AZ-GOV: How bad a candidate was Kari Lake? This bad.

There’s now compelling evidence this happened on a large scale in Arizona in precisely the races we thought.

The Arizona Republic this weekend highlighted a study of voting in all-important Maricopa County, which accounts for about 60 percent of the state’s electorate. It’s from a group called the “Audit Guys,” which includes a data analyst for the state Republican Party. The study showed that Lake, Masters and other statewide candidates like secretary of state hopeful Mark Finchem lost a significant number of votes from voters who otherwise backed mostly Republicans.

Those voters didn’t just skip those contests, mind you; they voted in large numbers for Democrats. And in some cases, including Lake’s, that appears to have been decisive.

In her case, there were nearly 40,000 voters who didn’t vote for her but otherwise mostly voted Republican across 14 other contests. And about 33,000 of them voted for now-Gov. Katie Hobbs (D). (Some didn’t vote or cast ballots for write-in candidates.)

That crossover vote is about double Lake’s overall, 17,000-vote margin of defeat. Given that Hobbs suffered many fewer defections — only about 8,000 mostly Democratic voters didn’t vote for her, and only about 6,000 voted for Lake — it suggests that the imbalance was decisive. Lake lost by about 27,000 votes among what can loosely be defined as crossover voters.



https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/01/23/maricopa-county-2022-votes/