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Arizona’s US Senate race has a considerable chance of becoming the weirdest contest of 2024. Blake Masters, the Peter Thiel acolyte whose ideological bearings resemble those of Tucker Carlson and Ohio senator J.D. Vance, will indeed be running again for Senate, according to The Wall Street Journal. Masters won Donald Trump’s endorsement last year but lost badly to Democratic senator Mark Kelly in the 2022 midterms.
This race, however, could prove unpredictable. The incumbent, Kyrsten Sinema, left the Democratic Party last year to become an independent, and should she run for reelection—which, at the moment, seems more likely than not—it would become a three-way race, pitting her against the Republican and Democratic nominees. Perhaps Masters, who ran in 2022 as an anti-abortion and immigration hard-liner, views this chaos as an opportunity for redemption, wherein he could land a sneaky victory without netting a majority.
But first he will have to survive a Republican primary that will likely feature a couple of other MAGA candidates: Kari Lake, who was defeated in the state’s gubernatorial race last year by Democrat Katie Hobbs, has said she’s “contemplating” a run, and Pinal County sheriff Mark Lamb has already launched his campaign but has yet to gain any real traction.
Interestingly, Masters and Lake each represent a unique outgrowth of the Trump movement. Masters is a so-called based nationalist whose dark vision of America aligns with that of young and extremely online conservatives, while Lake is a smooth-talking former television personality who mimics Trump in style and substance. (Like Trump, she has yet to concede defeat—despite losing to Hobbs by more than 17,000 votes—and has sought to challenge the election’s outcome in a series of misguided legal maneuvers. She’s also reportedly spent a lot of time at Mar-a-Lago recently, in an apparent effort to get on Trump’s VP shortlist; as one source told People, there’s a suite she has basically lived in.)
Masters and Lake were close allies last cycle, both backed by Trump and running on his informal “America First” slate. But Lake has already fired the first shot in their expected primary matchup. Last Friday, Masters announced a live stream with Andrew Jackson, an Arizona House candidate who, at least according to Lake, did not side with Lake’s election-fraud conspiracy theories regarding her gubernatorial defeat. “It’s great to have you back, Blake!” wrote the official Kari Lake War Room account on X (a.k.a. Twitter). “We hope your next interview is with someone who has not spent the last 9 months smearing Kari.” Lake later chimed in via her own X account. “I hope you bring up election fraud, and Election crime. You’ve been quite silent,” she wrote.
Lake’s advisers, according to Politico, have said that they expect her to enter the Republican Senate primary in the early fall. As for Masters, his failed Senate run was funded heavily by billionaire venture capitalist Thiel, whom Masters had spent the majority of his professional life working for. But Thiel is reportedly taking a step back from electoral politics, making it unclear if Masters can expect the same financial support—$15 million—that he received from Thiel in 2022.
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Caleb Ecarma
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