Arizona‘s Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake sparred with CNN anchor Dana Bash over election integrity during an interview on Sunday.
Lake, who was endorsed by former President Donald Trump and reportedly has Democrats spooked, said she would accept the results of the upcoming election on Nov. 8 if she won and refused to answer Bash’s prodding about her reaction if she lost, stressing that she would be the victor. The two also accused each other of harping on the 2020 presidential election, which Trump has still refused to concede.
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Bash asked Lake why she has called the 2020 election “corrupt, stolen, rotten and rigged” when there is “no evidence … that any of those things are true?”
“The real issue, Dana, is that the people don’t trust our elections. They haven’t since 2000,” Lake responded.
She brought up Stacey Abrams, a Democrat who refused to concede when she lost the 2018 gubernatorial election in Georgia to Gov. Brian Kemp, and problems in some Arizona precincts during the August primaries as examples underlying ongoing election distrust outside of the 2020 presidential election.
“An apology doesn’t bring somebody’s vote back,” she said of Arizona’s August primary election chaos. “All I’m saying is we need to restore honesty and integrity and transparency to our elections.”
Bash said that she would “never bring this [issue] up ever had you not been bringing this up consistently on the campaign trail” and asked if Lake was ready to accept the outcome of the election in November.
“I’m gonna win the election, and I will accept that result because the people will never — the people of Arizona will never support and vote for a coward like Katie Hobbs who won’t show up on a debate stage,” Lake said.
Lake’s Democratic opponent Katie Hobbs, who is Arizona’s secretary of state, appeared immediately after her segment and defended her decision to not debate Lake.
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“Kari Lake has made it clear time and time again that she’s not interested in having substantive, in-depth conversations about the issues that matter to Arizonans,” Hobbs said. “She only wants a scenario where she can control the dialogue.”
Lake and Hobbs are nearly tied in the polls, according to FiveThirtyEight’s aggregate, which has Lake ahead by less than 1 percentage point.
