Jacob Tyler Dunn
Audio By Carbonatix
As Arizona’s 2022 elections begin to heat up, candidates on Friday reported their campaign fundraising efforts for the first three months of the year.
Even as the 2020 election recedes further into the past, the reports show candidates in key races who are campaigning about election fraud conspiracies continue to rake in the cash.
In the governor’s race, far-right former TV anchor Kari Lake, armed with former president Donald Trump’s glowing endorsement, has posted $969,800 in donations so far in 2022, largely from individual contributions.
That’s an uptick from her lukewarm fundraising numbers last year. For all of 2021, Lake raised $1.5 million, falling far behind fellow candidates. Now, she has picked up the pace – and is beating out Democrat Katie Hobbs and Republican challenger Karrin Taylor Robson.
Technically, Robson says she raised $2.75 million in the first quarter. But $2 million of it is her own money. Only $755,000 came from individual contributions.
Hobbs, who raised nearly $3 million in 2021, doubling Lake’s fundraising total, now lags her two conservative opponents. She reported around $750,000 in donations in the first quarter.
Democratic candidate and former Nogales mayor Marco Lopez, meanwhile, reported about $450,000 in the first three months of the year. Aaron Lieberman, a former state representative also running as a Democrat, hasn’t yet released his fundraising totals.
So, at least in the first few months of 2022, Lake appears to be at the front of the fundraising pack in the governor’s race. Among other things, she has been militating about the border to do so. “We need your help,” she pleaded with followers Friday on Twitter, asking for donations. “It’s up to us to defend our homeland.”
But Lake is also burning through money quickly. She spent more than two-thirds of what she raised – $650,000 – in the first quarter.
That includes expenditures of around $35,000 to rent Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club. The campaign has spent more than $86,000 on Mar-a-Lago events this election cycle.
Meanwhile, as Lake appears to be gaining momentum in the governor’s race, State Senator Wendy Rogers, who is running for re-election in a newly redrawn district, has lost some of her force.
Rogers, who has gained a national platform through her relentless promotion of election conspiracies, raised $2.5 million in 2021, far more than most candidates in the Arizona legislature. Most of those donations were from out-of-state supporters.
This quarter, though, Rogers reported raising around $364,000 – half as much as she raised in the last quarter of 2021, when a Trump endorsement and appearances on national right-wing media helped raise her profile across the country.
Because of redistricting, Rogers now has found herself in the same district as Arizona Senator Kelly Townsend, once her ally. The two will face off in a rural district stretching from Cottonwood to Flagstaff.
Townsend has yet to post her first-quarter campaign finance reports, but so far she has lagged far behind Rogers in her numbers. In 2021, she raised just $9,306.
Rogers’ campaign donations may be slowing down – somewhat – but her social media tirades have not. “If we save Arizona we save the nation from the godless commies,” she wrote recently on Telegram, right after claiming the U.S. had seen a “bioweapon unleashed on it to steal an election and hurt its people.”
Mark Finchem, another favorite of Arizona’s fringe right, also reported lots of cash this quarter.
Finchem, currently a State Representative for District 11 in Pima County, is now running for secretary of state, the office that handles Arizona’s elections infrastructure, on a platform to “fix 2020.”
Finchem raised $277,000 this quarter and has raised nearly $1 million so far this election, mostly from individual donations. So far, he’s outpacing his conservative opponents. Republican Representative Michelle Ugenti-Rita raised only $11,000 this year. Republican advertising exec Beau Lane posted $144,000.
State Representative Shawnna Bolick, who represents parts of central Phoenix and Glendale, has not yet posted her fundraising count.
Two Democrats are running in the primary for secretary of state: current state Representative Reginald Bolding, who represents South Phoenix, and Adrian Fontes, the former Maricopa County Recorder. Their fundraising totals haven’t been posted yet, but last year they both raised less than Finchem’s $663,000 for 2021.
Bolding and Fontes raised $221,000 and $385,000 in 2021, respectively.
