Former Fox 10 anchor Kari Lake looked to be on a path to earning the Republican nomination for governor by early Wednesday morning. 

When initial voting results were published by the Secretary of State around 8 p.m. Tuesday, developer and former Arizona Regent Karrin Taylor Robson held a nine-point lead over Lake, with 49.3% to Lake’s 40.4%. 

But as the night wore on, counties began posting results from election-day voting, which heavily favored Lake, who has repeatedly claimed that mail-in voting creates the possibility for fraud. A little before 1 a.m., a large batch of votes from Maricopa County put Lake in the lead by a razor-thin margin. Subsequent updates began to widen the gap: by about 1:10 a.m. Lake had 45.6% of the vote to Taylor Robson’s 45.0%. That translated to less than a 4,000-vote lead. 

The election caps off a bruising GOP primary race that featured relentless attacks over issues from policy to drag queens to private airplanes. 

The winner will likely face Secretary of State Katie Hobbs in the general election. Hobbs led challenger Marco Lopez by more than 50 percentage points in preliminary results. 

On top of determining which candidate will appear on the general election ballot in November; the GOP race was seen as a proxy battle between former President Donald Trump, who endorsed Lake, and former Vice President Mike Pence and Gov. Doug Ducey, who both endorsed Taylor Robson. 

One question begged by the initial results: Will Lake accept a loss? 

In the past week, Lake floated numerous allegations that fraud and “stealing” was already underway in the primary, but she declined to provide any evidence and said she hadn’t made a report to law enforcement. 

Lake, who spent two decades as an anchor for Fox 10, entered the race with high name-recognition thanks to her years on a nightly TV show. She earned the endorsement of Trump early on and made his support a central pillar of her bid. Trump, in turn, boosted Lake throughout the race, coming to Arizona in January and again in July to stump for her and other Arizona GOP candidates. 

Lake offered a strident conservative policy platform across a range of issues: getting tough on the border and building the wall; addressing homelessness by arresting and forcing unhoused people into treatment; expanding educational vouchers and aligning Arizona public schools’ curriculum with one developed by a private Christian school in Michigan. 

But no issue featured more prominently in her campaign than Arizona’s 2020 election, which Lake claims, without evidence, was stolen from Trump. Lake regularly connected her other talking points to this central theme.  

“The reason that we have a border that is wide open, we have fentanyl pouring in killing our young people, we have people pouring across the border, we have an invasion on our border; the reason we have children being smuggled and trafficked and adults being trafficked across this country; the reason we have sky high inflation, they can’t afford our gasoline, can’t afford groceries, is because we had a rigged, stolen election,” she said in a debate in June. 

Though Lake bashed journalists and has encouraged viewers to “turn off” TV news channels, the media played a big role in her campaign strategy. Her first ad featured Lake smashing TVs, and members of her campaign team recorded her often aggressive interactions with reporters on the campaign trail in search of viral social media moments. 

Taylor Robson, with ties to Arizona’s Republican establishment including Ducey, sought to portray herself as a sensible, savvy option compared to Lake, but still staked out right-wing policy stances. In a scene from one of the TV ads that were a hallmark of her campaign, Taylor Robson walks near the U.S.-Mexico border as apparent migrants move through the background, touting her hawkish stance on border security; another shows a slow-motion clip of her firing an assault rifle, emphasizing her pro-gun stance. 

A wealthy land-use lawyer and developer whose father is a former president of the Arizona Senate, Taylor Robson had previously played a role in Republican politics, but mostly behind the scenes as a donor and fundraiser for conservative candidates. She got her most public-facing job when Ducey tapped her to serve on the Arizona Board of Regents in 2017. 

Polling from the beginning of the year put Taylor Robson’s support among likely primary voters in the single digits – something her campaign attributed to low name recognition. But she dipped into her own pockets to blanket Arizona airwaves with constant advertising, and the strategy appeared to pay off as her poll numbers steadily rose through 2022. 

As of late last month, Taylor Robson’s campaign had spent more than $18 million, with most of that going to TV ads. Of that money, more than $15 million dollars came from personal loans from the candidate herself. 

Taylor Robson walked a tightrope throughout the campaign when asked about her view on the 2020 election, which has become a flashpoint in GOP primaries in Arizona and beyond. She repeatedly said the race was “unfair” – but when pressed for details pointed to media coverage and Covid-era changes to election procedures. In a late-July interview with CNN, she repeatedly dodged questions about whether she thought the election was legitimate. 

Even so, Taylor Robson argued that when Lake claimed last week that the 2022 primary had already been tainted by fraud, she went too far. Lake’s comments were “meritless, reckless and disqualifying,” Taylor Robson said in a tweet.