This has become routine.
I expect GOP candidates to be liars and hypocrites. (See, e.g., “pro-life” Herschel Walker, a GOP Senate candidate in Georgia, paying for his girlfriend’s abortion and lying about it.)
Today I’m going to make an example of Mark Finchem, the QAnon-linked, election-denying, Oath Keeper Capitol rioter (see profile here) who won the GOP primary for Arizona secretary of state.
Mail voting is a favorite bogeyman of Republicans, who falsely claim fraudulent mail-in ballots cost Trump the 2020 election. Last month, debating his Democratic opponent, Finchem attacked mail-in voting because that’s what GOP voters want to hear, and claimed he always votes at the polls.
He’s a liar. An Arizona reporter who looked into it found that Finchem voted by mail in 28 of 30 elections between 2004 and 2021. See story here.
But Arizona’s GOP voters won’t care. Republicans all over the country worship Trump, a colossal liar, like a god. In Georgia, Walker got caught today telling two more whoppers (here and here), but it won’t cost him votes, because Republican voters have no standards.
As Democratic strategist James Carville pointed out here, the GOP gets candidates like Walker and Finchem because Republican voters are just as bad as they are.