Democratic Arizona Rep. Ruben Gallego, an Iraq War veteran, took an early lead over well-known former television news anchor and staunch Donald Trump ally Kari Lake in Tuesday’s election for U.S. Senate.
Gallego is leading 50.4% of the vote to Lake’s to 47.7% as of Wednesday morning, with 60% of the vote counted.
The race in a state with a recent history of close elections is among a handful of contests that will determine how large a Republican majority Trump will work with in the Senate when the president-elect returns to the White House next year.
The GOP clinched the Senate majority Tuesday night, retaking it from Democrats who held it for four years.
It is a test of the strength of the anti-Trump coalition that has powered the rise of Democrats in Arizona, which was reliably Republican until 2016.
Arizona voters have rejected Trump and his favored candidates in every statewide election since then. The presidential contest was too early to call in Arizona after Trump defeated Democrat Kamala Harris in most of the seven other battlegrounds.
Gallego led Lake in early returns, which included a combination of mail ballots received and counted before Election Day and those cast in-person on Tuesday.
Gallego expressed confidence when he spoke to Democrats on Tuesday night in Phoenix, though the race remained too early to call early Wednesday with about a million ballots remaining to be counted.
‘We had a mantra on this campaign: Go everywhere and talk to everyone,’ Gallego said. ‘And that’s exactly what we did. We didn’t take one vote for granted.’
In a break with tradition, Lake and the Arizona Republican Party did not hold an election night party.
She posted about results in the presidential race and shared complaints from others about the pace of vote counting in Maricopa County but did not say anything about her own race.
The winner of the Senate race will replace Kyrsten Sinema, whose 2018 victory as a Democrat created a formula that the party has successfully replicated since.
Sinema left the Democratic Party two years ago after she antagonized the party’s left wing. She considered running for a second term as an independent but bowed out when it was clear she had no clear path to victory.
Gallego maintained a significant fundraising advantage throughout the race. He relentlessly attacked Lake’s support for a state law dating to the Civil War that outlawed abortions under nearly all circumstances.
Lake moved to the middle on the issue, infuriating some of her allies on the right by opposing a federal abortion ban.
Gallego portrayed Lake as a liar who will do and say anything to gain power.
He downplayed his progressive voting record in Congress, leaning on his up-by-the-bootstraps personal story and his military service to build an image as a pragmatic moderate.
The son of immigrants from Mexico and Colombia, Gallego was raised in Chicago by a single mother and eventually accepted to Harvard University. He enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve and fought in Iraq in 2005 in a unit that sustained heavy casualties, including the death of his best friend.
If elected, he would be the first Latino U.S. senator from Arizona.