During the campaign for Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ), Republican Blake Masters has steadily increased skepticism and conspiracy theories surrounding the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
But in the final stages of his own 2022 race, Masters begins to doubt the outcome of this election – before the votes are even counted.
At a campaigning stop on Tuesday in a small town north of Phoenix, Masters faced a voter’s anxiety that he could win by “landfall” but the machine dropped. The vote will “flip the vote” in Kelly’s favor, according to audio of the event obtained by The Daily Beast.
“Unfortunately, we still have the machines in this election,” Masters replied. “Machine” refers to the machine of the Dominant Voting System, used in Arizona and the subject of countless baseless conspiracies. Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, used paper ballots in the 2020 election; The audit found no evidence of fraud.
Masters expanded on voters’ concerns by recounting a conversation he had with his father before launching his campaign. In Masters’ narrative, his father said he didn’t want him to run because he couldn’t beat Kelly, because of voter fraud.
“But let’s say you beat Mark Kelly by 30,000 votes,” Masters said. His father replied, “I’m worried they’ll only find 40,000 for Mark Kelly.”
“He invited me to prove him wrong,” Masters continued. “I said, ‘Dad, I can’t prove you wrong. All I know is, if those are the numbers, I have to win 80,000. “
At that line, the crowd exploded in applause.
A spokesman for Masters did not respond to The Daily Beast’s questions asking Masters to explain his exact concerns about voting machines.
Sarah Guggenheimer, a spokeswoman for Kelly, said in a statement that Masters is “deepening conspiracy theories” and “has made it clear that he is willing to threaten our democracy because he believes those things are wrong with us.” His baseless lie is more important than Arizonans’ right to vote. “
The GOP’s hopeful comments on Tuesday mark at least the second time he has publicly cast doubt on the upcoming November election. In June, before his primaries, The masters tell the crowd about 2020“Whatever their cheat potential, I’m pretty sure they’ve drawn all the stops… And the question is, will that happen again?”
Today, in the pro-Trump camp, the idea that Republican candidates need to win by big margins so they can overcome systematic Democratic voter fraud is prevalent. . Candidates who had struggled to carefully validate continued unfounded suspicions of voter fraud while not sowing so much suspicion into the system that they turned off GOP voters.
The failure of that balancing act is believed to have cost Republicans control of the Senate in 2020. During the pivotal Georgia pass, former Senses David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler raised suspicions. doubts in the state’s electoral system and called for the resignation of GOP Secretary of State while urging the loyal party to vote anyway. They didn’t, and both lost, with voter turnout significantly lower in conservative areas.
Like Georgia, Arizona has been at the forefront of 2020 election conspiracies and continues to produce Republican leaders who place trying to lose Trump at the center of the agenda. their politics. Mark Finchem, the GOP candidate for Secretary of State, pitched his candidacy with a lie about a stolen election, sparking widespread alarm about how he might have handled the election. elected in 2024 if promoted to this position.
Masters, the 36-year-old protégé of conservative tech billionaire Peter Thiel, kicked off the GOP’s main campaign as a hardline election denier. “I think Trump won in 2020,” began a video of the Masters posted to Twitter last November. After his first win, Masters stepped back a bit from that spot, checking his campaign website to tone down his rhetoric around 2020. But since then, he’s changed. once again, told Fox News last week that he still believes Trump should be in power now.
The contest between Kelly and Masters is said to be the closest in the country and could determine which party controls the US Senate. In 2020, Kelly beat former Senator Martha McSally (R-AZ) with about 80,000 votes, while President Joe Biden beat Trump with just 10,500 votes.
