By John McCormack
Thursday, June 23, 2022
With Joe Biden’s approval rating sinking below 40
percent, Republicans are now the heavy favorites to take back control of the
House in November, but the forecast for control of the Senate — currently
divided between 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans — remains unclear for two
reasons. First, the map of the 34 Senate seats up in 2022 favors the Democrats,
and a favorable Senate map sometimes matters more than the national political
environment: In 2018, even as the Democrats swept back to power in the House,
Republicans gained two seats in the Senate. Second, Republicans have failed to
recruit and nominate blue-chip candidates in several battleground states.
In New Hampshire, popular GOP governor Chris Sununu
declined to run for the Senate. In Georgia, first-time candidate Herschel
Walker has a lot of baggage and is running neck and neck with Democrat Raphael Warnock.
In Pennsylvania, Trump-backed celebrity TV doctor Mehmet Oz was trailing
Democrat John Fetterman by nine points — 37 percent to 46 percent — in the
first nonpartisan poll released after the May primary elections.
With much of the 2022 chessboard already set, Arizona’s
August 2 primary remains one of the most important outstanding Senate GOP
contests. When popular Arizona governor Doug Ducey decided not to run for the
Senate, Republicans lost their best bet. But among the remaining candidates,
many political observers viewed Arizona attorney general Mark Brnovich as the
GOP’s “best chance to win John McCain’s Senate seat back,” as Politico reported
in March.
Brnovich first won statewide office in 2014, after he
ousted an embattled incumbent Republican attorney general in a GOP primary.
When he won reelection as attorney general in 2018, with 52 percent of the
vote, he ran four points ahead of losing GOP Senate candidate Martha McSally
(yet four points behind Ducey, who was reelected governor). The son of
immigrants who fled communist Yugoslavia, Brnovich still lives in the Phoenix
suburb where he grew up, and he has a good story to tell Republican primary
voters about legal battles he has waged on a number of hot-button issues, from
illegal immigration to abortion to ballot-harvesting.
He also has a clear vision of the campaign he’d like to
run against Democrat Mark Kelly on the issues of immigration, inflation, and
gas prices. Inflation is a direct result of “the recklessness of Mark Kelly and
the Democrats — spending all of this ‘Covid relief’ money that we didn’t have;
it was unnecessary,” Brnovich tells National Review. “Economists
were warning: If you spend this money, you’re going to end up with inflation
problems.”
But to get into that race against Kelly, Brnovich will
first need to beat GOP rivals Jim Lamon, a wealthy businessman, and Blake
Masters, a protégé of billionaire Peter Thiel. And that is no easy task. The
GOP Senate primary is “kind of a jump ball,” Arizona-based pollster Mike Noble
of OH Predictive tells me, regarding the GOP Senate primary. “None of the
candidates have been able to do a good job to break away from the pack. They’re
all kind of missing something.”
Despite the solid résumé and record, Brnovich has been
dogged by at least two big problems during the campaign. The first is money.
Lamon has dumped at least $13 million of his own money into the campaign, and
Thiel has sent at least $13.5 million to the super PAC backing Masters.
Brnovich, on the other hand, had raised only $2.5 million for his campaign as
of March 31, and super PACs have spent little on his behalf.
Another big problem for Brnovich is Donald Trump, who has
attacked him at great length over the 2020 presidential election.
Immediately following the 2020 election, Brnovich went on
the Fox Business channel to debunk a conspiracy theory about the election in
Arizona; and, in his capacity as attorney general, he certified Biden’s
election. But under pressure from GOP activists in Arizona and from Trump, the
attorney general’s office opened its own investigation of the 2020 election. A
preliminary report released by Brnovich in April left no one happy. The
Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, most of whom are Republicans, issued a
lengthy rebuttal denouncing Brnovich and claiming, among other things, that he
was wrong to accuse the county of maintaining an improper chain of custody for
100,00 ballots. Trump endorsed Masters.
“Mark Brnovich is such a disappointment to me,” Trump
said in his June 2 statement endorsing Masters. “The Arizona State Senate gave
him overwhelming evidence of fraud and irregularities, issued a report which
was damning, and he did nothing about it. In other words, all talk and no
action!”
In Arizona (as we went to press), the only pollster who
had publicly released a poll of the race before and after Trump’s endorsement
found Masters getting a ten-point bump. A late-April Trafalgar poll showed
Lamon at 25 percent, Brnovich at 24 percent, and Masters at 19 percent, but a
June Trafalgar poll conducted shortly after the Trump endorsement found Masters
shooting up to 29 percent, Brnovich holding steady at 24 percent, and Lamon
dropping to 17 percent.
With Trump’s endorsement, Masters now appears to be a
slight favorite in the GOP primary, but he could be a riskier bet in November.
In pursuit of the nomination, Masters has courted controversy as a staunch
nationalist and Trumpist.
Masters’s opponents have hit him for comments on the
campaign trail and even for some dating back to his time as a libertarian in
college. Lamon is a controversial figure in his own right — he signed up to
serve as an alternative Trump elector in 2020 — but he’s poured money into an
attack ad that depicts Masters as someone who “unironically quoted a Nazi,
called World War II an unjust war,” and “shared an article attacking Israel as
the North Korea of the Middle East.” In an interview with National
Review, Brnovich rattles off his own litany of Masters comments, including
what Brnovich describes as “disparaging comments about African Americans and
gun violence,” adding, “I don’t see how someone like that can win any
election.” In an April interview, Masters had said that America’s gun-violence
problem is gang violence, elaborating, “It’s people in Chicago, St. Louis
shooting each other. Very often, you know, black people, frankly. And the
Democrats don’t want to do anything about that.”
While Masters insists he can win in November, he does not
deny that he has courted political controversy throughout his life.
“What important truth do very few people agree with you
on?” In his 2014 book Zero to One, Peter Thiel notes that he likes
to ask that question in job interviews, but it’s a question he never posed to Masters,
one of his most famous former employees.
“He never asked me, because I was the guy who helped
formulate the question and put it into the book,” Masters tells National
Review. Masters first met Thiel as a student at Stanford Law and helped
turn Thiel’s lectures there into that book; he went on to work as chief
operating officer of Thiel Capital and as president of the Thiel Foundation.
Masters thinks over the famous job-interview question
before settling on: “Anytime that I with my own words have made controversy on
the campaign trail, I think you could count that as an answer.” As one example,
Masters says:
I got in trouble the other week
because I just was talking about gun violence and crime, and I mentioned on a
radio show that most victims of gun murder in America are black men, and most
perpetrators of gun murder in America are also black men. Now, again, most
people don’t disagree with that because you can’t disagree with it, because
it’s an actual fact. It’s right there in FBI crime stats, in the CDC stats.
It’s just people don’t talk about it because it’s taboo. And I think any taboo
answer is kind of an answer to this question. Actually, it’s very important
because it’s very bad to let people just get slaughtered in these cities. And
the Democrats, they’ve given up — they don’t care about law and order. They
actually want more cities to look like Chicago.
Brnovich “would never ever say anything like that,” says
Masters. “He’s just — not the worst; he’s just median; he’s just mediocre. Give
the talking points, talk about how you love the Constitution, hope that’s
enough, get into office, do an okay job, not a great job, and lose to the
Left.”
Citing another example of an answer to Thiel’s famous
job-interview question, Masters says, “I believe the FBI was on the ground in
the January 6 crowd.” Masters has come under fire for saying at one campaign
event, “Don’t we suspect that like one-third of the people outside of the
Capitol complex on January 6 were actual FBI agents hanging out?” Masters tells
me he was being “a little hyperbolic” regarding the numbers but adds: “Senator
Ted Cruz was grilling whoever under oath, and they did not deny it. Like, the
FBI was obviously there. I’d like to know [in] what capacity. Did they know
anything? Wouldn’t that be nice to know?”
While Masters says he stands behind his campaign claims,
including one from an early commercial in which he said that “Trump won in
2020,” he has abandoned many views from his youth over which he has been
attacked.
Masters, now 35, says that during his high-school and
early college days he was “super-super-libertarian in ways that I sort of find
childish now.” In college, he wrote in one blog post unearthed by Jewish
Insider that “ ‘unrestricted’ immigration is the only choice.” As a
candidate, Masters now explicitly calls for the government to “militarize” the
border. A formerly close friend of Masters described him to the Daily
Beast as an “outspoken” supporter of a right to abortion in his youth,
but Masters now says he’s “100 percent pro-life.”
Masters tells me that his pro-life views matured during
law school and were “cemented” by the time his first child was born, when he
was 25. He came to oppose illegal immigration sometime between 2010 and 2012,
he says, adding that he and Thiel had a “similar evolution” away from staunch
libertarianism. “I know a lot of people that went Ron Paul, Rand Paul, Trump.”
Both of his major opponents have attacked Masters for an
anti-war essay for LewRockwell.com, published when he was 19, in which he
declared that “the U.S. hasn’t been involved in a just war in over 140 years,”
a period that includes World War II. The anti-war essay concluded with what
Masters presented as a “particularly representative and poignant quotation”
from Nazi official Hermann Göring at the Nuremberg trials: “Voice or no voice,
the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy.
All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the
pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works
the same way in any country.”
Masters has emphasized that the purpose of the Göring
quotation was not to praise him but to condemn unjust wars, and he says that as
a mature adult he definitely believes that U.S. involvement in the European and
Pacific theaters was just. “I don’t know why I skipped over” World War II, he
says. “We were attacked, and we had to fight that war. It was a just war.”
With Trump’s endorsement and millions in super-PAC
spending backing him, it seems more likely than not that Masters will be able
to withstand the attacks. Still, it would be wrong to write off Brnovich or
Lamon. Although Trump won the 2016 Arizona presidential primary with 46 percent
of the vote, John McCain defeated Kelli Ward later that year in the GOP
primary, carrying 52 percent of the vote; and in 2018, mainstream Republican
Martha McSally carried 55 percent in her primary against Ward and Sheriff Joe
Arpaio. There are several ways to cobble together a plurality of Arizona
Republicans, but time is running out: Most of the state votes by mail (a
practice that pre-dates Covid); ballots for the August 2 primary will be sent
out on July 6; and the election could effectively be over by the middle of
July. Expect the fight over the Arizona GOP Senate nomination to go from heated
to scorching.
No comments:
Post a Comment