted as a Democrat, from 2008 to 2012, according to voter registration records.
Lake said in her written responses she voted for Obama because of his promise to end wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but she felt he lied and “deliberately tore this country apart with identity politics” in his reelection campaign. She returned to the GOP in 2012.
Lake objected to characterizing any of her changes as contradictions.
“Are they contradictions? Or is that just what you want to call them to help ensure Katie Hobbs becomes our next governor?” she wrote. Hobbs is a Democratic candidate for governor.
“I stand behind what I’ve said on this campaign 100%, and — let’s be honest — that’s what the left is truly afraid of: a conservative problem solver who isn’t afraid to stand up and fight.”
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Praised as an outsider by voters
But she’s embraced her return to the Republican Party along the campaign trail and sought to turn it into a strength.
“I would love to see a show of hands if you or somebody you know has walked away from the Democrat Party?” she said on stage at Dream City Church in Glendale last November. Cheers erupted and hands flew up within the crowd of hundreds.
“We are in good company,” Lake told them. “You know who else walked away? President Donald Trump. Ronald Reagan.”
At a campaign event in Mesa in mid-June, when Lake again asked former Democrats in the room to raise their hands, Robert Lapinski of Scottsdale lifted his. Afterward, he said he loves Lake’s outsider take.
“She’s generating the enthusiasm, and I agree with what she’s saying,” he said. Lapinski met Lake once before at an event in Sun City West, where Lake directly confronted a heckler, inviting the person onstage.
When he later told friends about the heckler, Lapinski offered two scenarios of what might actually have happened. The first was that Lake’s answer was delivered on the fly.
The other scenario was that the encounter was a setup.
“Or if she put the heckler up to it, so she could give a strong response, then it’s even more brilliant, because it shows political savvy, and I admire that,” he said.
Reach reporter Stacey Barchenger at stacey.barchenger@arizonarepublic.com or 480-416-5669. Follow her on Twitter @sbarchenger.
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