She Defended Democracy. Do Voters Care?

Katie Hobbs was prepared for the 2020 election to get messy. As the Arizona secretary of state, she’d planned for an onslaught of far-fetched legal challenges from Donald Trump and his allies if Joe Biden prevailed. But Hobbs did not anticipate that she would become a spokesperson for democracy itself.

In the months following the election, the 52-year-old former social worker condemned the jeering mob outside a Maricopa County elections facility on CNN; in The Washington Post, she mocked the “absurd spectacle” of election-conspiracy theories; in an interview with MSNBC’s Joy Reid, she denounced state Republicans’ sloppy attempt to overturn the results through a partisan audit. Almost overnight, Hobbs had evolved from a wallflower bureaucrat to a liberal icon. When Hobbs announced in June that she was going to run for governor, money streamed in from her progressive fans in every corner of the country.

Now, with just five months until the primary, the stakes of Arizona’s gubernatorial election are becoming alarmingly clear. The leading Republican candidate, Kari Lake, a charismatic former local-TV-news anchor, has endorsed the lie that Democrats stole the 2020 election from Trump. She’s argued for arresting poll workers and has even .