Katie Hobbs Defeats Kari Lake To Win Arizona Governor’s Race Transcript

We’re getting some word from the control room about a call here, if I’m not mistaken. We are now projecting that Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs is in fact the winner in the Arizona gubernatorial race. This will make her the Democratic governor of that state. She has, according to our projections, vanquished Kari Lake, local TV news personality who mounted an incredibly strong campaign, but katie Hobbs was the only statewide elected Democrat. She was a Secretary of State. She ran for governor, and it looks like she will be the next governor in Arizona. Steve.

Well, that’s why I was kind of stalling for time…

I know.

Because I…

[inaudible 00:00:49] everyone, we all understand.

I had a very strong feeling this was coming and I was running out of ways to say it without saying it. But yes, this was an advantage of over 20,000 votes with Maricopa now pretty much exhausted in terms of remaining ballots. Pima County may have a few, but anything to come in out of Pima is probably going to benefit Hobbs. The provisional ballots to come might benefit Hobbs as well. You just take a look around the state, at the remaining areas, there are some Republican areas. Generally they’re very small in terms of population, in terms of vote share, and even in some of these Republican areas, for instance, we got an update from Yuma County, small county, earlier in the evening, and it was an update of those mail ballots dropped off on election day, and Hobbs actually got more votes in the update than Lake did.

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So even in some of these Republican rural areas, they weren’t huge batches of votes like we’re talking about in Maricopa. But even there, Lake was actually losing a little bit of ground in some of the updates earlier. So looking at Maricopa, that’s, it was ballgame. You knew Kari Lake needed to get a massive number out of there. I think she needed to get this thing at least inside of 5,000, where you could plausibly make a case that maybe there are enough votes out there in just the right combination for her. But when you saw 20,000, that’s a safe margin for Katie Hobbs.