Kari Lake Profile: Kari Lake Halperin is an American who was born on August 23, 1969. She used to be a TV news reporter and is now running for US Senate in Arizona in the 2024 election. She was a candidate for governor of Arizona in 2022.

Lake has worked in the media since the early 1990s. From 1999 to 2021, she was the reporter for the Phoenix TV station KSAZ-TV. A short time before she announced her run for governor of Arizona in 2022, she quit her job as a reporter.

Kari Lake Profile

Early Years

Lawrence A. Lake was born in 1969 in Rock Island, Illinois. He is a teacher and football and basketball coach from Richland Center, Wisconsin, and his mother, Sheila A. Lake (née McGuire), is a nurse from Appleton, Wisconsin. She is the eighth child in a family of nine.

Lake lived in Iowa as a child. She graduated from Eldridge, Iowa’s North Scott Senior High School and then went on to earn a BA in communications and writing from the University of Iowa.

Early Career

Lake began her work in 1991 as a production helper at KWQC-TV in Davenport, Iowa. She then moved on to WHBF-TV in Rock Island. After that, she worked as a daily reporter and weekend weathercaster before becoming an evening host at KPNX in Phoenix, Arizona. When she moved back to Arizona in 1999, she got a job as an evening news host for KSAZ-TV (Fox 10 Phoenix).

Lake shared fake and unverified information on social media during her last few years working in the media. This earned her an image as a troublemaker and led to criticism. She spoke out against the Red for Ed movement in 2018—which used strikes and protests to demand more money for schools—saying that it was a “big push to legalize pot.” She later apologized for what she said and took a surprise month-long leave from her job at the station.

After FTVLive showed a video of her at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando, Florida, in March 2021, she told KSAZ that she was leaving the station. In June 2021, she said she was running for governor.

Up until November 3, 2006, Lake was registered as a Republican. That day, she changed her name to become an independent. They became Democrats on January 4, 2008, one day after Obama won the Democratic presidential caucuses in Iowa. On January 31, 2012, she changed her party to Republican.

Trump, Ronald Reagan, and Kelli Ward, the chair of the Arizona Republican Party, were all former Democrats that Lake used as examples of people who had switched parties before her. As a Republican running for governor of Arizona in 2022, she turned in papers in June 2021 to join the Republican primary. There were four people running for the Republican nomination: Scott Neely, Karrin Taylor Robson (a former real estate developer and member of the Arizona Board of Regents), Paola Tulliani Zen, and Lake.

On August 2, 2022, Lake won the Republican primary in Arizona. He won in every county. Once she won the Republican primary, she told everyone, “We’re all big boys and girls” and to “come together.” But just a week later, she said, “We drove a stake through the heart of the McCain machine.”

Katie Hobbs, the Democratic candidate for governor, refused to face Lake during the race. In September 2022, both of them went to a meeting for governor candidates put on by the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Lake led protests against masks and told Arizona State University students to ignore the school’s mask rules. As governor, she would not stand for the COVID-19 pandemic’s mask and vaccine requirements. As governor, Lake promised a group of Republican seniors in November 2021 that she would work to make it easier for people to get hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin made in the state to “make it easier for us to get these lifesaving drugs.”

Later in Life: Politics Journey

A well-known Republican candidate named Lake has been accused of lying when he said that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” from Trump. During her campaign, she sided with Trump and worked hard to spread lies about the election. She said that Trump beat Biden in Arizona and that Biden did not get 81 million votes. The 2021 Maricopa County presidential vote audit showed no signs of election fraud. However, she still wanted the election to be “decertified,” which is against the law.

Lake also wanted Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, who was running against her as a Democrat for governor, to be jailed on false and vague charges of illegal behavior connected to the 2020 election. She also said that media should be jailed.

Trump and other Republicans who support Trump, like Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar and former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, backed Lake’s. Robson, on the other hand, was backed by Arizona Senate President Karen Fann, outgoing Republican Governor Doug Ducey, and Americans for Prosperity.

Lake kept making false claims about the 2020 election during a debate in June 2022 between Republicans running for the nomination. Seventeen days before Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017, Lake shared a meme on Facebook calling it a “national day of mourning and protest.” This was revealed by Fox News in July 2022. Fox News asked Lake’s team about the post, and it was taken down.

Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer sued Lake for defamation in June 2023, saying that she had frequently said that he had hacked the 2022 election by making ballots that were the wrong size and adding 300,000 fake votes to the Maricopa County vote count. Richer also said that this caused threats against him and his family and made Republican donors and networks avoid him.

Lake also backed the bid for the Oklahoma Senate of far-right video streamer Jarrin Jackson. Jackson was then looked at closely because he had made antisemitic comments in the past, such as saying that “the Jews” are proof that “evil exists.” This caused groups like the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Phoenix to ask Lake and other Arizona Republicans who backed Jackson to take back their support.

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In November 2022, Arizona Governor Rick Lake’s campaign had to deal with a probe into strange white powder and hateful letters sent in an envelope. The Phoenix Police Department looked through the things that Lake’s campaign gave them and found nothing illegal inside. After this was made public, Lake’s campaign said there were three packages, with “a white powdery substance along with a hateful letter” in the first one that the staff member opened.

For two days in October 2022, Lake wouldn’t say that she would accept a loss in the election: “I’m going to win the election, and I will accept that result.” On November 14, 2022, many news sites predicted that Lake had lost the gubernatorial race to Hobbs by a small margin. In response, Lake tweeted, “Arizonans know BS when they see it.” On November 17, Lake still wouldn’t admit she lost and said she was putting together a law team to fight the results.

Arizona’s election results were made official on December 5. Hobbs beat Lake by more than 17,000 votes. The Audit Guys, a group of three election data experts, did an analysis in January 2023 and found that in Maricopa County, more than 33,000 Republican voters who chose to vote for Hobbs instead of Lake in lower-level races, and almost 6,000 Republican-leaning voters who did not vote or wrote in someone else instead of Lake in the gubernatorial election. On the other hand, the study found that Lake got less than 6,000 votes from Maricopa County voters who lean Democratic.

Lake said that people were not able to vote because of problems with printing ballots and long lines in Maricopa County, where polls were run by Republicans. In 70 of the 223 polling places in Maricopa County, the votes written by voting machines were too faint to be read by tabulators. This was because of a setting on the printer that hadn’t caused widespread problems in earlier tests. Voters who didn’t want to wait in line for the problem to be solved could leave and vote at another polling place in Maricopa County. Online, wait times for voting places were shown, and many polling places had few or no lines.

Arizona Governor Hobbs was sworn in in January 2023. Later, she shared on Twitter 16 voter signatures, most of which were from 2020. The signatures did not match, which led her to believe that these were from fake votes. A law in Arizona says that “records containing a voter’s signature… shall not be reproduced by any person other than the voter,” except for people who work for the county clerk. As of the end of 2022, Lake’s effort had earned $2.6 million. An even bigger amount of money came from a non-profit fundraising group that Lake’s staff started in December 2022. By February 2023, this group had become Lake’s main way to raise money, and it is not needed to share information about donations.

In April 2023, an independent report on the printing problems in the 2022 election was released. It was led by Ruth McGregor, who was chief justice of the Arizona Supreme Court until she retired. The investigation found that “equipment failure” was “the main cause of the election day failures” and that there was “clear evidence that the problems should have been anticipated.” Lake and Mark Finchem sued the state to stop electronic voting machines from being used in her 2022 election. U.S. District Judge John Tuchi threw out the case, writing that Lake and Finchem “articulated only conjectural allegations of potential injuries” and did not have the right to sue. The Eleventh Amendment to the US Constitution and the Purcell principle were also used by Tuchi.

Alan Dershowitz was one of Lake’s lawyers in this suit. In December 2022, Tuchi punished them for making “false, misleading, and unsupported” claims during the case and for making claims without “an adequate factual or legal basis grounded in a reasonable pre-filing inquiry.” He also told the plaintiffs to pay the defendants’ attorney fees.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit turned down Finchem and Lake’s appeal in October 2022. They wanted to ban electronic voting machines, but “counsel for plaintiffs conceded that their arguments were limited to potential future hacking and not based on any past harm.”

After Arizona confirmed the election results on December 9, 2022, Lake filed a new suit in state court. He wanted the court to either throw out Hobbs’ win and name Lake the winner, or he wanted Maricopa County to hold a new election. Lake’s lawsuit said that hundreds of thousands of votes were cast illegally, but it didn’t give any proof to back up these claims. Lake’s last case was thrown out by Judge Thompson on December 24. He wrote that “printer failures did not actually affect the results of the election” and pointed out that a witness Lake had called said that “printer failures were largely the result of unforeseen mechanical failure.”

On his Twitter page, Lake criticized the judge in this case and linked to a Townhall article that said “his decision was ghostwritten” by “top left-wing attorneys like Marc Elias.” Judge Thompson told Lake to pay Hobbs $33,000 for expert witnesses and a ballot inspector because of the lawsuit, but he did not punish Lake for filing the lawsuit.

On February 16, 2023, Lake’s case was turned down by all three judges on the Arizona Court of Appeals. The court decided that Lake’s only claim that long lines at polling places might have had an impact on the outcome of the election was based on guesswork. She didn’t show any proof that voters whose ballots couldn’t be read by on-site tabulators weren’t allowed to vote. Instead, she said that the evidence from the trial showed that voters could cast their ballots and that the votes were counted correctly. There is no other reason to throw out the election results.

Lake tried to take her case to the Arizona Supreme Court, but they said they could not hear it. According to a five-page order from the Court, the lower courts did the right thing when they threw out six of Lake’s seven legal claims, saying that her challenges were “insufficient to warrant the requested relief under Arizona or federal law.” The Arizona Supreme Court then said that the lower courts got Lake’s remaining legal claim (about signature verification) wrongly, thinking that her challenge was about the policies that enforce signature verification, not the practices that happen.

Judge Peter Thompson of the Maricopa County Superior Court decided against Lake on her last claim on May 22, 2023, after a three-day trial. This confirmed Hobbs’ victory. Thompson said that Lake had not provided “clear and convincing evidence or a preponderance of evidence” of wrongdoing in the election. However, he did say that there was “ample evidence that — objectively speaking — a comparison between voter records and signatures was conducted in every instance [Lake] asked the Court to evaluate.” Thompson did not punish Lake for her final claim, telling her that even though there was no clear or convincing evidence for it, it was not necessary.

In May 2023, the Arizona Supreme Court said that Lake’s lawyers had broken the law by giving the court “false factual statements.” As a result, the court gave them a $2,000 fine. In court documents, Lake’s lawyers lied when they said that it was a “undisputed fact that 35,563 unaccounted for ballots were added to the total of ballots [at] a third party processing facility.”

Lake said on October 10, 2023, that she would be running for the US Senate in Arizona in 2024. Politico reported in November 2023 that Lake had changed her tone from the “fire and brimstone” style of her gubernatorial campaign to a more polite one, in an effort to make peace with Republicans she had attacked before.

Lake calls herself a conservative Republican and called herself a “Trump candidate” in 2022. During her campaign for governor, she got support from extreme right-wingers and said that President Joe Biden and Democrats had a “demonic agenda.” She went to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando in 2021 and 2022.

Lake has been against bills that would protect people from harassment based on their sexual orientation or gender identity, and he has also been against bathrooms that are accessible to transgender people. She has called LGBTQ rights and people who support them part of the “alphabet mafia” and said that drag queens could be bad for kids.

Personal Life

Jeff Halperin and Lake have been married since August 1998. They have two kids. She used to be married to electrical engineer Tracy Finnegan.

Lake was a Catholic as a child. According to her friends, she used to call herself a Buddhist before 2015. She called herself a conservative Christian as of 2022.

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