GOP Gubernatorial Candidates’ Obsession With Conspiracies about Past Election Front and Center in Debate

PHOENIX – Secretary of State and gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs spoke out Wednesday against Republican frontrunner for governor Kari Lake and her trailing opponent Karrin Taylor Robson for using the televised GOP primary debate to peddle 2020 election conspiracy theories. While Lake is a prominent election denier and Big Lie promoter, Robson has also been forced to jump on the Big Lie bandwagon to try to beat Lake in the primary.

“Despite the lack of real evidence showing the 2020 election was stolen, my Republican opponents cannot stop rehashing false, stale conspiracy theories,” Hobbs said. “Arizonans are ready to move on from an election that happened almost two years ago. As governor, I will tackle the issues voters actually care about, like education, the soaring cost of living and reproductive rights.”

The comments from Lake and Robson come on the heels of the widely disseminated Jan. 6 committee hearings in Washington, D.C., that underscored just how critical Trump’s Big Lie narrative was in instigating the deadly attack on our country.

Lake

  • Despite the hundreds of charges brought against Jan. 6 rioters at this point in time, Lake reinforced the theory that the government was holding U.S. citizens without charges, saying, “what I don’t like is that people are being held in prison without being charged.” Her statement was fact checked false by independent fact checker Politifact.

  • Lake told conservative news network RSBN last October that Jan. 6 rioters were “invited in by Capitol Police,” pushing an unproven narrative that the insurrection was nonviolent. By this point, Capitol officers had already testified before Congress months prior to the racism and physical harm they experienced during the riot.

Robson

  • In an interview with AZFamily, Robson avoided saying point-blank whether the 2020 election was stolen, but still insisted “I don’t believe the election was fair.” In a longer version of the same interview, she also said that as governor, she would focus on stricter voter ID requirements, increase penalties for ballot harvesting and make uniform rules for cleaning up voter rolls. [Timestamp 2:15]