Yahoo Sports Kari Lake Refuses To Say Whether She’ll Accept Arizona Election Results If She Loses
Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake speaks at a rally on Sept. 20 in Chandler, Arizona. (Photo: Matt York via Associated Press)
Kari Lake, the GOP nominee for Arizona governor, refused to say whether she would accept an election loss against Democratic nominee Katie Hobbs in this year’s midterm election on Nov. 8.
In an interview with host Dana Bash on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, Lake repeatedly asserted that she was going to win the election after Bash asked her multiple times if she would accept the election results.
“I’m going to win the election, and I will accept that result,” Lake said, while also claiming that Hobbs was racist.
During the exchange, Bash asked Lake, “If you lose, will you accept that?”
To which Lake replied again: “I’m going to win the election, and I will accept that result.”
Both Lake and Hobbs were scheduled to participate in a televised debate on Arizona PBS on Oct. 12, but Hobbs refused to participate because she believed Lake was “only interested in creating a spectacle” and called Lake a “conspiracy theorist.”
“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 Arizonians,” Hobbs told Bash on Sunday’s CNN broadcast. “She only wants a scenario where she can control the dialogue, and she’s refused to sit down in a one-on-one lengthy conversation to really clarify with Arizonians where she is on the issues.”
Lake was initially scheduled to appear in an interview with Arizona PBS this Wednesday in lieu of the debate, though that appearance was later canceled after Arizona Citizens Clean Election Commission, which partnered with PBS to organize the debate, backed out.
Lake is a former reporter for a Fox affiliate in Arizona. Hobbs currently serves as Arizona’s secretary of state. According to a Fox 10 Phoenix/InsiderAdvantage poll, Lake currently leads the governor’s race by 4 points, polling at 49.3% to Hobbs’ 45.6% as of Thursday.
Lake is a staunch Trump supporter who’s been endorsed by the former president and has received major backing from controversial Republican figures including Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and MyPillow CEO and conspiracist Mike Lindell.
She’s also a peddler of election fraud claims pushed by Trump, who continues to claim that there was widespread voter fraud during the 2020 election despite the Justice Department finding no evidence of it.
Lake recently made headlines when she said both Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and Trump have “BDE,” commonly known as “big dick energy.”
“I’ll tell you what he’s got ― I don’t know if you’ve heard of this, but he’s got BDE,” she said, referring to DeSantis. “Anybody know what that means? Ask your kids about it later.”
“He’s got the same kind of BDE that President Trump has,” she continued. “And frankly, he has the same kind of BDE that we want all of our elected leaders to have.”
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story misidentified the network where Lake was a reporter.
This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.
