One of the emerging themes of the 2022 elections is that the GOP is still Trump’s party, as shown by the many primary victories of candidates he endorsed.
Two of those candidates are Kari Lake, running for Arizona governor, and Blake Masters, running for John McCain’s Arizona Senate seat currently held by Democrat Mark Kelly, a retired astronaut. (Read story here.)
Lake (bio here) is well known to Arizona voters as a former TV news anchor. She’s an election denier, anti-vaxxer, and encourages defiance of federal authority. She’s trailing in polls, albeit by a rather slim 3-point margin or thereabouts. Her Democratic opponent is Katie Hobbs, Arizona secretary of state.
She says she wouldn’t have certified the 2020 election, and has called for jailing Hobbs and journalists. That should disqualify her in the minds of voters from any public office. She’s a shrieking banshee, not a responsible leader.
Masters (bio here), 36, is close to Peter Thiel (profile here), a toxic rightwing billionaire. He’s young and green, and like Lake has no public office experience. He’s for privatizing Social Security, which probably helps explain why he’s doing worse than Lake in polls; Arizona has a lot of retirees. That also shows he has no political acumen.
He’s an election denier, too; and even worse has called the Capitol riot an “FBI false flag operation,” claiming a third of the 15,000-strong mob were FBI agents. Someone that far out of touch with reality obviously shouldn’t be a U.S. Senator. Arizona voters agree; he’s down more than 8 points in polls.
These two losers are behind despite Arizona’s strong Republican lean; poll aggregator Nate Silver’s “Five Thirty Eight” gives Republicans a 7.6% edge there. Most people, if asked, would rate Arizona as a Republican-leaning state. It takes work for a Republican to lose there.
Lake and Masters seem likely to lose, and they deserve to lose. They’re unfit to govern. They’re screwballs, liars, toxic. Arizona needs better.
Photo: Kari Lake (left), Blake Masters (right)
