Kari Lake blew it by turning into a 'crazy election-denier who's unhinged': MSNBC panel

According to a smaller-than-usual panel on MSNBC "Morning Joe," losing Arizona gubernatorial candidate went from a rising star in the Republican Party to having a questionable career in politics if one at all.

On the day after Christmas, NBC political analyst John Heilemann and Democratic campaign adviser Elise Jordan joined fill-in host Jonathan Lemire to discuss Lake's election fraud lawsuit being booted by Maricopa County Judge Peter Thompson on Christmas Eve in a scorching 10-page ruling.

As Heilemann explained, the fact that she lost and then chose to follow Donald Trump's path of being an election denier never should have happened considering her early qualities as a candidate and her camera-ready presence as a television newscaster.

What derailed her candidacy, the entire panel agreed, was her increasingly extremist rhetoric that Jordan suggested made her look "unhinged."

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"If you have seen Kari Lake -- Kari Lake on the campaign this fall, and you ran across her and put aside her election denialism, you would have thought here's a person with extraordinarily good candidate skills for a first-time candidate for office," Heilemann explained. "She's compelling, she's got energy with the base. She knows what to do on camera, she can tell a story."

"In a normal candidate context she lost a narrow race for governor for her first time around," he added. "This woman has a bright future she'll be back, right? That is what you would say in the before times, before Trump and before election denialism. Now you see this person, who is not Trump, in the sense that she has no national following of tens of millions of voters, and she is out there basically playing the sore loser card. Going back again and again and she's going to do what Trump did basically in 2020 and litigate these unfounded claims of election fraud, and she is going to lose."

After pondering whether Arizona voters will still embrace her or move on to what Heilemann called a "more traditional candidate," Jordan jumped in to sum up what happened in Arizona.

"She was a good candidate on the stump until she misread what the electorate wanted and it wasn't the crazy election denier who is unhinged and she didn't pivot at all," she stated.

Watch video below or at this link.

MSNBC 12 26 2022 06 24 02 youtu.be