Don’t look now but, thanks to a variety of circumstances, Arizona is hosting one of the most important debates in the country.
Actually,dolook. Everybody else will. Because the debate between the U.S. Senate candidates in Arizona, Democrat Ruben Gallego and Republican Kari Lake, should be contentious and maybe entertaining and probably maddening.
It’s also really important in an election where the absolute madness of the presidential election has sometimes overshadowed the importance of the down-ballot races. If you’ve tried to watch television in the last month or so, you know that there might not be enough mud left in the state of Arizona for these two campaigns to sling at each other, but that’s not going to stop them from trying. (Butplease, cut out the political ads during football games and the baseball postseason.)
When is the Kari Lake-Ruben Gallego debate?
Gallego and Lake are scheduled to debate at 6 p.m. Arizona time on Wednesday, Oct. 9. It will be aired on local TV stations in Phoenix and around Arizona, and streamed on news sites, including azcentral.com. The moderators are Steve Goldstein, a longtime former KJZZ host, and Nohelani Graf, a former ABC 15 anchor.
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That’ll be a fun job — part debate moderator, part bouncer. Lake and Gallego have what you might, ahem, call strong personalities, agree on not much and no doubt will use their only debate to attack each other. If history is any guide, Lake will probably attack the moderators, as well.
That’s history as in recent history, when Lake sat for an interview with Ted Simons on Arizona PBS. Lake is about as MAGA as it gets, especially when it comes to not accepting election results (though with Simons she mostly just danced around the fact that she’s never conceded defeat in the 2022 Arizona governor’s race) and going after the media. She lumped Simons in with the absent Gallego — more on that in a moment — so much that he had to ask her to stop.
Simons performed exactly the way a moderator or an anchor or a reporter should. He was polite, insistent and armed with facts. Goldstein and Graf better be too or they’ll get eaten alive.
In fairness, Lake’s interview with Simons was also supposed to be a debate. She accepted, Gallego didn’t. The station then offered them one-on-one interviews; Simons said they’re still negotiating with Gallego over his.
Opinion: 'Goodness gracious':Ted Simons' Kari Lake interview was great TV
So is this going to be a Trump-like contentious debate, or something more akin to the more-civil vice-presidential debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz? Will Gallego try to bait Lake the way Kamala Harris did Trump? Or vice versa? That certainly seems more likely than the back-slapping good time Walz and Vance mostly engaged in, though you never know.
There are certainly substantive issues to discuss, both in terms of the country and the individual candidates.
I’d say Job 1 is to ask Lake, again, whether she accepts the results of the 2020 election, the 2022 election and if she will accept the 2024 results if she loses. Simons laid out a good case for this being a matter of character. It would also be interesting to try to get Lake, who goes back and forth between talking about being a journalist for many years and attacking the media, depending on the situation, to take a side.
Moderators Steve Goldstein and Nohelani Graf have a tough job
As for Gallego, he definitely should be held to account for his “moderate reinvention,” as the Washington Post put it, shifting some of his more liberal stances as a member of the U.S. Congress to more middle-of-the-road ones as a Senate candidate.
Immigration and, especially, abortion will be hot-button topics. It’s not like we don’t know where they stand on these issues — well, Lake has moved around on abortion — but it’s worthwhile to get them on the record in front of an audience that may not be fully aware of their stances. (People, read a newspaper.) Or, who knows, maybe they’ll contradict what they’ve said already. Given the candidates, that’s certainly a possibility.
That puts a lot of pressure on Goldstein and Graf. Theirs is in a way a thankless job, but an important one.
On the other hand, it’s difficult to imagine anyone with a pulse still being undecided as to who they’re voting for. But, like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, these mythical creatures supposedly exist, at least as far as polls are concerned. And if a debate like this can help someone make up their mind, all the better.
Reach Goodykoontz atbill.goodykoontz@arizonarepublic.com. Facebook:facebook.com/GoodyOnFilm. X:@goodyk. Subscribe tothe weekly movies newsletter.