Kari Lake and Ruben Gallego face off in heated races for open seats in Arizona’s 2024 Senate election

Rep. Ruben Gallego and Republican Kari Lake face off on the battlefield Arizona in a high-profile Senate race.

Gallego and Lake were vying for the open seat left by Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, a former Democrat become independentdecided not seek re-election. The seat is among numbers Democrats have fought to retain in 2024. Republicans gained ground in several other states and won a majority in the House of Representatives on election night.

Gallego, 44, is a Marine veteran who was first elected to the House of Representatives in 2014 and represents a district that includes parts of Phoenix and Glendale. In his Senate campaign, the progressive lawmaker has tried to court centrist voters while portraying his opponent as extreme. Gallego would be the first Latino senator to represent Arizona.

Lake, who narrowly lost a far-right campaign for governor in 2022, is a former television news anchor and close ally of former President Donald Trump. The 55-year-old, who is widely known in the state, has been a vocal election denier regarding both the outcome of her own gubernatorial campaign and Trump’s 2020 duel against President Biden. But she expressed that message often during the Senate race. In the run-up to Election Day, Lake launched personal attacks on Gallego, including over the circumstances of his divorce.

Until Sinema won her Senate race in 2018, Arizona had not elected a Democrat to the Senate in three decades, although Sinema later left the party. Then in 2020, Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat, won a closely contested Senate race to fill the remainder of Senator John McCain’s term after his death, becoming the first Democrat to hold that seat since 1962.

The historically Republican state has been a key battleground this cycle, and as a border state, immigration has become particularly important to voters – an issue that has tended to be more favorable to Republicans.

Still, Gallego was leading in most national polls in the months leading up to the election, and Democrats invested heavily in advertising in the state, which had the largest gap in advertising reservations of any contested election this cycle. An abortion initiative is also on the ballot in Arizona, an issue that appears to have driven Democrats to the polls in previous elections.