On the fundraising front, Wednesday brought plenty of good news for Republicans.
Kari Lake, the GOP front-runner in the U.S. Senate race in Arizona and a staunch supporter of former President Donald Trump, broke a Mar-a-Lago record for nonincumbent Senate candidates by raising more than $1 million, two campaign officials told ABC News.
The fundraising event Wednesday at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, included packages as high as $100,000 per couple.
A former news anchor, Lake narrowly lost her 2022 Arizona gubernatorial bid to Democrat Katie Hobbs. As in the 2020 presidential election, irregularities plagued the Lake-Hobbs contest. In Maricopa County, for instance, electronic voting machine tabulators rejected thousands of ballots and caused hours-long lines.
Lake has brought legal challenges against both the 2022 election results and the use of electronic voting machine tabulators.
Looking ahead to this fall, she will likely face Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego in the general election.
Polls show Lake with a strong lead over Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb and other candidates in the GOP primary race, and Gallego faces no serious challengers on the Democratic side. The primary elections will be held on July 30.
Last month, independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, a former Democrat who still caucuses with that loathsome party, announced that she would not seek re-election.
Sinema’s withdrawal almost certainly means that Lake and Gallego will go head-to-head in a high-stakes contest that could decide which major party controls the Senate.
Do you believe Kari Lake will win her Senate race?
A Rasmussen poll conducted in February showed Lake with a 3-point lead over Gallego in a head-to-head race. At that time, Sinema had not yet announced her decision not to seek re-election.
Last month, however, The Hill and Emerson College released a poll showing the Democrat with a 4-point lead, though undecided voters did break slightly in Lake’s direction.
Curiously, that same poll showed Trump with a 4-point lead over President Joe Biden in Arizona. So it appears that Lake must work to match the former president’s appeal in the Grand Canyon State.
In other words, her Wednesday fundraising haul could not have come at a better time.
Gallego, for instance, raised $3.3 million in the final quarter of 2023 and another $7.5 million in the first quarter of 2024, according to ABC News.
Lake, by contrast, raised $2.1 million in the final quarter of 2023 and has not yet released 2024 numbers.
Trump himself attended the Mar-a-Lago fundraiser in support of Lake, according to Breitbart.
That event came on the same day that the Republican National Committee announced impressive March fundraising results. Together with the Trump campaign, the RNC brought in $65.6 million last month.
“We are going to win BIG in just 31 weeks,” RNC Chairman Michael Whatley said in a statement.
Such effusive optimism following fundraising success comes as no surprise. After all, elections cost money.
On the other hand, the MAGA-led Republican Party relies on support from ordinary, working Americans. And recent polls have shown that its support has grown the fastest among black and Latino voters.
Thus, the establishment-backed Democrats have bad ideas but much deeper pockets than their GOP opponents.
MAGA-backed Republican candidates, therefore, will not outspend their Democrat counterparts. But fundraising news like Wednesday’s means they could keep pace.
Furthermore, Democrats have long enjoyed major institutional advantages.
The establishment media, entertainment industry, teacher-producing education colleges and universities as a whole have bombarded the masses with establishment-approved narratives.
Imagine how bad their ideas must be, and how often and egregiously they must have lied, in order to have lost elections in spite of those financial and institutional advantages.
In short, Republicans like Lake need only to keep in striking distance on the fundraising front. Speaking the truth and having better ideas will take care of the rest.
Disclosure: Floyd Brown, one of the owners and founder of The Western Journal, is serving on a volunteer basis as chairman of Kari Lake’s Senate campaign.
