OLYMPIA, Wash. – In just two days, purchasing a firearm in Washington will look different.
New gun laws take effect on Jan. 1, which means anyone looking to purchase a gun will have additional steps to take before getting one in their hands.
Throughout 2023, there was pushback on both sides of the argument across Washington state. Now, businesses are preparing for the changes.
When House Bill 1143 was first brought to the table earlier this year, it was authored by 18 state leaders. They said, at the time, it was an effort to reduce gun violence in the state.
Fast forward to the end of 2023: those laws will be in effect in the new year.
“We’re hoping that the state patrol is prepared and on day one when we roll this thing out, that the background checks will get processed, and the logins will work and all this stuff is going to roll like it’s supposed to,” said Wade Gaughran, the owner of Wade’s Eastside Guns.
Gaughran said his business is ready to go. However, he has reservations about the state’s preparations.
“I have like zero confidence that that is going to happen because it’s something new,” Gaughran said. “And so, we’ll see. We’ll see what happens. The system that’s in place was working extremely well.”
The major changes come Jan. 1, which now says there’s a 10-day waiting period to purchase any gun, whether that’s a shotgun or pistol.
“It processes as it’s supposed to, and ten days is actually ten days,” Gaughran said. “Ten government days is never ten government days.”
Gaughran said it’ll be on the businesses to play middleman with customers and the new laws.
“We’re the buffer there, right,” Gaughran said. “Nobody gets to talk to the state patrol. Nobody’s calling state patrol and asking, where is my background check? They’re calling us – where is my background check? I want to pick up my gun, the law says ten days.”
All in all, after three decades of selling firearms, Gaughran said this is just another change in the way the evolution of the gun-selling landscape that they’ll work through.
“It’s just another business problem,” Gaughran said. “I mean, if I wanted a simple life, I wouldn’t have sold guns. This is just a tough business. It’s always a tough business.”
House Bill 1143 was led in part by State Representative Liz Berry and Senator Strom Peterson. Earlier this month, Rep. Berry and other state leaders were at the White House for the Legislative Convening on Gun Violence Prevention. Rep. Berry said on her social media, gun violence is one of her main focus points as it’s personal to her.
FOX13 has reached out to more of the state leaders spearheading this bill and will update this story when we receive a response.
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Three years ago, while the nation’s attention was on the 2020 presidential election, voters in Oregon took a dramatic step back from America’s long-running War on Drugs. By a 17-point margin, Oregonians approved Ballot Measure 110, which eliminated criminal penalties for possessing small amounts of any drug, including cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine. When the policy went into effect early the next year, it lifted the fear of prosecution for the state’s drug users and launched Oregon on an experiment to determine whether a long-sought goal of the drug-policy reform movement—decriminalization—could help solve America’s drug problems.
Early results of this reform effort, the first of its kind in any state, are now coming into view, and so far, they are not encouraging. State leaders have acknowledged faults with the policy’s implementation and enforcement measures. And Oregon’s drug problems have not improved. Last year, the state experienced one of the sharpest rises in overdose deaths in the nation and had one of the highest percentages of adults with a substance-use disorder. During one two-week period last month, three children under the age of 4 overdosed in Portland after ingesting fentanyl.
For decades, drug policy in America centered on using law enforcement to target people who sold, possessed, or used drugs—an approach long supported by both Democratic and Republican politicians. Only in recent years, amid an epidemic of opioid overdoses and a national reconsideration of racial inequities in the criminal-justice system, has the drug-policy status quo begun to break down, as a coalition of health workers, criminal-justice-reform advocates, and drug-user activists have lobbied for a more compassionate and nuanced response. The new approach emphasizes reducing overdoses, stopping the spread of infectious disease, and providing drug users with the resources they need—counseling, housing, transportation—to stabilize their lives and gain control over their drug use.
Oregon’s Measure 110 was viewed as an opportunity to prove that activists’ most groundbreaking idea—sharply reducing the role of law enforcement in the government’s response to drugs—could work. The measure also earmarked hundreds of millions of dollars in cannabis tax revenue for building a statewide treatment network that advocates promised would do what police and prosecutors couldn’t: help drug users stop or reduce their drug use and become healthy, engaged members of their communities. The day after the measure passed, Kassandra Frederique, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, one of the nation’s most prominent drug-policy reform organizations, issued a statement calling the vote a “historic, paradigm-shifting win” and predicting that Oregon would become “a model and starting point for states across the country to decriminalize drug use.”
But three years later, with rising overdoses and delays in treatment funding, even some of the measure’s supporters now believe that the policy needs to be changed. In a nonpartisan statewide poll earlier this year, more than 60 percent of respondents blamed Measure 110 for making drug addiction, homelessness, and crime worse. A majority, including a majority of Democrats, said they supported bringing back criminal penalties for drug possession. This year’s legislative session, which ended in late June, saw at least a dozen Measure 110–related proposals from Democrats and Republicans alike, ranging from technical fixes to full restoration of criminal penalties for drug possession. Two significant changes—tighter restrictions on fentanyl and more state oversight of how Measure 110 funding is distributed—passed with bipartisan support.
Few people consider Measure 110 “a success out of the gate,” Tony Morse, the policy and advocacy director for Oregon Recovers, told me. The organization, which promotes policy solutions to the state’s addiction crisis, initially opposed Measure 110; now it supports funding the policy, though it also wants more state money for in-patient treatment and detox services. As Morse put it, “If you take away the criminal-justice system as a pathway that gets people into treatment, you need to think about what is going to replace it.”
Many advocates say the new policy simply needs more time to prove itself, even if they also acknowledge that parts of the ballot measure had flaws; advocates worked closely with lawmakers on the oversight bill that passed last month. “We’re building the plane as we fly it,” Haven Wheelock, a program supervisor at a homeless-services provider in Portland who helped put Measure 110 on the ballot, told me. “We tried the War on Drugs for 50 years, and it didn’t work … It hurts my heart every time someone says we need to repeal this before we even give it a chance.”
Workers from the organization Central City Concern hand out Narcan in Portland, Oregon, on April 5. (Jordan Gale)
Measure 110 went into effect at a time of dramatic change in U.S. drug policy. Departing from precedent, the Biden administration has endorsed and increased federal funding for a public-health strategy called harm reduction; rather than pushing for abstinence, harm reduction emphasizes keeping drug users safe—for instance, through the distribution of clean syringes and overdose-reversal medications. The term harm reduction appeared five times in the ballot text of Measure 110, which forbids funding recipients from “mandating abstinence.”
Matt Sutton, the director of external relations for the Drug Policy Alliance, which helped write Measure 110 and spent more than $5 million to pass it, told me that reform advocates viewed the measure as the start of a nationwide decriminalization push. The effort started in Oregon because the state had been an early adopter of marijuana legalization and is considered a drug-policy-reform leader. Success would mean showing the rest of the country that “people did think we should invest in a public-health approach instead of criminalization,” Sutton said.
To achieve this goal, Measure 110 enacted two major changes to Oregon’s drug laws. First, minor drug possession was downgraded from a misdemeanor to a violation, similar to a traffic ticket. Under the new law, users caught with up to 1 gram of heroin or methamphetamine, or up to 40 oxycodone pills, are charged a $100 fine, which can be waived if they call a treatment-referral hotline. (Selling, trafficking, and possessing large amounts of drugs remain criminal offenses in Oregon.) Second, the law set aside a portion of state cannabis tax revenue every two years to fund a statewide network of harm-reduction and other services. A grant-making panel was created to oversee the funding process. At least six members of the panel were required to be directly involved in providing services to drug users; at least two had to be active or former drug users themselves; and three were to be “members of communities that have been disproportionately impacted” by drug criminalization, according to the ballot measure.
Backers of Measure 110 said the law was modeled on drug policies in Portugal, where personal drug possession was decriminalized two decades ago. But Oregon’s enforcement-and-treatment-referral system differs from Portugal’s. Users caught with drugs in Portugal are referred to a civil commission that evaluates their drug use and recommends treatment if needed, with civil sanctions for noncompliance. Portugal’s state-run health system also funds a nationwide network of treatment services, many of which focus on sobriety. Sutton said drafters of Measure 110 wanted to avoid anything that might resemble a criminal tribunal or coercing drug users into treatment. “People respond best when they’re ready to access those services in a voluntary way,” he said.
Almost immediately after taking effect, Measure 110 encountered problems. A state audit published this year found that the new law was “vague” about how state officials should oversee the awarding of money to new treatment programs, and set “unrealistic timelines” for evaluating and funding treatment proposals. As a result, the funding process was left largely to the grant-making panel, most of whose members “lacked experience in designing, evaluating and administrating a governmental-grant-application process,” according to the audit. Last year, supporters of Measure 110 accused state health officials, preoccupied with the coronavirus pandemic, of giving the panel insufficient direction and resources to handle a flood of grant applications. The state health authority acknowledged missteps in the grant-making process.
The audit described a chaotic process, with more than a dozen canceled meetings, potential conflicts of interest in the selection of funding recipients, and lines of applicant evaluations left blank. Full distribution of the first biennial payout of cannabis tax revenue—$302 million for harm reduction, housing, and other services—did not occur until late 2022, almost two years after Measure 110 passed. Figures released by the state last month show that, in the second half of 2022, recipients of Measure 110 funding provided some form of service to roughly 50,000 “clients,” though the Oregon Health Authority has said that a single individual could be counted multiple times in that total. (A study released last year by public-health researchers in Oregon found that, as of 2020, more than 650,000 Oregonians required, but were not receiving, treatment for a substance-use disorder.)
Meanwhile, the new law’s enforcement provisions have proved ineffectual. Of 5,299 drug-possession cases filed in Oregon circuit courts since Measure 110 went into effect, 3,381 resulted in a recipient failing to pay the fine or appear in court and facing no further penalties, according to the Oregon Judicial Department; about 1,300 tickets were dismissed or are pending. The state audit found that, during its first 15 months in operation, the treatment-referral hotline received just 119 calls, at a cost to the state of $7,000 per call. A survey of law-enforcement officers conducted by researchers at Portland State University found that, as of July 2022, officers were issuing an average of just 300 drug-possession tickets a month statewide, compared with 600 drug-possession arrests a month before Measure 110 took effect and close to 1,200 monthly arrests prior to the outbreak of COVID-19.
“Focusing on these tickets even though they’ll be ineffective—it’s not a great use of your resources,” Sheriff Nate Sickler of Jackson County, in the rural southern part of the state, told me of his department’s approach.
Advocates have celebrated a plunge in arrests. “For reducing arrests of people of color, it’s been an overwhelming success,” says Mike Marshall, the director of Oregon Recovers. But critics say that sidelining law enforcement has made it harder to persuade some drug users to stop using. Sickler cited the example of drug-court programs, which multiple studies have shown to be highly effective, including in Jackson County. Use of such programs in the county has declined in the absence of criminal prosecution, Sickler said: “Without accountability or the ability to drive a better choice, these individuals are left to their own demise.”
The consequences of Measure 110’s shortcomings have fallen most heavily on Oregon’s drug users. In the two years after the law took effect, the number of annual overdoses in the state rose by 61 percent, compared with a 13 percent increase nationwide, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In neighboring Idaho and California, where drug possession remains subject to prosecution, the rate of increase was significantly lower than Oregon’s. (The spike in Washington State was similar to Oregon’s, but that comparison is more complicated because Washington’s drug policy has fluctuated since 2021.) Other states once notorious for drug deaths, including West Virginia, Indiana, and Arkansas, are now experiencing declines in overdose rates.
In downtown Portland this spring, police cleared out what The Oregonian called an “open-air drug market” in a former retail center. Prominent businesses in the area, including the outdoor-gear retailer REI, have closed in recent months, in part citing a rise in shoplifting and violence. Earlier this year, Portland business owners appeared before the Multnomah County Commission to ask for help with crime, drug-dealing, and other problems stemming from a behavioral-health resource center operated by a harm-reduction nonprofit that was awarded more than $4 million in Measure 110 funding. In April, the center abruptly closed following employee complaints that clients were covering walls with graffiti and overdosing on-site. A subsequent investigation by the nonprofit found that a security contractor had been using cocaine on the job. The center reopened two weeks later with beefed-up security measures.
Portland’s Democratic mayor, Ted Wheeler, went so far as to attempt an end run around Measure 110 in his city. Last month, Wheeler unveiled a proposal to criminalize public drug consumption in Portland, similar to existing bans on open-air drinking, saying in a statement that Measure 110 “is not working as it was intended to.” He added, “Portland’s substance-abuse problems have exploded to deadly and disastrous proportions.” Wheeler withdrew the proposal days later after learning that an older state law prohibits local jurisdictions from banning public drug use.
Despite shifting public opinion on Measure 110, many Oregon leaders are not ready to give up on the policy. Earlier this month, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek signed legislation that strengthens state oversight of Measure 110 and requires an audit, due no later than December 2025, of about two dozen aspects of the measure’s performance, including whether it is reducing overdoses. Other bills passed by the legislature’s Democratic majority strengthened criminal penalties for possession of large quantities of fentanyl and mandated that school drug-prevention programs instruct students about the risks of synthetic opioids. Republican proposals to repeal Measure 110 outright or claw back tens of millions of dollars in harm-reduction funding were not enacted.
The fallout from Measure 110 has received some critical coverage from media outlets on the right. “It is predictable,” a scholar from the Hudson Institute told Fox News. “It is a tragedy and a self-inflicted wound.” (Meanwhile, in Portugal, the model for Oregon, some residents are raising questions about their own nation’s decriminalization policy.) But so far Oregon’s experience doesn’t appear to have stopped efforts to bring decriminalization to other parts of the United States. “We’ll see more ballot initiatives,” Sutton, of the Drug Policy Alliance, said, adding that advocates are currently working with city leaders to decriminalize drugs in Washington, D.C.
Supporters of Measure 110 are now seeking to draw attention to what they say are the policy’s overlooked positive effects. This summer, the Health Justice Recovery Alliance, a Measure 110 advocacy organization, is leading an effort to spotlight expanded treatment services and boost community awareness of the treatment-referral hotline. Advocates are also coordinating with law-enforcement agencies to ensure that officers know about local resources for drug users. “People are hiring for their programs; outreach programs are expanding, offering more services,” Devon Downeysmith, the communications director for the group, told me.
An array of services around the state have been expanded through the policy: housing for pregnant women awaiting drug treatment; culturally specific programs for Black, Latino, and Indigenous drug users; and even distribution of bicycle helmets to people unable to drive to treatment meetings. “People often forget how much time it takes to spend a bunch of money and build services,” said Wheelock, the homeless-services worker, whose organization received more than $2 million in funding from Measure 110.
Still, even some recipients of Measure 110 funding wonder whether one of the law’s pillars—the citation system that was supposed to help route drug users into treatment—needs to be rethought. “Perhaps some consequences might be a helpful thing,” says Julia Pinsky, a co-founder of Max’s Mission, a harm-reduction nonprofit in southern Oregon. Max’s Mission has received $1.5 million from Measure 110, enabling the organization to hire new staff, open new offices, and serve more people. Pinsky told me she is proud of her organization’s work and remains committed to the idea that “you shouldn’t have to go to prison to be treated for substance use.” She said that she doesn’t want drug use to “become a felony,” but that some people aren’t capable of stopping drug use on their own. “They need additional help.”
Brandi Fogle, a regional manager for Max’s Mission, says her own story illustrates the complex trade-offs involved in reforming drug policy. Three and a half years ago, she was a homeless drug user, addicted to heroin and drifting around Jackson and Josephine Counties. Although she tried to stop numerous times, including one six-month period during which she was prescribed the drug-replacement medication methadone, she told me that a 2020 arrest for drug possession was what finally turned her life around. She asked to be enrolled in a 19-month drug-court program that included residential treatment, mandatory 12-step meetings, and a community-service project, and ultimately was hired by Pinsky.
Since Measure 110 went into effect, Fogle said, she has gotten pushback from members of the community for the work Max’s Mission does. She said that both the old system of criminal justice and the new system of harm reduction can benefit drug users, but that her hope now is to make the latter approach more successful. “Everyone is different,” Fogle said. “Drug court worked for me because I chose it, and I wouldn’t have needed drug court in the first place if I had received the kind of services Max’s Mission provides. I want to offer people that chance.”
As millions of Americans returned to their jobs this week after the Thanksgiving holiday, several of the elected leaders of Cochise County, Arizona, opted not to do theirs.
The board of supervisors in this sparsely populated southeastern chunk of the state refuses to certify the county’s midterm-election results. Of course, nothing actually went wrong in Cochise County’s election. Instead, on Monday, the two Republican members of the Cochise County board outvoted its single Democrat to delay certification of the election, missing the deadline. By refusing to complete the process, these two officials chose instead to make a kind of generalized protest against imagined election fraud in Arizona. Their action could mean that Cochise County voters won’t have their ballots counted in the state’s final results.
Nullifying the votes of some 47,000 people for no reason is certainly a choice—and a nihilistic one at that. These two board members are engaging in a strategy of bottom-up election obstruction, apparently to clog the gears of democracy with enough sand to spread distrust throughout the entire system. Nationally, the Cochise County supervisors’ strategy may prove inconsequential, at least for now. But it’s a perfect illustration of the state of American democracy—and could be a test run of much greater consequence for 2024.
Even though prominent election deniers lost big in the November polls, in both Arizona and elsewhere, the election-denial movement is still alive, and even thriving, at the state and local level around the country. The “Stop the Steal” blueprint that Donald Trump drew up is there for anyone to follow, in the next presidential cycle and quite possibly beyond.
Before the midterms, election experts had their eyes fixed on Arizona, and in particular on Cochise County, 200 miles southeast of Phoenix. There, in the home of the Dragoon Mountains and the old frontier boomtown of Tombstone, suspicion of voting machines runs deep—so much so that county officials were demanding a full hand recount of the votes before the election had even happened. (Although all Arizona postelection audits require a small hand-counted sample, a full hand count of the votes would be illegal and, experts say, extremely prone to error.) In the end, the Arizona Supreme Court had to prevent Cochise County officials from doing it.
Ultimately, Election Day went smoothly in Cochise, and Republicans cleaned house in the county’s results: The GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and Senate hopeful Blake Masters defeated their Democratic opponents there by 18 and 11 points respectively, even though both lost overall. Still, county GOP leaders wouldn’t take yes for an answer, and they weren’t finished sowing chaos.
One of the Republican supervisors acknowledged in an interview that delaying the county’s election certification was in fact intended as a protest over the election—not in Cochise, but in Maricopa County, where Republicans claim, without evidence, that machine errors disenfranchised thousands of voters. In other words, the play here is to use local political control in one county to cast doubt on another’s larger and more politically important election—to taint the entire process by contaminating a small piece of it.
As I reported at the time, Maricopa County did have some technical problems on Election Day. Dozens of tabulation-machine printers weren’t working, despite those machines having been previously tested for accuracy. But voters weren’t turned away from polling sites. Instead, their ballots were dropped in an auxiliary box and taken to the county’s central tabulation center, to be counted along with millions of other ballots. If anyone was disenfranchising Arizonans, it was the state’s GOP leaders demanding that voters not put their ballot in the auxiliary box.
But all of that is truly beside the point. Certification is not just a formality; the process enables officials to review an election for wrongdoing. Which sometimes happens! Back in 2018, the North Carolina state election board refused to certify the results of a House race, because Republican campaign operatives had engaged in illegal ballot harvesting and tampering.
But nothing like that went down in Cochise or Maricopa Counties this year. Instead, local GOP officials are choosing to invalidate the votes of their own neighbors in order to express their displeasure with an election outcome. It’s childish. It’s wrong. It seems very illegal. And it’s probably not going to work. On Monday, Secretary of State (and now Governor-elect) Katie Hobbs filed a lawsuit against the board, tweeting that Cochise County “had a statutory duty to certify the results of the 2022 General Election by today.” The judge will hear the suit later today, and may offer a decision as early as this afternoon.
The most likely outcome is that the judge forces the board to certify the election. “Stop the Steal” zealots have tried the Cochise move before, after all. Earlier this year, commissioners in heavily Republican Otero County, New Mexico, decided not to certify their party primary-election results. That didn’t fly at the state supreme court, which ruled that the commissioners had to do their jobs. (Commissioner Couy Griffin notably still voted no, announcing that his vote was “based on my gut feeling and my own intuition, and that’s all I need.”) But if the court doesn’t force Cochise officials to change their ways, the secretary of state’s office could, in theory, tally the rest of Arizona’s votes without the county’s included. The irony is that, in a purely electoral sense, this would be great news for Democrats, potentially flipping a U.S. House seat from red to blue.
Something that became very clear in 2020 is that America’s election system relies not on spelled-out rules and regulations, but on human beings acting honestly. Before 2016, the certification process was not used as a weapon to fight back against a disappointing result. “That’s not how healthy democracies function,” Tammy Patrick, the program CEO for the election center at the National Association of Election Officials, told me. And American democracy is only as healthy as its weakest link.
What happens next in Cochise County may have little significant effect on the rest of the country. But Cochise serves as a reminder that the election-fraud myth persists. And in places where its believers have unchecked power, they will do their utmost to flex it.
The hope was that, after major midterm losses and continued rebukes from the courts, the election-denial movement would peter out—that Stop the Steal types might simply grow tired of failing. But if Trump is a viable candidate for president in 2024, you can expect him to sing from the same songbook he used in 2016 and 2020. Other candidates will amplify those lies, too, if they can benefit from doing so. Whether election denialism will survive independently of Trump is hard to anticipate. But Republicans “have seen that while it may not be the way to gain office, it is certainly the way to drive donations and fundraising and elevate your stature in the party,” Patrick said.
Cochise is a useful stress test for America’s electoral system “in terms of demonstrating the continued dangers to our democracy”—and what can be done about them, Rick Hasen, the director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA, told me. Congress should pass reforms to the Electoral Count Act, Hasen said. States can also try to prevent what’s happening in Cochise County from recurring in 2024. Colorado passed legislation this year clarifying its rules about certification. But state leaders are similarly well positioned to make the waters of democracy muddier. In 2021, Arizona Republicans tried and failed to pass legislation that would allow the state legislature to reject the results of an election it didn’t support. An upcoming Supreme Court decision on the authority of state legislatures in administering elections will be incredibly consequential to any future election-subversion efforts.
Over the past six years, millions of people in this country have been encouraged by political leaders on the right to see themselves as the real Americans—the nation’s true rulers—who are in danger of being cheated out of their political inheritance by voter fraud on the left. They’ve been trained to respond to electoral losses with deflection, conspiracy, and dishonesty. They don’t need Trump around to keep doing that.
It might be nice one day to wake up and feel serene—even hopeful—about the state of American politics. To know that all of those people who have been warning about the growing threat to democracy are way ahead of their skis. But today is not that day.
Arizona Republicans are nominating an entire cast of characters who argue not only that Donald Trump won the election in 2020, but also that the state’s results should be decertified—a process for which there is no legal basis. These Trump-endorsed candidates—Kari Lake for governor, Mark Finchem for secretary of state, Abraham Hamadeh for attorney general, Blake Masters for senator—all won their respective primaries this week and are now one election away from political power.
Some strategists might frame these Republican wins as a gift to Democrats, and you can look at it that way. Democrats will be more competitive in the upcoming midterms than they might have been if more reasonable Republicans were on the ballot. Moderates and independents abound in Arizona, and they aren’t going to be excited to vote for a passel of kooks. But that doesn’t change the simple fact that the fundamentals are on Republicans’ side this year: Joe Biden is still unpopular; inflation is still high; America might soon be entering a recession.
“Nobody should be popping champagne,” Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist and the publisher of The Bulwark, told me. “This is the most antidemocracy slate of candidates in the country. We’re in a very dangerous situation.”
“Stop the Steal” candidates are running—and winning—all over the country. But Arizona concentrates a lot of them within a single geographic area—like an ant farm of election deniers.
Lake might prove the most significant of these candidates. Lake’s lead over her top Republican opponent, Karrin Taylor Robson, had grown to nearly 3 percent when the gubernatorial primary race was finally called in her favor on Thursday night. Before becoming an enthusiastic proponent of Trump’s election lies, Lake was a local TV-news anchor, making her a household name in Arizona and giving her something that many political candidates lack: confidence in front of the camera. Like Trump, Lake has a difficult-to-describe magnetism with Republican-base voters; they simply cannot get enough of her.
Throughout her campaign, Lake has called Biden an “illegitimate president” and vowed that, if she becomes governor, she’ll be reviewing and decertifying Arizona’s 2020 election results—despite multiple audits (and even a partisan review) showing precisely zero evidence of widespread fraud. Even ahead of the primary, Lake claimed to have evidence of funny business; the NBC reporter Vaughn Hillyard tried to get Lake to share some of that evidence, but she would not. Lake and Finchem, the cowboy-hat-wearing would-be secretary of state whom I profiled last month, have been cooking up new ways supposedly to prevent fraud—by banning voting machines and early voting. Both Lake and Finchem primed voters to believe that, if they lost, only fraud would explain their losses. Of course they did. That’s the new Republican playbook, and these two know it better than anyone.
Lake’s opponent in November, Katie Hobbs, is Arizona’s former secretary of state and a run-of-the-mill Democrat who will probably try to position herself as the sane, competent foil to Lake’s wild-eyed conspiracy monger. That’s a solid strategy—maybe the only one that can work. But Hobbs is so run-of-the-mill that she’s boring. And what Hobbs lacks in personality, she makes up for in baggage, after a former staffer successfully sued last year over discrimination. For Arizonans who are still fans of democracy, though, Hobbs is the obvious choice—an apt example of the “Terrible Candidate/Important Election” scenario that my colleague Caitlin Flanagan described this week.
Arizona Democrats like Hobbs do have a genuine shot at defeating this slate of extremists. The basic fact of these Republicans’ extremism makes all Democratic candidates look better by comparison. Many independent voters, who count for something like one-third of all Arizona voters, and moderate Republicans would probably have happily voted for any Republican but Lake; come November, some of them may be willing to turn that into any candidate but Lake. Plus, Democrats seem to have gotten their groove back in recent weeks. Lawmakers in Washington, D.C., reached a long-elusive deal on sweeping climate legislation; gas prices are dropping fast; and the overturning of Roe v. Wademight energize an otherwise sleepy set of Democratic voters just in time for the midterms.
And yet. Despite what hopeful Democrats might tell you, Arizona isn’t a purple state; it’s more of a lightish red. And this year remains an excellent year for Republicans—probably the best chance for any Republican extremist to make it into elected office not just in Arizona, but anywhere in the country. “When the political party in power has a president running in the mid- or upper 30s and inflation is high and people are feeling recession-y?” Longwell said. “You’re in a danger point. You just are.”
The danger of a Lake or Finchem election in November is pretty straightforward, as I’ve outlined in previous stories. State leaders can easily cast doubt on an election’s results if the outcome doesn’t suit them, and this entire slate of Arizona Republicans is clearly prepared to do that. Governors and secretaries of state can tinker with election procedures or propose absurd new requirements, such as having every voter reregister to vote, as the Republican gubernatorial nominee in Pennsylvania, Doug Mastriano, has suggested. What happens if the outcome of the 2024 presidential election comes down to a closely divided Arizona? What if such a pivotal state was run not by Democrats and Republicans who are loyal to the democratic process, but by conspiracy-drunk partisans who won’t stop until they see their candidate swearing on a Bible? There’s a reason Trump has endorsed this slate; he knows these candidates will be pulling for him no matter what.
Maybe the most important thing to note is that whatever happens to these Trump sycophants in November, they’ve demonstrated that a not-insignificant number of Republican voters want them—the cream of the conspiracy crop—to lead their party. In Tuesday’s primary, Rusty Bowers, Arizona’s Republican speaker of the house who did not cooperate with attempts to overturn the 2020 election results, lost his State Senate race to an election denier. Lake, who has become a household name in Trumpworld and raked in campaign donations from across the country, will be well positioned, whatever the coming election result, to be a MAGA superstar.
If you’re still tallying up Trump’s primary wins and losses as an indicator of his grip on the party, you’re missing the point. The man’s enduring legacy is figures like Lake and a GOP packed with cranks and conspiracy theorists. “They will be defining the next generation of Republicans, and [Lake] will be among the next generation of leaders,” Longwell said. “If she wins, or even if she loses.”
