'Latinos for Lake': Candidate attempts to reach essential Arizona voting bloc in US Senate race
The scene was similar and the target was identical.
Republican U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake held a Latino-themed campaign event at a boxing gym in Goodyear on Wednesday. It came a month after Ruben Gallego, the only Democrat running in the race, held a campaign event for a largely Hispanic audience at a boxing gym in Glendale.
Both events offered Mexican food outside the gym, and in both cases, the candidates hoped to win over Latino voters, a competitive and growing demographic group in Arizona.
Lake’s message to her “Latinos for Lake” supporters sounded largely like her speeches to other groups as well: She alluded to efforts to bribe her from running, said 12 million illegal immigrants push down wages while raising housing costs and she ruminated on the 2020 and 2022 elections.
“Right now, people can’t even afford to feed themselves, let alone start a family,” she told a gathering of perhaps 200 people at Sonny’s Boxing Gym as she shifted to the subject of inflation. “Right now, under Bidenomics, you can’t even afford a Chipotle meal once a week. It’s just out of reach.”
Polling has suggested that former President Donald Trump is showing surprising appeal to Hispanic voters, especially men. While President Joe Biden still wins that demographic overall, his margins are relatively small and have contributed to Trump’s consistent lead in Arizona polling.
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A Republican consultant not involved in the Senate race but familiar with Arizona polling said that Lake isn’t doing as well with Hispanics as Trump. Publicly available polling shows Lake trailing Gallego, sometimes by numbers outside the margin of error.
It’s why both Senate candidates are looking to reach Hispanics in search of support that could help tip the race.
Lake, whose husband is Hispanic, has held events in Latino-heavy areas like Nogales and sat for extended interviews with Spanish-language Univision.
Gallego, who is the son of Hispanic immigrants, held a town hall in Maryvale entirely in Spanish, among other events that have included judging a tamale festival and taking part in a food tour in south Phoenix and the West Valley.
His campaign declined to comment on Lake’s event Wednesday.
Many in the crowd appeared not to be Hispanic. One thing that seemed to unite all the attendees was their high opinion of Lake.
Avondale resident Gene Garcia, 51, said he’s a Lake supporter and the Latino theme of the event was unimportant to him.
“A lot of her events are in Scottsdale or in the East Valley. She’s here in the West Valley, and that’s where I’m at.”
Garcia said he appreciates her traditional pro-family message and wants a political change for the seat held by the retiring U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz.
Ricky DeHoyoz, a Phoenix resident who was active in Lake’s 2022 gubernatorial campaign, was on hand for a candidate he still backs.
He said he was troubled by Lake’s conflicting reactions to the Arizona Supreme Court upholding a near-total ban on abortion but still views her as a better option than Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb, who is also seeking the GOP nomination and has said he unequivocally supports the 19th-century law.
Lake mentioned her fondness for large families but didn’t discuss abortion.
If she avoided one subject, abortion, that has created problems for her in the past, she went on at length about another.
“I am the only one running for U.S. Senate who will acknowledge that the 2020 election was fraught with fraud, and so was 2022,” she said.
During a recent forum that included Lamb, Lake referred to his congressional testimony in which he said he didn’t have evidence of widespread election fraud. She went on to call Lamb a “total coward” for not claiming the 2020 election was stolen. Lamb has said he doubts Biden fairly received 81 million votes, but he had no evidence of fraud in his county.
The entire subject of election denialism is a topic the National Republican Senatorial Committee has urged Lake to drop.
Near the end of her 20-minute speech, Lake hit Gallego with the kind of labels that may resonate with Hispanics.
“Many of you might have families who come from parts of Latin America or other parts that have escaped to America,” Lake said. “Ruben Gallego wants to drag us by the collar back into that Marxism and socialism. We cannot have that.”
The event Wednesday included an appearance from Tito Ortiz, a retired mixed martial arts fighter and, briefly, a member of the city council in Huntington Beach, Calif.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: 'Latinos for Lake' event attempts to reach essential voting bloc in AZ