From our correspondent in New York The night before the election, Carrie Lake, the Republican candidate for governor of Arizona, appeared in an elegant green dress on stage at a warehouse near Scottsdale Airport, Arizona. “Those bastards who are back there don’t want us to talk about the stolen elections,” he recalled to reporters.

It was the fiercest deniers of the electoral system, Sarah Palin 2.0 who was not fooled by the media.She has worked in television for twenty years. When moderate Republican leaders noticed how unprepared she was, she leveled her criticism like a medal. “Trump Lane” was her own definition. Monday night, a Carizona dream or ghost crashes (depending on your view). Carrie Lake was beaten up by Katie Hobbs.

Lake’s recipe included all of Trump’s elements, even the songs themselves, including mocking enemies (even Paul Pelosi after the assault), and it added a double dose of religion: She said it was God who had it. The media (in the past he supported Obama and considered himself a Buddhist). Like in a country rock band, Carey and the three other Trump candidates — for Senate, Secretary of State and Representative — boarded a bus around Arizona announcing: “We can’t even afford a democratic election.” They lost all four, but did not yet admit defeat. Hobbs, the Arizona Secretary of State, a former social worker who worked with homeless youth (a big problem in the Phoenix area), was ridiculed by Lake for refusing to participate in a television debate.

One of Lake’s videos showed her competitor running and hiding in a public restroom: She was in a restaurant, which a far-right journalist called her. For several months, she was threatened with death and pursued by armed gangs. Hobbs, who appeared frequently after 2020 on television to defend the integrity of the presidential election, reiterated that she wanted to avoid television debate and other occasions that would have given Lake a platform for lying. During the vote count, which took nearly a week, Lake continued to speak out on television and on social media about the fraud. However, in recent days, the mood of Republican campaign advisers has gradually worsened.

They gathered in a hotel room, in the same Scottsdale resort where they celebrated their victory early on voting night, ate pizza, tossed coffee one by one looking at the results of the count that arrived each night, 80,000 at a time, and the percentages their candidate got weren’t enough to get back. They will likely try to challenge the outcome in court, particularly on the grounds that some ballot-reading machines are out of order for three hours. Many moderate and independent Republicans (1.4 million unaffiliated and a third of Arizona’s electorate) rejected Lake: it was a vote against her, not a vote for Hobbes. On the other hand, the former TV presenter declared at a rally: “If there are McCain supporters in this room they can leave.” They are beautiful again. In Arizona, Biden won 11,000 votes in 2020. It’s no longer a “red” state but it’s too early to call it “blue”: it’s “purple,” explains respected Phoenix pollster Mike Noble. Hobbs would replace outgoing Republican Governor Doug Ducey who could not advance again because he overstayed his term.

It is the third state, after Maryland and Massachusetts, to move its seat from the Republican Party to the Democratic camp in last Tuesday’s elections. The Supreme Court also ruled that Kelly Ward, an osteopath and leader of the Arizona Republican Party (who challenged Senator John McCain in the Republican primary in 2016 calling him a “mafia godfather”) should turn over his phone records. to the House Committee investigating the assault on Congress on January 6, 2021. In Arizona, some party officials have been accused of involvement in Trump’s attempt to undermine the outcome of the 2020 election. Although there are many moderate Republicans in Arizona, it has always been a current Of the most extreme local parties, his most famous face was that of Maricopa Mayor Joe Arpaio, who was fierce with immigrants and then was pardoned by Trump: At the age of ninety, a few months ago, he tried to run for mayor of a small town, but also lost. Arizona is going in a different direction.