It’s concession season in Arizona.
You know the tradition: After elections are over, the losing candidates, who labeled their opponents evil enemies of all that is decent and good during the campaign, swallow their disappointment, congratulate the opponents on victory, and acknowledge “The people have spoken.”
At least that’s the way it used to go most of the time. Nowadays, especially in Arizona , responses to losing range from gracious concession to outraged spinning of conspiracies. One candidate even made what looks like a threat of violence.
Perhaps the most surprising concession this week came from Kathy Hoffman, the incumbent superintendent of public instruction. Hoffman, a Democrat, was losing Saturday by 8,894 votes to Tom Horne, the Republican. That is well within the margin that would trigger an automatic recount of the race.
Nevertheless, Hoffman, who bashed Horne repeatedly for bringing an “accused pedophile” into his campaign, conceded Thursday. She didn’t go so far as to say Horne is a great American, or anything like that, but she acknowledged defeat, somewhat surprising in a race so close:
“After a hard-fought race, we came up short,” she acknowledged via Twitter, before moving on to thank her supporters and family.
Some Republicans have also been graceful in defeat. Incumbent state Sen. Nancy Barto of Phoenix is losing to Democrat Christine Marsh by just 1,194 votes — about a 1% margin.
“This is a disappointing outcome, but we left it all on the field and I’m proud of the campaign we ran,” Barto said in a statement Tuesday. “I congratulate my opponent on her victory. This was a hard-fought race and both campaigns stayed focused on the issues.”
Masters concedes, critiques
Several Republican candidates, though, have harshly criticized the election’s processes while conceding, or said election-day problems in Maricopa County make the outcome illegitimate.
Blake Masters, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, has gone through a three-step process reflecting both the news and the margin. On Nov. 12, after AP and other news outlets called the U.S. Senate race for Democratic incumbent Mark Kelly, Masters said, “We are going to make sure every legal vote is counted.”
“If at the end, Sen. Kelly has more of them than I do, then I will congratulate him on a hard-fought victory. But voters decide, not the media; let’s count the votes.”
On Tuesday, Masters announced, “I called and congratulated Mark Kelly this morning. There were obviously a lot of problems with this election, but there is no path forward in my race.”
This was true: As continued vote-counting tightened some other races, the Kelly lead had grown to well over 100,000 votes and several percentage points. On Thursday, though, Masters didn’t so much backtrack as extend his election critique:
“Every member of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors should lose their job. If they had any honor, they would resign in disgrace. They all deserve to be recalled by the voters, and investigated by the AG,” he said by Twitter.
Lake rejects outcome
He isn’t wrong about the mishandling of election day in Maricopa County — it really was a mess, largely because of printers putting out ballots that could not be read by the tabulation machines in about a third of polling places. That’s too bad also because Republican Kari Lake was never going to concede gracefully if she lost to Katie Hobbs anyway.
The circumstances have actually given her reason to hold out, although the margin, more than 17,000 votes on Saturday, was outside the percentage that would lead to an automatic recount. Unlike Hoffman, conceding when she didn’t have to, Lake is gearing up for a fight, protesting this result just as she has denied Donald Trump’s 2020 loss — by 10,457 votes in Arizona.
“What happened to Arizonans on Election Day was unforgivable,” Lake said in a video message to supporters. “Tens of thousands of Maricopa County voters were disenfranchised. Now I am busy here collecting evidence and data. Rest assured I have assembled the best and brightest legal team, and we are exploring every avenue to correct the many wrongs that have been done this past week.”
We can expect her to challenge the results as long as she can and rally a protest movement. She was at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida Friday, telling a crowd that included the former president: “You cannot stop the Founding Fathers and the blood we have inside of us, and so I will fight what happened on Tuesday, two weeks ago now.”
Finchem decompensates
While the inevitable Kari Lake challenge of a loss has benefited from some well-founded complaints, nothing can explain the meltdown of Oro Valley resident and GOP candidate for secretary of state Mark Finchem. He was one of three statewide candidates who lost clearly, the others being Masters and the Democratic candidate for state treasurer Martin Quezada.
Quezada said on Nov. 13: “I first and foremost want to congratulate Kimberly Yee on her re-election to the office of AZ State Treasurer and wish her nothing but success and joy in her 2nd term.”
Finchem, though, despite the fact that he is losing by a 120,000-vote and 4.8 percentage-point margin, has spent the time since Election Day falling apart online.
“Polls had me winning Maricopa. No way we lost Maricopa,” he said in a stream of tweets Monday. “The results from the machines defy all math.”
He regularly pushed a new conspiracy theory: That U.S. aid to Ukraine was laundered through the recently collapsed cryptocurrency exchange called FTX, and donated back to the Democrats by the company’s CEO.
On Wednesday he said, “I have not conceded. We all know why. That is all.”
On Friday, he took a disturbing step further. Referring to a tweet by the ABC 15 election-data analyst Garrett Archer, Finchem tweeted, “Maybe sharp shoot the WEF shills for once?”
I didn’t know what that meants, so I asked him to explain, and he simply repeated the phrase. Now, “WEF” is a reference to the World Economic Forum, which plays a role in several current conspiracy theories. But “sharp shoot”? Can that mean anything other than that people he considers “WEF shills,” like Archer, should be shot?
I asked him again via Twitter, to clarify, and he didn’t. It’s dangerous, and a shame we’ve come to this. But it’s also a sign of why Finchem lost so clearly, even if he doesn’t admit it.
Tim Steller is an opinion columnist. A 25-year veteran of reporting and editing, he digs into issues and stories that matter in the Tucson area, reports the results and tells you his conclusions. Contact him at tsteller@tucson.com or 520-807-7789. On Twitter: @senyorreporter
