Hey, moderates, Kari Lake wants to talk (forget those nasty things she said about you)

Calling all RINOS, doormats, gold diggers, GOP plotters of global domination and yes, all you John McCain supporters.

Kari Lake, having apparently checked the latest polls, wants to talk.

No, seriously.

Kari Lake is contacting the McCain wing

Republican politicos are buzzing — with a fair amount of eye rolls thrown in — about Lake’s quiet outreach to various Republicans she vilified in 2021, 2022 and the better part of 2023.

“I heard that she has taken meetings and is trying to set up meetings with the McCain wing of the Arizona Republican Party,” said GOP strategist Barrett Marson, who along with several other strategists confirmed she’s been privately reaching out to establishment Republicans.

A source close to Karrin Taylor Robson confirmed Lake has contacted her former opponent — the one she savaged last year as a “gold digger,” a con artist and a RINO who pretty much hates America.No word on whether she has contacted former Gov. Doug Ducey, who she accused of supporting open borders and being a doormat to the Mexican drug cartels.

Or Cindy McCain, who she implicated in a globalist plot to destroy America.

Or Maricopa County Supervisor Bill Gates and Recorder Stephen Richer, both of whom she has accused of being criminals.

It's a wise, but brazen, strategy for Lake

But Kathy Petsas, a lifetime Republican and former chair of her legislative district who was basically chased out of the party by the America First crowd, confirmed that Lake has asked to meet.

“I’m willing to meet with her to hear what she has to say and hopefully she’s willing to hear what I have to say,” Petsas told me.

It’s a wise strategy for Lake, something she should have employed in 2022 when she was instead instructing McCain supporters to “get the hell out” of one of her final events before the general election.Also, an incredibly a brazen one given Lake’s scorched-earth approach to politics.

After her win in last year’s gubernatorial primary — after she bragged that she “drove a stake through the heart of the McCain machine” — Petsas wondered on social media if this was Lake’s way of unifying the party.

Lake’s response was to have her campaign account rhetorically punch Petsas smack in the nose.

“Kathy, You’re exactly the type of demographic that we feel no need to appeal to,” Kari Lake’s War Room tweeted in reply. “The Republicans who willfully cheered for Joe Biden to win because they vindictively hated this party moving past them.”

Lake can't win without moderates

Now Lake is quietly reaching out to exactly that type of demographic.

Because here is the infuriating thing for Kari Lake and MAGA Republican Party — the lesson they did not learn in 2018 or 2020 or 2022. The reason Arizona elected a Democratic governor and two Democratic senators.

They cannot win without the support of the more moderate Republicans and the conservative leaning independents they scorn.

“She can’t win if she doesn’t have that wing of the party unified behind her,” said one Republican strategist, who would not speak on the record. “There’s no way, the math doesn’t work.”

Ohio to Kari Lake and the GOP: Be very afraid

Especially as suburbanite Republicans likely won’t have to hold their nose and vote for a Democrat or leave their ballots blank — not if Democrat-turned-independent Kyrsten Sinema is on the ballot along with Democrat Ruben Gallego.

Though conventional wisdom would suggest that Democrats would split their vote, polls suggest Sinema would actually siphon votes from Lake, not Gallego.

My guess is that Lake is not going to have much luck in retreating from the line she so brazenly, gleefully crossed in 2022 and 2023.

How does Lake erase all that vitriol?

“I think I’m a pretty good PR/communication person but I have no f---ing idea of how she can erase two years of just the most vitriolic statements on the RINOs and moderate McCain wing of the Arizona Republican Party and independents, for that matter,” Marson told me.

“I don’t know how one erases all the brutal things that she has said over the last year and a half or two years. I just don’t know how she’s going to do it, especially if she’s not doing it publicly.”

No doubt, she would have to make her apologies both heartfelt (if that’s possible) and public — starting with Supervisor Gates, who has endured three years of threats and harassment for the apparently unpardonable crime of refusing to buy into the Big Lie that Donald Trump won Arizona in 2020.

Gates, who was diagnosed with PTSD, prompting Lake’s War Room to mock him in May.

“Embarrassing,” her campaign account wrote. “He can’t run an election, but he can run to the media for sympathy.”For Lake, any road to Washington likely runs through a public apology to people like Gates. And Taylor Robson and McCain and Ducey and too many others to count.

Won’t that go over well with her MAGA base?

Reach Roberts at laurie.roberts@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on X, formerly Twitter, at @LaurieRoberts or on Threads at @laurierobertsaz.

Support local journalism: Subscribe to azcentral.com today.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Kari Lake is quietly reaching out to moderates? Sure, that'll go well