Kari Lake raises nearly $1.5 million for Arizona GOP gubernatorial primary

Posted Jan 13, 2022

Jeremy Duda
Arizona Mirror

Gage SkidmoreRepublican gubernatorial hopeful Kari Lake.

Buoyed by former President Donald Trump’s endorsement, Republican gubernatorial hopeful Kari Lake raised nearly $1.5 million since kicking off her campaign in June.

Lake, a former Fox 10 anchor, announced her fundraising total on Wednesday, saying she’d received contributions from more than 9,000 people.

“We have built a grassroots fundraising machine from scratch, despite the establishment pulling out all the stops to slow us down. The people of Arizona are clearly looking for new leadership in our great state. My frontrunner status, along with the thousands of brand new donors is making the establishment very nervous,” Lake said in a press statement.

Lake’s campaign would not say how much money she’s spent or how much she has on hand, a critical number as the campaigns ramp up their activities to start the election year. The campaign also wouldn’t say how much of Lake’s fundraising haul came after Trump endorsed her in late September. Lake held a fundraising at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida in November.

Those details of Lake’s fundraising will be available when she files her first campaign finance report for the 2021 calendar year, which is due on Saturday.

Since joining the race to succeed Gov. Doug Ducey last summer, Lake has jumped into the lead with an insurgent, anti-establishment campaign reminiscent of Trump’s rise to the presidency in 2016.

Lake is the second of the five major Republican gubernatorial candidates to announce her fundraising total for last year. Developer Karrin Taylor Robson announced that she raised $3.7 million in 2021, half of which came out of her own pocket, and has $3 million on hand. Lake spokesman Ross Trumble said none of the campaign’s money is from self-funding.

Republican candidates Steve Gaynor, Matt Salmon and Kimberly Yee haven’t announced their fundraising totals.

On the Democratic side, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, the frontrunner for her party’s nomination, raised more than $2.9 million. As Arizona’s top election official, Hobbs achieved national prominence as a vocal critic of the false claims that the 2020 presidential election was rigged against Trump and of the so-called “audit” that Senate President Karen Fann initiated of the election in Maricopa County in response to those bogus allegations.

Aaron Lieberman and Marco Lopez, who are also running for the Democratic nomination, raised $1 million and $1.6 million last year, respectively.

This report was first published by the Arizona Mirror.