For two decades Kari Lake’s throaty voice and pixie cut were fixtures on Fox 10 in Phoenix, providing the sort of comforting presence common on local news channels across the nation: Introducing cooking features moments after relaying details of grisly murders.
That all seems like a long time ago.
Now she is running for the Senate as a Trump loyalist who, like him, leveraged TV name recognition into a firebrand political career, rising to national prominence and infamy after refusing to accept election defeat.
‘She’s a killer,’ Trump told DailyMail.com aboard his plane last year when the 55-year-old was frequently floated as a potential running mate.
She has been afforded fundraisers at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida home, and some of MAGA world’s top insiders have worked on her run for Senate.
Kari Lake rose to national fame for supporting Donald Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was rigged, and has modeled her political career – from TV star to firebrand conservative – on his rise from The Apprentice to the White House
The flip side is that she is a figure of hate on the left. And two weeks before election day her campaign office was evacuated when a package labeled ‘anthrax’ was delivered.
It comes after an extraordinary metamorphosis.
Lake grew up in rural Iowa as the youngest of nine children, in a family where they thought it was normal to do odd jobs to buy their own shampoo and toothpaste.
She studied communications and journalism at the University of Iowa, and joined a local station after graduating.
She hopped around stations, working as production assistant, reporter and even weather forecaster, before landing at Fox 10 as an evening anchor in 1999.
Former colleagues remember a friendly, gregarious presence, a registered Republican who was open minded enough to donate to Democrat Barack Obama and talk up his policies off camera.
Things changed when Trump came to power and Lake’s social media presence began to drift into territory that sat badly with her role as a trusted local voice of news,
It culminated when Lake had to make an on-air apology for a tweet that claimed #RedForEd, a local political push to increase public school funding and teacher pay, was in fact a front to legalize marijuana.
‘#RedForEd is nothing more than a push to legalize pot. Check this out,’ she said with a picture of a T-shirt with the slogan #GreenForEd.
Lake was a news anchor on Fox 10 in Phoenix for 22 years. She quit in 2021 to go into politics
Lake with husband Jeff Halperin and children Ruby and Leo in a Facebook photo from 2017
‘T-Shirts are already printed!! This is a big push to legalize pot and to make it more savory by tossing teachers a bone with a substantial raise.’
Diana Pike, regional human resources director for FOX in Lake’s last years with the station, told PHOENIX magazine: ‘2018 was kind of her demise, the end of her relationship with the station
‘Her thing became, “It’s freedom of speech, I have the right to say what I want to say.”‘
She quit the station a day after video emerged of her attending the 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference, triggering questions about whether she was there as a delegate or a reporter.
Later that year she announced her run for governor, winning the endorsement of Trump in a primary pitted as mainstream conservatives against Trumpers.
After winning the nomination she suggested she was ready to build bridges with the rest of the party, but quickly aped Trump by denigrating the memory of Sen. John McCain, one of the state’s biggest names in politics.
‘We drove a stake through the heart of the McCain machine,’ she said, while also suggesting he was a ‘loser.’
Lake eventually lost to Democratic candidate Katie Hobbs by a little over 17,000 votes.
Several audits by election experts and the Associated Press found that thousands of Republicans had voted for Hobbs or had simply stayed away.
Lake saw things differently, and launched a string of legal challenges, claiming that thousands of her voters had been unable to vote because of long lines or ballot paper printing problems.
Lake enjoyed a family vacation in the Bahamas last year as she made preparations for a run for the Arizona Senate seat vacated by Kyrsten Sinema
Lake at one time was touted as a potential running mate for Trump and frequently topped polls asking Republicans who they would like to see as vice president
The irregularities were focused in Republican-leaning areas of Maricopa County, the most populous part of the state, she said.
These were the ‘most dishonest elections in the history of Arizona,’ she said in a video posted to Trump’s Truth Social media platform.
‘This botched election should not be certified,’ she said.
Her challenges failed. But taking a move straight out of Trump’s playbook meant she had a place in the spotlight right alongside the former president.
For a while she was an almost ever-present figure at Mar-a-Lago, and frequently turned up at Trump rallies.
He provided the foreword and the title to her memoir: ‘Unafraid: Just Getting Started.’
Lake lost the race to be governor of Arizona by a narrow margin in 2022 and has used that defeat, and her allegations of fraud, to fire up supporters
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‘What happened to Kari Lake on 8 November 2022 is one of the most egregious ‘cases of ‘highway robbery’ in any state’s history,’ he wrote. ‘Kari Lakes story does not end in defeat, because she is just getting started!’
A year later, after a Bahamas vacation with her family, she announced that she was running for the U.S. Senate.
However, her election-denying rhetoric and close allegiance to Trump, means she has apparently struggled to convince voters that she has tacked to the center in her race against Democrat Rep. Ruben Gallego.
Her current position that she opposes a federal limit on terminations sits awkwardly alongside her 2022 assessment that abortion was ‘the ultimate sin.’
And although Trump has a narrow lead over Kamala Harris in the state, Lake is polling well below both him and her rival for the Senate. The latest surveys suggest she is about seven points behind Gallego.
Arizona Republican strategist Barrett Marson said Lake had turned out to be a ‘one-trick pony’ and voters had wearied of that trick.
‘They want to move on in life,’ he said.
‘And while one could say that Donald Trump hasn’t necessarily moved on from his election denialism, Trump is a unique individual in American politics, and no one, not Kari Lake, not any other politician in America, can emulate Donald Trump’s success. even if they try to mimic his behavior.’