They all said it — they had to.
To win the GOP primary election, candidates for governor, attorney general and the other statewide offices had to get the endorsement of Donald Trump. And to get the endorsement of Donald Trump, they had to say he was robbed of the 2020 election.
Whether they believed it or not was immaterial, and most of them probably believed it anyway.
Kari Lake said it as clearly as anyone when she said of Joe Biden, “He lost the election, and he shouldn’t be in the White House.”
But they all did it, one way or another. U.S. Senate candidate Blake Masters, Secretary of State candidate Mark Finchem and Attorney General candidate Abraham Hamadeh all said the 2020 election was rigged, stolen, illegitimate.
It's not true, but it flattered Trump, who has always been loathe to accept a loss. Going back to 2004, Trump claimed his show The Apprentice was cheated of an Emmy award by The Amazing Race. In 2016, he claimed he lost the Iowa caucus to Ted Cruz due to fraud.
So the candidates flattered him; they got his endorsement; they won their primaries.
But now it’s the general election campaign, and for most of them, their previous strident declarations of certainty are mellowing into measured statements of concern.
This was clear on Sunday in Mesa, when each of them spoke before Trump took the stage at a rally. None of them said the 2020 election was stolen. None of them claimed he was the legitimate president of the United States (though Kari Lake vacuumed the carpet he was going to speak from, and her campaign said it was “out of respect for the office of the President of the United States”).
The 2020 election hardly came up in their speeches.
Finchem, the truest believer in the stolen-election faction, came closest when he complained about the performance of his opponent, Adrian Fontes, as Maricopa County recorder in 2020 and said, “We need to restore voter confidence in the process, and we must design a rigorous pre-audit system for every county to follow before the election.”
Hamadeh softens stand
This softening is becoming a pattern.
In the debate between the attorney general candidates, Democrat Kris Mayes and Republican Hamadeh, moderator Ted Simons brought up previous tweets by Hamadeh. In one of them, on April 6, 2022, Hamadeh wrote:
“My message to those who worked to rob President Trump in the rigged 2020 election: Your day of reckoning is coming when I take office January 2023… #perpwalks”
In an April 2022 tweet, Abraham Hamadeh threatened that those who he thought "rigged" the 2020 election would be arrested after he's in office.
It was just one of many times Hamadeh claimed with certainty that Trump had been robbed in 2020 and as attorney general he would right the wrong.
Now he’s not acting so certain. In response to Simons, he said, “All Arizonans want right now is free, fair and competent elections. The media has shifted the narrative by saying there was no fraud to saying there wasn’t enough fraud to overturn the elections.”
“We’re already seeing prosecutions happening,” he went on. “Just the other month, this administration prosecuted the former San Luis mayor for ballot harvesting.”
This was a reference to Guillermina Fuentes, an oft-cited case of taking the ballots of non-relatives to the polls — a felony under Arizona law. Fuentes was convicted of delivering four valid ballots of people who were not members of her household — but it was in the 2020 primary, not the general election.
Masters: No evidence of fraud
Perhaps the starkest shift in emphasis, though, came from Blake Masters, the U.S. Senate candidate. After Masters won the primary, CNN found, someone deleted language saying the 2020 race wasn't a "free and fair election."
In November 2021, Master put out a video in which he announced starkly, “I think Trump won in 2020.” He also argued that “The 2020 election wasn’t free or fair. And (Republican Attorney General Mark) Brnovich clearly didn’t want President Trump to win.”
In his debate with Democrat Mark Kelly, though, Masters’ argument rested on the Hunter Biden story. This is the story of a computer Biden left at a repair shop that allegedly contains the sordid details of corruption — not just of Hunter Biden trading on his name but Joe Biden himself profiting from international graft.
Masters is right that, at the time, social-media companies and some news outlets suppressed the story. The FBI and other agencies argued it was an effort at Russian disinformation. But the laptop turned out to be real, even if the stories in it aren’t as clear yet.
“I suspect Pres. Trump would be in the White House today if big tech and big media and the FBI didn’t work together to put the thumb on the scale to get Joe Biden in there,” he said at the debate.
This is a similar counterfactual argument to the one some Democrats have made about Russian influence on the 2016 election— that without it, Hillary Clinton would have won.
But when it got down to the question of whether there was fraud in 2020, Masters said, “I haven’t seen evidence of that.”
A fight over a few
What’s going on here is pretty clear. The candidates needed to flex their fraud muscles to win the primary, but it is not an issue that the key general-election voters care much about. My former Star colleague Daniel Scarpinato, who went on to become Gov. Doug Ducey’s chief of staff and now works for Ascent Media, put it this way:
“Election integrity was one of the top issues among Republican primary voters, right up there along with border security and inflation,” he said.
Now, though, the candidates are fighting only over, say, 5% of Arizona voters who might vote for either side. Those voters want to hear about issues like inflation and abortion and the border but not about 2020.
“It’s challenging because it was such an animating issues for some of the nominees,” Scarpinato said. “It’s difficult to make that pivot.”
But pivot they must. And the only question for voters is whether to believe that those who were so committed to the stolen-election line are now merely interested in assuring future fair elections.
I don’t believe it. I think the shift masks a commitment on the part of Big Lie true believers like Finchem and Lake to question every Republican loss as fraudulent and cast every Democratic loss as valid, to change laws and procedures until their party’s wins are assured.
But what matters is what that undecided 5 percent think.
