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Lake and Gallego fight over border policy, abortion in only U.S. Senate debate

Congressman Ruben Gallego and Kari Lake debate for a U.S. Senate seat in Arizona on Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2024.
Cheryl Evans/The Arizona Republic/Pool
Congressman Ruben Gallego and Kari Lake debate for a U.S. Senate seat in Arizona on Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2024.

In their only debate this year, Republican Kari Lake and Democrat Ruben Gallego tried to paint the other as an extremist unfit to serve in the U.S. Senate.

Gallego, a longtime Democratic congressman, said Lake “failed the basic test of honesty,” citing her unsubstantiated claims that her loss in the 2022 gubernatorial election was marred by widespread voter fraud.

“She has lied to Arizonans about the 2022 election. She has said that she still is the rightful governor of Arizona,” Gallego said. “She has lied about fellow Republicans to the point where they had to go get bodyguards because of all the threats that she created.”

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Lake, a former newscaster, accused Gallego of moderating his positions in an attempt to win over moderate voters in Arizona, a state where Republicans and independent voters vastly outnumber registered Democrats.

“So we're getting the extreme makeover version of Ruben tonight,” Lake said.

She cited Gallego’s position on border security, pointing to comments he made in 2017 criticizing former President Donald Trump’s “stupid, dumb border wall.”

“That border wall keeps us safe,” Lake said. “We've seen it here in Arizona, because we've seen those areas where the border wall is there and people aren't coming through, where there are gaps in it, people are pouring through.”

Gallego, who also called more recent efforts to extend a border wall “ineffective and impractical,” said he does support building walls “where needed, where our experts wanted it.”

“But it also has to be coupled with technology, manpower and then laws that come behind that,” Gallego said. He said bipartisan border legislation opposed by Lake and Trump would have provided many of those resources and accused Lake of milking the issue for political gain without coming up with real solutions.

“I heard from the mayors that I've visited down there, our county officials, and they needed this, and they wanted this,” Gallego said. “This is why it was very, very sad that Kari Lake came out and was against that bill.”

Lake said she supports HR2, a more aggressive immigration bill that would have included 900 miles of new border wall that failed to gain traction this year.

“The real answer, the real solution Arizona is not to have to pour billions into all of this, is to shut down the border, build the border wall that he calls a dumb, stupid border wall,” Lake said, referring to federal dollars used to help local border communities and nonprofits cope with the migrant crisis.

Lake and Gallego also sparred over abortion policy — an issue top of mind for Arizona voters, who will decide whether to add the right to access abortion to the state’s constitution when they cast their ballots this year.

Gallego said he would vote in favor of a national abortion law codifying the rights that existed in the U.S. under Roe v. Wade prior to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in 2022. He said he would vote for that legislation whether or not Arizonans approve their own abortion access law.

“Because a woman has a right to control her body, no matter what state she’s in,” Gallego said.

He also criticized Lake for her previous comments praising an 1864 near-total abortion ban that went back into effect in Arizona following the Dobbs decision and only came off the books in September after Democratic state lawmakers, joined by a handful of Republicans, voted to repeal it in May.

Lake said the abortion issue should be left to the states, echoing a talking point regularly proffered by Trump on the campaign trail.

“I want us to have that choice, and whatever the law ends up being, our choice ends up being, I will respect,” Lake said.

Lake also falsely claimed Arizona’s current abortion law, a 15-week ban, was a bipartisan bill “passed by both Democrats and Republicans, signed into law by both [Democratic Gov.] Hobbs and [former Republican] Gov. [Doug] Ducey.

In fact, the law passed with only Republican votes in 2022 and was signed into law by Ducey, well before Hobbs took office.

Lake did not speak to the media after the debate, and her campaign surrogates declined to say how she would vote on Arizona’s abortion rights amendment.

The debate took place on the same day that early voting began in Arizona as most public polling shows Lake trailing Gallego by 6 points or more.

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Wayne Schutsky is a broadcast field correspondent covering Arizona politics on KJZZ. He has over a decade of experience as a journalist reporting on local communities in Arizona and the state Capitol.