Sunday, June 26, 2022

Scorched Earth in Arizona’s GOP Primary

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.

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