Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey tore into his own party on Sunday for lifting up the “misleading” Kari Lake to the top of the Republican primary to replace him, setting up the outgoing politician for a new fight with Donald Trump.
“This is all an act,” Doucy told CNN’s Dana Bash on Sunday’s State of the Union. “She’s been putting on a show for some time now, and we’ll see if the voters of Arizona buy it.”
Ducey has been one of Lake and Trump’s perennial enemies due to the governor’s insistence that the 2020 election was not stolen. He has backed lawyer Karrin Taylor Robson in the primary, scheduled for Aug. 2, a candidate Ducey has called “a real conservative” and “the real deal.”
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Kari Lake? Not so much.
“Kari Lake is misleading voters,” Ducey said. “She’s been tagged by her opponent, ‘Fake Lake,’ which is sticking and doing some damage. Karrin Taylor Robson started from zero and now this is a margin-of-error race.”
The fight between Robson and Lake, a former-journalist-turned-right-wing-diehard, has morphed into a proxy battle between Ducey and Trump, whose call he ignored when certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 win. Trump backed Lake in September, saying she would do “a far better job than RINO Governor Doug Ducey—won’t even be a contest!” (Ducey sidestepped Sunday whether he would endorse Trump in 2024. “I think we will have options in the 2024 primary race. I am hopeful we will have options.”)
When pressed by Bash, however, the governor wouldn’t say whether the Republican Governors Association would back Lake if she won the primary next month.
“All post-August 2nd roles are to be determined,” Ducey said. “The Republican Governors Association is in the business of electing Republican governors. We happen to be very good at it. We’re the only majority Republican conference in the country. We protect our incumbents, we keep our red states red. Dana, we’re on offense all over the country right now... We don’t support lost causes. We certainly don’t support landslides. We go into states where the races are competitive and get the good candidate over the finish line.”
