The Daily Agenda: Kari is in. What about Kyrsten?

We're ready for the "craziest" "nastiest" election ever ... Would you count your money like this? ... And just call them recycled poopsicles.

Kari Lake kicked off her long-teased candidacy for U.S. Senate at an ultra-rich lifestyle magazine headquarters last night, delivering a pitch to voters that was indistinguishable from the message voters rejected just last year. 

She promised to “restore honest elections” while seeming to toggle between pledging to keep up her fight to become governor and claiming God has bigger plans for her than losing the rigged governor’s race. She declared that Trump’s “mean tweets were keeping us safe” before he cut in with a prerecorded cameo backing her candidacy. 

And while swearing she doesn’t care what her former colleagues in the press think of her, the former news anchor lobbed more attacks at the press corps than at either of her competitors, U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego and (maybe) U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema.¹ It was the same old Kari.

“I need you to, first of all, turn off the fake news. Turn them off!” she told her supporters, urging them to get information from KariLake.com instead. “If you have subscriptions to their newspapers, cancel the subscriptions, OK? They’re anti-American.”

We absolutely believe her when she promised 2024 will be “even crazier and nastier than the last election cycle.” 

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Arizona has long been bracing for a three-way race of epic proportions. Politicos have dubbed the Gallego/Lake/Sinema contest the “Grand Slam, the World Cup, the World Series, the Super Bowl ” of elections.

But technically, that’s still not a sure thing. 

Sinema’s fundraising numbers have flatlined in the most recent quarter. While she still hasn’t released her full numbers from her latest fundraising report, she announced she has $10.8 million on hand. That’s an impressive war chest — unless you consider that it was $10.8 million last quarter too. 

Meanwhile, Sinema still doesn’t have a single signature from the roughly² 45,000 minimum voters that she’ll need before April 8 in order to qualify for the ballot.³ And because she’s an independent, she needs about five times as many signatures as Lake or Gallego.⁴ In fact, Sinema hasn’t even filed a statement of interest to run, the very first step.

All that and more has some Democrats seriously questioning whether Arizona political reporters will be blessed with this “Super Bowl” of U.S. Senate races that we have been promised. 

“I do not see her running,” one veteran Democratic strategist told us. “This is not what you do when you’re a serious candidate running for office.”

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Weird stuff happens in three-way races. They’re notoriously unpredictable. 

But Sinema pulling off a win in today’s charged partisan environment seems unlikely, as two dueling polls that The Hill reported on yesterday show. In a survey from Public Policy Polling, a left-leaning pollster, Gallego narrowly leads Lake in the three-way race. In the poll from Republican pollster National Research Inc., Lake narrowly leads Gallego. None of the polls show Sinema within striking distance, let alone leading. 

If Sinema is going to navigate that “path to victory” she recently told donors about, she has a steep hill to climb. That plan had her gaining support from more than 60% of independents and about 30% of Republicans. Current polling puts her support in the teens for both groups. 

But should a three-way race shape up, the biggest remaining question is who will Sinema play spoiler to. Early East Coast conventional wisdom was that the former Democrat would mostly pull from the Democratic candidate. But as any Arizona Democrat knows, Democrats really dislike Sinema right now. 

More likely, according to the polling and Sinema’s own internal plan, is that Sinema would pick off disaffected Republicans who aren’t willing to fully cross the aisle for a liberal Gallego. 

But don’t worry Republicans, Arizona’s self-proclaimed “duly elected governor” turned presumptive U.S. Senate nominee has her own numbers. In a nine-page memo that the New York Times got ahold of, Lake claims that Sinema will be Gallego’s foil, not her own. Just trust her.

This is why we can’t have nice things: Arizona’s experiment with Cyber Ninjas is the prime example of why counting ballots by hand is a bad idea, Votebeat’s Jessica Huseman writes in the New York Times’ opinion pages, but it’s still a catchy idea in ruby red areas like Cochise County, where there’s little political diversity to push back on the ill-conceived project.

“Imagine, if you will, a truck full of paper currency. You and a few lucky friends have to count the money, which has come in a variety of denominations, by hand,” she writes. “You have to finish in a matter of days, and you also have to keep the bills in order under penalty of law. You can’t use a counting machine, and you can’t even use a program like Excel to do the summations. How many friends do you think you would need? Do you think you would all arrive at the same totals?”

Nonprofit doesn’t mean no profit: Charlie Kirk, the founder of MAGA youth organization Turning Point USA, may have helped Republicans lose basically every important position in state government this year. But at least he and his friends are getting rich doing it. The Associated Press investigates, finding the nonprofit organization has paid at least $6.6 million over the years to fake elector and Arizona state Sen. Jake Hoffman’s company, Rally Forge, which “recruited teenagers to spread false information online about voter fraud and the coronavirus pandemic,” among other shady Arizonans. 

What’s wrong with stop signs?: Democratic Rep. Leezah Sun lives near the Valley’s most dangerous intersection — it’s a roundabout — and complains that a new bill Gov. Katie Hobbs signed will give truckers the right-of-way on roundabouts, making them even more dangerous. In an op-ed in the Republic, Sun said next year she’s going to work on repealing the bill, which was pushed by the powerful Arizona Trucking Association. 

He’s running?: A Minnesota woman nominated U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly to run for president in response to the New York Times query of its audience for better candidates. Connie Momenthy of Hopkins, Minn., said he’s highly educated, has a middle-of-the-road view, and “has shown empathy and understanding as a caregiver.”

He’s not running: Longtime Coconino County Supervisor Matt Ryan is resigning at the end of the year, one year ahead of finishing his seventh consecutive term on the board, the Arizona Daily Sun reports. Supervisors in the county will have to appoint a new colleague to fill out the remainder of his term.

Do better: Adult Protective Services is not doing a good job of protecting vulnerable adults and holding accountable those who harm or take advantage of them, per auditors. The Republic’s Stephanie Innes reports that the agency, which is housed under the Department of Economic Security, substantiates less than 1% of all the cases it investigates, which is "well below the proportion of substantiated findings in other states," per auditors. The audit comes after the 2018 rape of an incapacitated woman at a care facility that sparked outrage and calls for reform.

Scottsdale City Councilwoman Solange Whitehead fed her constituents popsicles made from recycled wastewater and bragged about it in her newsletter, per the Scottsdale Progress’ Tom Scanlon. The frozen former sewer water treats were “fruity” and “delicious” and probably wouldn’t be legal in most states. 

Also, this whole news story is objectively funny on several levels.

1. Yes, we know Mark Lamb is still in the GOP primary.

2. The state doesn’t actually determine how many signatures candidates need until January. 

3. And realistically, she probably needs about double that many to fend off a legal challenge.

4. Independents, however, can collect signatures from any voter, not just voters in their own party.