New survey on Wednesday revealing her leading her Democratic opponent, Rep. Reuben Gallego, for the first time gave former Arizona GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake some very exciting news.
Although Lake and Gallego matched according to Atlas Intel’s October 29 poll, their most recent data from October 30–31 shows Lake slightly leading over her Democratic competitor with 48.6 percent of the vote compared to Gallego’s 47.9 percent.
The poll also gauged third-party support at 1.4 percent; another 1.5 percent of respondents still remain unsure.
Lake, who was just beaten in the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial contest by then-Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, still battles uphill.
For most of the campaign, Gallego has maintained a constant lead in the RealClearPolitical polling average. Gallego’s lead was four percentage points according to a Rasmussen Reports poll taken from October 25 to October 29; a CNN poll taken from October 21 to October 26 put the Democrat up by eight points.
According to an October 26–28 Data Orbital poll, Lake and Gallego almost deadlocked and the contest was significantly closer.
Gallego’s advantage in the RealClear Politics polling average overall as of October 31 is 3.9 percentage points.
Consistent with his significant advantage in the October 29 poll, AtlasIntel also revealed good results for former President Trump in Arizona. Leading Vice President Kamala Harris by 4.2% in the October 30–31 poll, Trump ranks highest among all seven battleground states polled.
With few Republican votes defecting and almost equal Democratic supporters choosing not to support Harris, the poll also found that Trump is just slightly winning over independents in the state.
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Last month, Lake’s Senate campaign unexpectedly changed course after a shock court decision disclosing sealed divorce records from her opponent’s past.
Gallego lost a protracted legal fight to keep the matter quiet after divorcing his then-wife, Kate Gallego, in 2016. After a ten-month court battle, the Washington Free Beacon won and Gallego’s last request to keep the papers under wraps was denied by the Arizona Supreme Court.
Gallego said in a brief to the court that year that Kate Gallego “had not yet been served” with divorce papers and “her attorney entered an appearance,” indicating that she was “probably going to give birth any day,” the site said. The divorce petition declared that “parties’ marriage is irretrievably broken” and noted “no reasonable prospect of reconciliation.”
Said another way, the filing seemed to catch Kate Gallego off-guard. She contested her then-husband’s assertion in a February 2017 reply to his divorce application, stating she was “without knowledge of information sufficient to form a belief” the marriage wasn’t fixable.
Basically, the Free Beacon said, Ruben Gallego’s wife, then a Phoenix city councilwoman, was quite pregnant when she received divorce papers she had no knowledge were arriving.
Under an Arizona provision allowing judges to award such fines, the court records also show the lawmaker trying to load his wife with court fees. In her February 2017 paperwork, Kate Gallego asked the court to “enter an order that husband contribute to wife’s attorney’s fees and costs.”
Ruben Gallego sought to have the court decide that neither party is in need of nor entitled to an award of long term spousal support in his first plea to the court, therefore negating any claims to such maintenance from Kate. She first said she was “entitled to spousal maintenance,” but she eventually withdrew it and admitted both of them were financially independent and not in need of help.
April 2017 saw the finalization of their divorce.