Senate is statewide. You can't be serious suggesting they let Trump win but cheated to keep Lake out again.
Cheating thankfully isn't infinite. We'll have to wait until all the 'votes' are 'counted' to see the final Trump - Lake margin, but the reason it's a wide ~7 point gap is because Ruben Gallego spent many millions of $ at the start of the year reinventing himself as a moderate independent who will take a stand against the Democrats for the sake of Arizona if he needs to. There were also Hispanics who figured he'd represent their ethnic interests more, but nevertheless preferred Trump over Kamala. Kari basically had no $ for all intents and purposes.
If Dave McCormick was somehow broke, he'd have lost decisively to Bob Casey. Dave is going to be the one guy in a close Trump state that managed to beat the Dem because unlike all the others - e.g. Sam Brown, Mike Rogers, etc - Dave McCormick wasn't massively outspent by his opponent.
There's this image floating around that I didn't save, but it basically shows something like
PENNSYLVANIA: Dave McCormick $100,000,000
MICHIGAN: Mike Rogers $(insert number much less than $100,000,000)
other states and the Republican candidates in them (including Arizona, Nevada): $0
Mitch McConnell wants establishment toadies. Ideally, they can also self-fund. Dave McCormick played the strategy of being a fake America First candidate (he's a legit neocon who will get along well with the likes of Mitch, John Thune, etc), and boosted that Fake America First message which resonates well with Pennsylvania, with his $100,000,000 war chest.
I'm telling ya - we'd have easily won the Senate races in Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan if all those candidates had Dave's level of ca$h. It wouldn't have been close. We would have won ALL those Senate races quite easily. It's also quite possible Trump did a bit better in Pennsylvania compared to, say, Wisconsin because of Dave McCormick's cash fueling bad publicity against the Democrats and Get-Out-The-Vote ops.
Trump's "election denialism" (notice the rhetorical trick to have it similarly worded to "holocaust denialism") is arguably more controversial than Kari Lake's because of 'muh Capitol Assault' but Trump had wayyyy more $ than Kari, and was financially supported by the GOP establishment wayyy more than Kari (an underrated factor in 2024, unlike 2020, was that the GOP establishment was less willing to just throw the race to the Democrats because even they are sick and tired of chomo joe admin's style of running the country). And as I said before, he has a solid record to run on whereas Kari was a newscaster who never had a business record in the private sector, nor any prior political success aside from technically winning the legal votes in the 2022 AZ Gubernatorial race. Oh and one last thing - Kamala is tied to the horrifically unpopular Biden admin (she did her best to assert "I'm obviously not Joe Biden and I'm not Donald Trump either"), whereas Ruben Gallego to many Arizonans was just some guy in the House who was scamming them into believing he was a moderate independent maverick (far from it; he's a shitlib through and through who would lock up Kyle Rittenhouse for life, for instance).
I personally will not ever vote or donate to the Republican Party again for Mitch McConnell's outright treasonous conduct when it comes to leaving candidates woefully underfunded. Hell, Sam Brown (R) in the 2024 Nevada Senate race is a legit neocon, but Mitch likes being in the minority so much that even someone like Sam Brown didn't receive the money he needed to face off against Jacky Rosen (D) who was playing the same fake moderate "I'm for all Nevadans, I will break away from my party when I need to" strategy.