Senate Nominee Lake and Her Own State Party Chair Get Into a Yelling Match Over Her Movement's Label Days After Her Upset Win; She Reportedly Shouts 'Stop Gaslighting Me!'

PHOENIX — Four days after an insurgent candidate stunned the establishment to win a U.S. Senate nomination, the nominee and the chair of her own state party got on the phone to plan the general election and instead, according to three people familiar with the call, planned it at a volume that could be heard by the three people familiar with the call.

The conversation between nominee Lake and the chair concerned whether the nominee's association with the activist movement that powered her primary victory would sink her in a statewide race, and whether the party had done enough to help her. The nominee, by the accounts of people who spoke with her, said it had not, and at one point shouted, 'Stop gaslighting me!' A person close to the chair said the chair did not yell but was yelled at, a distinction that will presumably be litigated at the state convention.

The chair, according to these accounts, wants Lake to distance herself from the movement and its label before the general election, in which the party already faces an uphill fight against a well-funded incumbent. The nominee wants the party to treat her like a nominee, which the party insists it is doing, at a reasonable speaking volume.

Strategists from the opposing party, who have spent years watching their own insurgents scream at their own chairs, expressed delight at the symmetry and forwarded the story to one another with the word 'disarray' in the subject line, a word they had previously applied only to the other side.

"We are unified," the state party said in a statement, issued separately from the nominee's statement that the party was unified.

The Press's party unity desk notes that an insurgent nominee fighting her own chair is described as 'grassroots energy' when it happens to your party and 'civil war' when it happens to the other, and that the only thing that changes is the area code. At press time both sides had agreed to a second call, and the people familiar with it had agreed to stand closer.