Tim Steller's column: Trio of losing GOP candidates demand your attention

One of them says “I will die on this hill.”

Another proclaims, “I will never give up on this fight.”

The third: “I have not conceded this election and we still have work to do. We are calling for a new election.”

Most Arizona residents have undoubtedly moved on from the 2022 general election. But three Republicans who lost statewide elections — in quotation order, Kari Lake, Abraham Hamadeh and Mark Finchem — are striving to stay relevant as two of them pursue election challenges and public attention naturally wanes.

The bigger the margin the candidate lost by, it seems, the more desperate the measure taken. It is, after all, a challenge to wipe away big electoral margins of defeat that are explainable by careful analysis of votes cast in Maricopa County.

The upshot of that analysis: Tens of thousands of Republican voters turned away from their party’s more extreme candidates, handing victories to Democrats.

Accepting a rejection this personal, though, is anathema to dead-enders.

Take Mark Finchem, the GOP candidate for secretary of state from Oro Valley, who lost by 120,208 votes. It takes some gall to challenge an election you lost by a full 3 percentage points, as Finchem did.

But Finchem is displaying the kind of brazenness unique to him in the Tucson area’s recent history. He has been raising money in an ongoing barrage of emails that hardly slowed after the election ended and is continuing even after his election challenge is over.

‘Pay off campaign debt’

A recent one said, “the illegitimate Secretary of State Adrian Fontes is attempting to abuse the power of the office for political gain, to sanction us for demanding transparency and integrity in elections.

“I need your help to fight this abuse of power. Demand transparency in elections!”

It was another in an endless series of donation requests, but I didn’t notice, until Howard Fischer reported last week, what Finchem’s emails say at the bottom:

“All donations will go toward the 2022 General Election for Mark Finchem to help pay off campaign debt.”

As Fischer reported, Finchem’s campaign-finance filings show no campaign debt. In fact, his Jan. 17 filing showed the campaign had a cash balance of $96,831.13 on Dec. 31. Moreover, every filing by his secretary-of-state campaign has shown a cash balance, and none ever reported that the campaign received a loan.

What this campaign debt is, nobody seems to know, or is saying. It strikes me as something that regulators or prosecutors should be interested in.

But it’s pretty clear why Finchem lost. An analysis of Maricopa County’s cast-vote record, by Tucson Republican Benny White and two colleagues, shows that Republicans rejected him more than they did any other statewide GOP candidate. White, by the way, was the GOP candidate for Pima County recorder in 2020.

GOP chose bad candidates

He, along with fellow auditors Larry Moore and Tim Halvorsen, analyzed the county’s cast-vote record and paid special attention to what they called “disaffected voters” — those who voted for eight or more candidates from one party on last year’s ballot, but not others at the top of the ticket.

It turns out that 62,866 Maricopa County voters who voted for at least eight other Republicans did not vote for Finchem. That compares to just 2,737 “disaffected” Democratic voters who voted for eight other Democrats but rejected Adrian Fontes.

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The pattern was similar, but less dramatic, in the gubernatorial race. There were 33,041 disaffected Republican voters who did not fill out the bubble for Lake, as compared to 5,953 disaffected Democratic voters who did not vote for Dem nominee Katie Hobbs.

In the attorney general’s race, there were 33,110 disaffected Republican voters who turned away from Abraham Hamadeh, as compared to 6,246 Democratic voters who rejected Kris Mayes.

“That tells me this particular set of Republican candidates were simply not supported by a large portion of Republicans and probably most of the non-partisans,” White told me. In the primary, he said, “the Republicans chose a bunch of bad candidates.”

Of course, Kari Lake never accepted that she could lose. She began claiming fraud during the primary election campaign, before election day, then let that drop after she won.

When she lost the general election, by 17,117 votes, she of course claimed that narrow loss was a fraudulent result. Eventually getting her chance in court to put up the evidence of a fault election, she failed, but she of course did not shut up. She has continued saying and tweeting wild claims, such as this from Jan. 20:

“The Red Wave happened in AZ. Crooked Dems and RINOs rigged our Elections.

EVERYONE knows Arizonans did NOT vote for Cartel-controlled goons like Hobbs, Fontes & Mayes.

Frauds stole Arizona’s state Government.”

She too is regularly banging the drum for donations to her perpetual election effort, now with the eye-rolling name Save Arizona Fund. A state appellate court will hear Lake’s appeal of the earlier ruling against her on Feb. 1.

‘The votes are out there’

Hamadeh, too, has demanded to be remembered, as the weeks post-election have turned into months and his rival was sworn in as attorney general. But his rhetorical excess has diminished from the days when he called for “perp walks” over the 2020 elections.

Instead, he regularly conjures up a “they” who he claims to be fighting against as he seeks a new trial over the election he so narrowly lost — by 280 votes.

“They say we are a threat to democracy,” he said in a tweet Tuesday. “Yet they are the ones who cheered Maricopa County’s Election Day disaster. They are the ones who withheld critical evidence in an election lawsuit. They are the ones threatening to arrest elected officials.”

At least, in Hamadeh’s case, there is an underlying case to be made and a slight chance to win it. He has pointed to uncounted provisional ballots and undercounted votes as areas of legitimate contention where he might garner the necessary 280-vote margin. It’s possible, barely.

And at least he’s not constantly asking for donations the way Finchem and Lake have been.

“The votes are out there. We have more votes than Kris Mayes. Now it’s a question of which votes will be counted,” he claimed in a Twitter spaces interview Sunday night.

The votes were out there before the general election, too, of course. Candidates such as Hamadeh and Lake, if not Finchem, could have gotten them if they had appealed slightly more to the broad electorate. The fact they didn’t is their fault and a reason to pay them little mind as they play out their string.