Republican-biased Politico reports today, Arizona GOP Senate frontrunner loses lead amid air assault:
Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich has fallen out of first place in the state’s Republican Senate primary, a slide that corresponds with aggressive advertising spending by his opponents — and Donald Trump’s ire.
For nearly a year, Brnovich held a steady lead in the primary to take on Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly, a key race as the GOP seeks to take back the Senate majority.
But walking the fine line between his responsibilities as attorney general [as if!] and Republican Senate hopeful has proved challenging in a state where Trump allies have unsuccessfully sought to challenge the 2020 presidential election results.
While struggling to articulate a clear position on the election, Brnovich has lost his commanding lead, according to four separate public and internal polls conducted in the past month. He’s been surpassed by wealthy solar power executive Jim Lamon, a self-funder who has spent $3.8 million on advertisements ahead of the Aug. 2 primary.
Jim Lamon has pushed many of the Big Lie election denier conspiracy theories. He joined Arizona Republican Party chair Kelli Ward in 2020 in unsuccessfully suing to block Biden’s victory in the state. He was a participant in Trump’s Coup Plot, signing his name to a forged document as a fake GQP elector from Arizona in a failed attempt to create a disputed slate of electors from Arizona. GOP Senate Candidate Jim Lamon Signed as Fake Presidential Elector. Lamon’s company donated $300,000 to the Arizona GOP in March 2021 to help pay for the Arizona Senate’s GQP sham “fraudit” of the state’s 2020 election results. He has also been engaged in a shady voter registration drive with the nonprofit Look Ahead America. Arizona Senate candidate poured millions into voter registration group. “Lamon also stands to get a substantial tax break from his $2 million effort to turn out conservative voters.” This guy is evil.
An internal Lamon poll obtained by POLITICO shows him with a three-point lead over Brnovich, putting Lamon at 25 percent, Brnovich at 22 percent, Blake Masters at 16 percent and Mick McGuire at 6 percent, while 31 percent remain undecided.
The poll, conducted April 21 through 24 by McLaughlin & Associates, is consistent with other surveys done since April 1 by The Trafalgar Group, Remington Research Group and Data Orbital.
Meanwhile, Trump has shown an interest in Masters, an associate of billionaire tech executive Peter Thiel who resigned in March from leading Thiel’s venture capital firm. On Saturday evening, Trump called in to address a crowd gathered at an election integrity event that Masters held in Chandler. The public display of support for Masters, while not an official endorsement, came one week after the former president blasted Brnovich for declining to take action to address his unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud in the state.
“I heard Blake was the person that showed up,” Trump said through cellphone audio being blared into the crowd. “And I want to thank Blake.”
Masters had challenged Brnovich to debate him on election integrity issues, though Brnovich declined to participate in the event. Lamon was not invited.
Note: Peter Thiel, MAGA’s Big Money Man for Trump, is his own brand of evil. Dissatisfied With Their Party, Wealthy Republican Donors Form Secret Coalitions:
A new coalition of wealthy conservative benefactors that says it aims to “disrupt but advance the Republican agenda” gathered this week for a private summit in South Florida that included closed-door addresses from former President Donald J. Trump and an allied Senate candidate at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, according to documents and interviews.
The coalition, called the Rockbridge Network, includes some of Mr. Trump’s biggest donors, such as Peter Thiel and Rebekah Mercer, and has laid out an ambitious goal — to reshape the American right by spending more than $30 million on conservative media, legal, policy and voter registration projects, among other initiatives.
The emergence of Rockbridge, the existence of which has not previously been reported, comes amid escalating jockeying among conservative megadonors to shape the 2022 midterms and the future of the Republican Party from outside the formal party machinery, and often with little disclosure.
See also, Inside The New Right, Where Peter Thiel Is Placing His Biggest Bets (excerpt):
But the people these pieces describe, who made up most of the partygoers around me, were only the most buttoned-up seam of a much larger and stranger political ferment, burbling up mainly within America’s young and well-educated elite, part of an intra-media class info-war. The podcasters, bro-ish anonymous Twitter posters, online philosophers, artists, and amorphous scenesters in this world are variously known as “dissidents,” “neo-reactionaries,” “post-leftists,” or the “heterodox” fringe—though they’re all often grouped for convenience under the heading of America’s New Right. They have a wildly diverse set of political backgrounds, with influences ranging from 17th-century Jacobite royalists to Marxist cultural critics to so-called reactionary feminists to the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, whom they sometimes refer to with semi-ironic affection as Uncle Ted. Which is to say that this New Right is not a part of the conservative movement as most people in America would understand it. It’s better described as a tangled set of frameworks for critiquing the systems of power and propaganda that most people reading this probably think of as “the way the world is.” And one point shapes all of it: It is a project to overthrow the thrust of progress, at least such as liberals understand the word.
This worldview, these worldviews, run counter to the American narrative of the last century—that economic growth and technological innovation are inevitably leading us toward a better future. It’s a position that has become quietly edgy and cool in new tech outposts like Miami and Austin, and in downtown Manhattan, where New Right–ish politics are in, and signifiers like a demure cross necklace have become markers of a transgressive chic. No one is leading this movement, but it does have key figures.
One is Peter Thiel, the billionaire who helped fund NatCon and who had just given the conference’s opening address. Thiel has also funded things like the edgelordy and post-left–inflected New People’s Cinema film festival, which ended its weeklong run of parties and screenings in Manhattan just a few days before NatCon began. He’s long been a big donor to Republican political candidates, but in recent years Thiel has grown increasingly involved in the politics of this younger and weirder world—becoming something like a nefarious godfather or a genial rich uncle, depending on your perspective. Podcasters and art-world figures now joke about their hope to get so-called Thielbucks. His most significant recent outlays have been to two young Senate candidates who are deeply enmeshed in this scene and influenced by its intellectual currents: Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance, running for the Republican nomination in Ohio, and Blake Masters in Arizona.
Thiel has given more than $10 million to super PACs supporting the men’s candidacies, and both are personally close to him. Vance is a former employee of Thiel’s Mithril Capital, and Masters, until recently the COO of Thiel’s so-called “family office,” also ran the Thiel Foundation, which has become increasingly intertwined with this New Right ecosystem. These three—Thiel, Vance, Masters—are all friends with Curtis Yarvin, a 48-year-old ex-programmer and blogger who has done more than anyone to articulate the world historical critique and popularize the key terms of the New Right. You’ll often hear people in this world—again under many layers of irony—call him things like Lord Yarvin, or Our Prophet.
* * *
People often struggle with what to make of Thiel’s involvement in this ecosystem. Last year the journalist Max Chafkin published a biography of Thiel, titled The Contrarian, in which he described Yarvin as the “house political philosopher” for a network often called the Thielverse. The book focuses heavily on Thiel’s political maneuverings, describing how he evolved from being a hyper-libertarian to someone who now makes common cause with nationalists and populists. And it explains how Thiel helped both Cruz and Josh Hawley on their paths to the Senate. [Both were insurrection leaders on January 6, 2021. That tells you what you need to know about Thiel and his candidates..] The Contrarian ends with a dark picture of the billionaire trying to extend his political reach ever more overtly by funding and shepherding the campaigns of Masters and Vance. “Masters and Vance are different from Hawley and Cruz,” Chafkin writes; the former two are “extensions” of Thiel.
Sounds like Thiel has more in common with Marvel’s super-villain Thanos. Masters and Vance “are ‘extensions’ of Thiel.” This should terrify you.
Politico continues:
In early April, Brnovich’s office released an interim report on the status of his still-ongoing, monthslong investigation of the 2020 election in Maricopa County, where Trump has alleged massive voter fraud occurred.
While Brnovich wrote in the report there were “serious vulnerabilities” in the election process [in a bid to garner Trump’s endorsement], he did not outline evidence of widespread fraud or assert that the election outcome was different. He said his office’s investigation will continue [to keep the Big Lie alive.]
Trump took note of the report, releasing a statement nearly two weeks later bashing Brnovich as “politically correct” for not taking any substantial actions to challenge the election results.
“Because of the amount of time that it took him to do the report, which was endless, his poll numbers have been rapidly sinking,” Trump wrote of Brnovich on April 18. “Now, people are upset with the fact that while he states the problem, he seems to be doing nothing about it — he doesn’t give the answers.”
Trump’s approach to Brnovich is similar to one he took to Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, whom Trump has also criticized for supporting the certification of the 2020 election results in the state. He berated Ducey for months until Ducey confirmed earlier this year he would not be seeking the GOP nomination for Senate, despite being encouraged by national Republicans to do so.
After Trump’s comments in April, Brnovich released his own statement suggesting he is unwilling to say unequivocally that the election in Arizona was fraudulent.
“I understand his frustration, but as I’ve said previously, I will continue to follow the facts and evidence and do what the law requires,” Brnovich said at the time. “That’s what I’ve always done and what I will continue to do as Arizona’s next senator.” [The facts say otherwise. He has routinely abused the powers of his office to pursue politically motivated lawsuits.]
Brnovich’s campaign declined to respond to a request for comment for this story.
If Trump continues to make GOP candidates’ rhetoric on election fraud the top criteria of his endorsement decision in the Arizona Senate primary, Lamon will likely also be at a disadvantage.
Lamon has not gone as far as Masters in insisting the last presidential election was stolen. [Seriously Politico? Lamon put his money, and his signature, where his lying mouth is. He is a fake GQP elector under investigation by the House Select Committee on January 6, for chrissakes!] Days before Trump attended a Masters fundraiser in November at Mar-a-Lago, Masters released a video saying “I think Trump won in 2020.”
While Lamon helped fund a partisan audit into the Maricopa County election results and has said he believes there were significant election irregularities that should be addressed, he maintains there was not enough information uncovered to know whether Biden’s victory in the state was fraudulent.
Richard Grenell, Trump’s former acting director of national intelligence, and two other Lamon surrogates have spoken to Trump about him in the last two weeks, according to a person familiar with the conversations, though there is no clear indication Trump has taken an interest in Lamon. His last visit with Trump was at the end of the year, Lamon’s campaign confirmed.
Despite being a statewide elected officeholder, Brnovich hasn’t shown strength in fundraising.
In the first quarter of the year, Brnovich spent more than he raised. And of his half-million dollars on hand at the end of the quarter, less than $175,000 of it is able to be spent on the primary, according to FEC data.
Those limits on individual donation amounts don’t exist for self-funders, meaning Lamon can use for the primary nearly all of his $7 million on hand. And he intends to put in “many more millions,” in addition to the $13 million Lamon has already invested, his campaign confirmed to POLITICO, declining to elaborate on exactly how much Lamon is willing to spend on the race. Lamon said at a private gathering last year he intended to spend as much as $50 million to win the Senate seat.
Masters, meanwhile, has declined to self-fund and is raising money through individual donors, while benefiting from $3.5 million that Saving Arizona — a Thiel-funded super PAC — has spent for him on advertising. Thiel has pledged $10 million to the effort. Lamon’s campaign has so far spent roughly the same amount on television ads, while Brnovich has remained off the air.
“Our campaign has been steadily rising in the polls, as Blake outpaces his opponents in events, media and fundraising,” said Amalia Halikias, Masters’ campaign manager. “Brnovich had an initial name ID advantage, but is falling fast. Lamon has been spending his millions, but there’s a limit on what an out-of-touch unlikeable guy can buy. We are on track to win in August and November.”
In Ohio, Trump recently endorsed J.D. Vance, who, like Masters, is supported by Thiel and who lagged in polling throughout much of the primary campaign. The Trump endorsement appears to have given Vance somewhat of a last-minute boost in polling ahead of the state’s Tuesday primary, in addition to fundraising help. In the days after the endorsement, more than $5 million poured into a pro-Vance super PAC, including a new $3.5 million donation from Thiel.
So Two Big Lie election deniers backed by big money, and Big Lie curious Brnovich. Gov. Ducey’s surrogate candidate, former Arizona National Guard Gen. Mick McGuire, has been running TV ads for a couple of weeks now, but his poor poll showing did not merit a mention in this Politico report, other than his dismal “6 percent” poll showing. There, I just gave you more than what Politico gave you, and more than you deserve.
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