Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters speaks to supporters during a campaign event at Whiskey Roads Restaurant & Bar on July 31, 2022 in Tucson, Arizona. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
Blake Masters, an ultra-MAGA candidate backed by former President Donald Trump, won Arizona’s GOP Senate primary on Tuesday night, setting up a general election showdown with his more traditional Democratic challenger that will test whether the way to win is a key swing state in 2022 is by channeling the hostility of the far right – or by trying to appeal to a wider coalition.
With more than 70 percent of precincts reporting, Masters — a 35-year-old “anti-progressive” venture capitalist elevated to the head of a crowded primary field with at least $15 million in super PAC funding from powerful Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, his longtime boss and mentor — won his party’s nomination for the U.S. Senate early Wednesday morning, defeating wealthy solar executive Jim Laymon and state Attorney General Mark Burnovich.
On Election Day, Masters will face incumbent Democrat Mark Kelly in a race that will help determine control of the deeply divided Senate.
After midnight, a second MAGA candidate, state Rep. Mark Finchem, also won the GOP nomination for Arizona Secretary of State. And a third, former Phoenix news anchor Carrie Lake, was in a close battle for the party’s gubernatorial nomination with her establishment rival, real estate developer Karin Taylor Robson.
“We won today seven out of 10 votes on Election Day,” Lake told supporters Tuesday night, claiming — falsely — that “there’s no path to victory for my opponent and we won this race. Period.”
Lake also claimed that “if we don’t win, there’s some cheating involved” – a possible hint that she could challenge the results in the coming days.
Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Carrie Lake speaks to supporters during a campaign event at Whiskey Roads Restaurant and Bar on July 31, 2022 in Tucson, Arizona. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
Both Lake and Finchem repeated Trump’s lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him — and vowed to do whatever it takes to prevent another Trump loss in the future. Masters also declared that “Trump won in 2020.”
For all three election deniers, those displays of allegiance were enough to win Trump the sought-after endorsement, which he gave in person at a July 22 rally in Prescott Valley.
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That same day, former Trump Vice President Mike Pence campaigned across the state for Robeson, who refused to say the 2020 election was rigged. Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey — another prominent Republican who, like Pence, has opposed Trump’s efforts to override the 2020 outcome — also endorsed Robeson, along with Finchem’s primary challenger, Beau Lane.
If Lake ends up joining Finchem and Masters on the winner’s podium, they will cement Trump’s victory in the Grand Canyon State — and combine to form perhaps the most pro-MAGA slate of candidates anywhere in America.
But the problem for Republicans is that Arizona is hardly the most pro-MAGA state in America.
“With the national mood turning so strongly against the Biden administration and Democratic control of Congress, Republican candidates should have a relatively easy time picking up seats in Arizona this cycle,” said Robert Robb, a longtime Arizona Republic columnist and former political consultant to the Republican Party. “But these candidates are weak candidates. Whatever this “new right” thing is, I don’t think it necessarily fits Arizona.
Mark Finchem, Republican candidate for Arizona Secretary of State, waves to the crowd as he arrives to speak at the Save America rally, Friday, July 22, 2022, in Prescott, Arizona (Ross D. Franklin/AP Photo)
From Pennsylvania to Georgia to Nevada, GOP primary voters have repeatedly lambasted Republican strategists and delighted their Democratic counterparts this year by nominating candidates who may be too extreme to get elected — and who risk failing otherwise very well winning intermediate races because of it.
Arizona is now ground zero for this phenomenon – and the Masters is Exhibit A.
His MAGA transformation is total. Before 2016, Masters was a libertarian purist who persuaded friends to stand up for choice, described the borders between states simply as “a line[s] in the sand’ and favored ‘unrestricted’ immigration. At 19, he wrote an essay approvingly quoting Nazi leader Hermann Göring to argue that “the United States has not fought a just war in over 140 years.” (In response to a recent Jewish Insider story about this essay, written in opposition to the Iraq War and posted on the radical libertarian Lew Rockwell’s website, Masters admitted that he “went too far.”)
At Stanford Law, the masters took a course on startups taught by Thiel, then a libertarian himself—and a long way from Silicon Valley. Spurred on by Thiel’s contrarian thinking, Masters posted his detailed class notes on Tumblr; David Brooks wrote an entire New York Times column about them. Thiel and Masters then spun those same notes into a book called From Zero to One. Masters spent the next eight years in leadership positions at the Thiel Foundation and at the venture capital firm. In 2016, Thiel endorsed Trump and Masters followed him to Trump Tower to help with the post-election transition.
The key lesson from Thiel’s course — “Instead of being a little bit better than everyone else in a crowded and established field,” as Brooks put it, “it’s often more valuable to create a new market and completely dominate it” — seems the strategy behind the Masters campaign.
“I definitely approach politics with an entrepreneurial perspective,” Masters told the Stanford Review last September. “President Trump showed me that new things are possible in politics. You can think of its administration as a startup of sorts. It was devastating. … I think sounding different and looking different is the way you can break through.”
Former United States President Donald J. Trump delivers remarks at the America First Agenda Summit hosted by the America First Policy Institute in Washington, DC, United States on July 26, 2022. (Kyle Mazza/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
To that end — breaking through by sounding “different” — Masters has included a short-barreled shotgun in one ad, while stating that it’s “not intended for hunting.” “This,” he said, “is meant to kill people.”
He characterized the Democrats who “run the country” — “Biden, Pelosi, Schumer, Mark Kelly” — as “psychopaths.” He passed a national ban on abortion. He touted the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, as a “subversive thinker [who is] He said he wants to cut legal immigration in half because “we don’t need hundreds of thousands of people from India and China coming every year to take coding jobs.” He popularized the conspiracy theory that Democrats planned to win elections by “importing” immigrants to replace native-born voters. He called January 6 a “false flag operation,” claiming that “a third of the people outside the Capitol complex on January 6 were real FBI agents hanging out.” And he blamed “black people, frankly” for America’s “gun violence problem.
The question now is whether this MAGA-focused strategy will work as well in the Arizona general election as it did in the GOP primary. So far, the general election vote has been thin — but Kelly tends to lead the Masters by double-digit margins in the most recent polls.
The irony, Robb says, is that the very thing that has so radicalized Republicans in Arizona is the very thing that could doom them in November: the looming state election.
One-third of Arizona voters are Latino; a third are independent. In the Trump era, this dynamic seems to have pushed the once Republican stronghold away from Trumpism, not toward it.
“Arizona rejected Trump and Trumpism — big time,” explains Rob. “From 2008 to 2018, Arizona had not elected a single Democrat to statewide office. In 2018, we elected a Democratic U.S. Senator, two Democratic statewide officeholders [including Hobbs], and the Republicans lost their advantage in the legislature. They now have the thinnest margin they’ve had in that entire period. And of course, Trump himself barely won in 2016 before losing in 2020.
“There’s a pattern to what would make this election a blow to the Republicans — which is that you’re not running against Trump, you’re running independently of Trump,” Rob continues. “But Republicans don’t do that. They accept Trump and Trumpism, across the board. Biden and his administration should be on the ballot this election cycle. But those candidates are putting Trump on the ballot — and he’s not playing well in Arizona.
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