Tucker Carlson's Embarrassing Arizona Face-Plant

Carlson then pivoted to criticizing Arizona election officials for the timetable they said would be necessary to finish counting the votes.

Later in the program, Carlson brought on Lake for an interview. “Where do you think you are in this?” he asked. “Well, I feel a hundred percent certain I'm going to win. The question is how big will that win be?” she replied.

That was not the question.

Thursday, November 10: Anger

For the second night in a row, Carlson opened his show by talking about the Arizona races. But this time he did not offer confidence that his candidates had triumphed, and instead lashed out at Arizona election officials for failing to report the results swiftly enough for him.

Carlson described Arizona’s tally as “beneath Third World,” insinuated that the similar delay in vote-counting in 2018 covered up fraud that led to McSally’s defeat, and called the failure to report the result on election night “an actual attack on democracy.”

Carlson returned to the subject later in the program. “Arizona election officials continue to claim updated vote totals any minute. They're obviously not embarrassed by how long this is taking tonight. They should be ashamed,” he claimed.

After airing a clip of Maricopa County Board of Supervisors chairman Bill Gates calling the count, “very standard,” Carlson ranted: “Where's the groveling? Where's the ‘I'm sorry, I can't believe I screwed up your democracy,’ which we all pretend to care so much about? We can't even count the votes on time. Despite the fact your county has a four and a half billion dollar annual budget, but we can't count votes.”

Carlson concluded by complaining about someone else’s lack of contrition: “Why don't you apologize? Let's start there. They never will, ever.”

Carlson then brought on Arizona political consultant Constantin Querard, a Republican, who argued that “Kari Lake is in a very strong position right now” and that state Republicans are “still pretty optimistic about Masters' chances.” But Carlson, unassuaged, pivoted back to the counting.

“If this were happening in Guinea Bissau, I can promise you the U.S. State Department would say this election is questionable. They would,” he said. “But it's not Guinea Bissau, it is Arizona.”

Friday, November 11: Bargaining And Depression

Yet again, Carlson started his show with the ongoing Arizona vote count, which he portrayed as inexplicably difficult to comprehend and perhaps illegitimate.

“There is still drama, confusion, really chaos in the state of Arizona tonight, stemming from Tuesday's elections,” he said. “How are the officials in charge of this ‘election’ responding? It's hard to know from afar.”

Carlson brought on Lake, who remained confident about the results, saying, “We're less than a point away from our opponent. And we think it's going to start turning and turning quickly, and we believe we're going to win … with a nice padding actually.”

But the Fox host had already turned to trying to delegitimize the election. “So your opponent is the secretary of state,” he said. “She didn't campaign much and she didn't seem like she needed to campaign a lot. She never debated you. And some are smirking online that well, of course, she was always confident in her victory. What's your view of that very common take on the race?”

Carlson went on to complain that Hobbs had failed to “recuse herself for appearance sake,” and suggested big changes were necessary to restore faith in elections. “My view is: eliminate absentee ballots, except for you know, the tiny percentage who really need them,” he said. “This is crazy. And it really is hurting people's view of democracy.”

Carlson then turned to the Senate election. “Blake Masters is running in the other big race in the State of Arizona, which like the Governor's race is still nowhere near being settled. Masters says he can still win his race,” he said.

He then introduced Masters to provide what on-screen text described as his “path to victory.” This involved a dubious claim that some Maricopa County ballots might have been counted twice and a lot of bleating about Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell failing to provide his campaign with enough support.

Roughly two hours later, Fox’s Decision Desk called the race for Kelly.