Kari Lake, who has been one of the most prominent faces of the “Stop the Steal” movement the last four years, has been uncharacteristically quiet about her recent Senate race loss.
In a bizarre video last week, Lake did not question the results of the election she lost to Democratic Senator-elect Ruben Gallego, but she also never formally conceded. She never threatened legal action against her loss either — a stark contrast to her gubernatorial loss in 2022, which she claimed was the result of baseless voter fraud conspiracy theories.
“Truth will never stop mattering to me,” she said in her November 13 video. “You will never stop mattering to me. These memories that we made together will never go away, they will grow sweeter over time.”
Alongside her quasi-acceptance of her defeat, Lake also, in recent days, settled a year-long defamation lawsuit with election official Stephen Richer, who she falsely blamed for her 2022 gubernatorial defeat.
In the context of Donald Trump’s recent presidential victory, Lake’s quiet Senate defeat and the recent settlement reached in the defamation lawsuit align with the broader contours of the election denialism movement — it’s only real when Trump loses, experts tell TPM.
“If she wanted to continue to fight it, what could her argument possibly have been when all of those ballots were the same ones that had Trump winning at the top of the ticket?” Mark Kokanovich, former federal prosecutor and attorney at Ballard Spahr, explained in an interview with TPM.
In 2023, Richer filed a lawsuit against Lake, arguing that following Lake’s gubernatorial defeat in 2022, Lake falsely accused Richer of “sabotaging the election.” As a result of the false claims against him, Richer and his family, he argued, endured threats to their lives and “have had their lives turned upside down.”
Lake did not respond to TPM’s request for comment, and in a text message to TPM, Richer wrote that the suit has been “settled” and that “both sides are satisfied with the result.”
Lake has consistently spread false claims about the 2020 election and the 2022 election for almost four years, so it’s particularly noteworthy that in the face of yet another defeat she has remained relatively quiet.
Some speculate that Lake is privately preparing for the possibility of serving in the Trump administration in some capacity, and any sort of election denial activity or ongoing defamation litigation could jeopardize her chances of landing a role in the administration.
“My guess is that it would be trying to time it so that she could get some position in the administration, and she doesn’t want to come into the administration under a cloud,” Kokanovich said. “…and it would be better not to have a Republican on Republican lawsuit going on.”
Despite the quieting of election denial talk from Lake, the damage that she and others in the “Stop the Steal” movement have inflicted on the entire election system will take years to recover from.
“It’s going to take years, if not decades, whether Kari Lake concedes or not, whether she remains on the scene and tries to run for another office,” said David Becker, the executive director and founder of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research. “I don’t think it’ll have much effect on whether or not there are hundreds of thousands of Arizonans and millions of Americans who believe lies that they can’t trust our election system.”
Others in the “Stop the Steal” movement aren’t giving up the gambit as easily.
MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell remains one of these voices fully committed to claiming widespread voter fraud, despite Trump’s victory and despite there being zero evidence to suggest the election was insecure or unsafe.
On Wednesday, Lindell claimed in an email to supporters that Lake was the victim of “voter inversion” from the “Deep State.”
“And look at what just happened to Kari Lake in Arizona- they stopped counting while over 400,000 ballots were still waiting to be counted!,” Lindell wrote in an email to his supporters. “And are now saying Gallegos is the winner, garnering roughly the same 1.6 million votes Trump got. While Kari Lake supposedly got the same 1.5 million votes that Kamala got? Are you kidding me??? This sounds like voter inversion.”
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