(NewsNation) — The emergence of GOP candidate for Arizona governor, Kari Lake, is leading some to ask if she’s now the leading lady of Trumpism, a phrase coined by The Atlantic.
Former President Donald Trump was in Mesa, Arizona this weekend to stump for Lake and her fellow Arizona Republicans. But some pundits have their sights on the future, floating her name as Trump’s potential running mate in 2024.
Just one year after leaving a job as a Phoenix local news anchor, she has become a magnet for the Make America Great Again movement.
This weekend, the president watched over her as she touted his agenda of “woke school curriculums,” fighting the “invasion at the southern border” and falsely claiming the 2020 election was stolen.
Republican strategist thinks Lake is morphing the Trump message into her own.
“You know what they said about Ginger Rogers; she did everything that Fred Astaire did but in heels and backwards,” said GOP strategist John Feehery. “And that’s kind of like what Kari Lake has been able to do. Shes been able to do it better than Trump.”
Not all are on board with Lake’s ascension in the GOP ranks. Some Arizona Republicans campaigned for her opponent, Democrat Katie Hobbs, in an attempt to pull support over party lines.
“Candidates like Kari Lake who are reinventing themselves in the image of Donald Trump … are a little troubling for Republican candidates, I think …” Republican strategist Lisa Camooso Miller told NewsNation.
Hobbs recently refused to debate Lake, calling her a “conspiracy theorist.”
The race is virtually a dead heat, according to polling from FiveThirtyEight, which has Hobbs with an advantage of less than 1 percentage point.