Democrat Ruben Gallego defeats Kari Lake to become Arizona's next senator

Ruben Gallego will be the next senator from Arizona. The Democrat ultimately defeated Republican Kari Lake by a narrow margin at the polls. Five days after the election, the AP called the race in favor of the current representative and now future successor to independent Kyrsten Sinema, who opted not to run for reelection.

With approximately 95% of the votes counted, Gallego won 50.0% of the vote to 47.8% for Lake. In terms of the number of votes, the now-future senator outpolled Kamala Harris in the Grand Canyon State.

The 44-year-old Democrat was a state representative from 2011 to 2014 when he jumped to the U.S. House of Representatives to represent Arizona's 7th and 3rd districts. With these results, he will succeed Sinema in the Senate starting Jan. 3, 2025.

While Lake ran a much more competitive race than polls anticipated, she fell short of Trump's numbers in Arizona, who beat Harris by more than 5 percentage points, 52.6% to 46.4%. The clearest example is Maricopa County, the most populous county in the state. Trump won there by a 5-point margin, while Gallego pulled 4 points ahead of Lake in the Senate race.

Gallego focused his campaign on being a middle-class Democrat, emphasizing his Colombian and Mexican family roots and his single-mother upbringing.

As for his ideology, he was a member of the progressive bloc in the House of Representatives and is now expected to be close to Senators Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.).

According to his campaign website, he supports raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, raising taxes for "billionaires" and going after "corporations." He blames "the supply chain, the COVID-19 pandemic and the conflict in Ukraine" for inflation over the past four years.