Former President Donald Trump endorsed Carrie Lake, who walked away from her nearly three-year TV news career and embraced his lies for the 2020 election. She faced Karrin Taylor Robson, who was endorsed by prominent Republicans across the country who they were trying to push their party to move on from Trump. The race was too early to happen, with Robson leading Lake by 3 percentage points. The margin was shrinking as precinct votes, more favorable to Lake than early polls, were added to the tally. As the midterm primary season enters its final stretch this month, Arizona’s races are poised to provide important clues about the direction of the GOP. Victories by Trump-backed candidates could give the former president allies who dominate the election administration as he considers another bid for the White House in 2024. The losses, however, may signal an opening in the party to a different way forward. The former president has endorsed and campaigned for a number of candidates who support his lies, including Lake, who he says would have refused to certify President Joe Biden’s narrow victory in Arizona. Robson said the GOP needs to focus on the future despite what she called an “unfair” election. In the race to oversee the Arizona secretary of state election, Trump also endorsed a state lawmaker who was at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 and claims the former president was cheated out of victory. “I think the majority of people, and a lot of people who are Trump supporters, want to move on,” said former Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, who supports Robson. “I mean, it was two years ago. Let’s go. Let’s move.” The election comes on one of the biggest midterm primary nights of the year — one that had some warning signs for Republicans. In Kansas, voters rejected a state constitutional amendment that would have allowed the legislature to restrict or ban abortions. They were the first voters to weigh in on abortion rights since the US Supreme Court revoked the constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy. The rejection in a conservative state is a sign of potential energy for Democrats, who hope that anger over the court’s abortion ruling will outweigh concerns about inflation and President Joe Biden’s flagging popularity. Tudor Dixon, a conservative commentator, won the GOP primary for Michigan governor, emerging atop a field of little-known conservatives days after Trump endorsed her. He will face Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in November. In Missouri, Attorney General Eric Schmidt won the Republican nomination for senator and will face Democrat Trudy Bush Valentine, heir to the Anheuser-Busch beer fortune. And two Republican members of the House from Washington state who voted to impeach Trump face primary challengers. But the contests are especially visible in Arizona, a longtime Republican stronghold that has become more favorable to Democrats in recent years due to explosive development in and around Phoenix. The primaries and the fall election will provide insight into whether Biden’s success here in 2020 was a one-time event or the start of a long-term departure from the Democratic Party. With such high stakes, Arizona has been central to efforts by Trump and his allies to challenge Biden’s victory with false allegations of fraud. Federal and state election officials and Trump’s own attorney general have said there is no credible evidence the election was tainted. The former president’s claims of fraud have also been roundly rejected by courts, including judges appointed by Trump. A manual count led by Trump supporters in Arizona’s largest county found no evidence of a stolen election and concluded that Biden’s margin of victory was greater than the official tally. Although Trump remains the most popular figure within the GOP, his efforts to influence the primaries this year have yielded mixed results. His preferred candidates in states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania prevailed in their primaries. But in Georgia, another state central to Trump’s election lies, his chosen gubernatorial candidate was defeated by more than 50 percentage points. Georgia’s Republican secretary of state also ran for renomination against a Trump-backed primary challenger. “You have entrusted me with your most sacred asset in a constitutional democracy – your vote,” Ms Robson told supporters as she awaited election results. The former president hopes he will be more successful in Arizona, where the current governor, Doug Ducey, cannot run for re-election. That could give Trump a better chance than in Georgia to influence the winner. Lake is well-known across much of the state, having bought the evening news in Phoenix for more than two decades. He ran as a fierce critic of the mainstream media, which he says is unfair to Republicans, and other enemies of Trump’s Make America Great Again movement, including the family of the late Sen. John McCain. A supporter of lying about Trump’s election, Lake said her campaign is “already detecting some theft” in her own race, but has repeatedly refused to provide any evidence for the claim. Robson, whose home developer husband is one of the state’s richest men, is mostly self-funding her campaign. The GOP establishment, increasingly comfortable distancing itself from Trump, rallied around him last month with a series of endorsements from Ducey, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Vice President Mike Pence. The surge in establishment support for Robson has drawn national scrutiny to the race for what it says about the GOP base ahead of crucial presidential primaries in two years. “Everybody wants to try to make this a kind of proxy for 2024,” said Christie, who ran for president in 2016. “Trust me, I’ve been through enough of this to know that 2024 is going to be decided by the people who they’re going to step up to the plate … and how they’re performing or not performing at that moment.” Robson is running a largely old-school Republican campaign focused on cutting taxes and regulations, securing the border and promoting school choice. He has also highlighted Lake’s past support for Democrats, including a $350 contribution to the last Democratic president. “I can’t vote for someone who supported Barack Obama,” said Travis Fillmore, 36, a firearms instructor from Tempe who planned to vote for Robson. He said he remains a Trump supporter and believes he was robbed of the 2020 election, but Lake’s support for Obama was unacceptable. On the Democratic side, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs defeated Marco Lopez, a former Nogales mayor and border enforcement official during the Obama administration. As Arizona’s top election official, Hobbs endeared herself to Democrats with a passionate defense of the integrity of the 2020 election, a stance that has drawn death threats. But it is weighed down by a discrimination case won by a black policy consultant from Hobbs’s time in the Legislature. Trump-endorsed Blake Masters wins Arizona GOP Senate race. He is a 35-year-old first-time candidate who has spent most of his career working for billionaire Peter Thiel, who is financing his campaign. Masters highlighted cultural grievances animating the right, including critical race theory and claims of heavy technology censorship. Until Trump’s endorsement, the race had no clear front-runner between Masters, businessman Jim Lamon and Attorney General Mark Brnovich, all of whom sought his endorsement. Lamon said Trump was wrong to endorse Masters and dug into his own fortune to highlight Masters’ ties to tech companies and his writings as a college student advocating open borders. Lamon signed a certificate falsely stating that Trump had won Arizona in 2020 and that he was one of the state’s “duly elected and qualified” electors. Trump traveled to Brnovich and may have torpedoed his campaign when the attorney general’s election fraud investigation failed to lead to criminal charges against election officials. Masters will face incumbent Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly in the fall. The Republican race for Arizona secretary of state was won by Trump-endorsed candidate Mark Finchem, who was on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021. His competition included Shawnna Bolick, a state congresswoman who pushed for legislation that would allow to the legislature to overturn the will of the voters and decide which candidate will receive the state’s 11 electoral votes for president. The GOP establishment rallied around advertising executive Beau Lane, who says there were no widespread problems with the 2020 election. Republican House Speaker Rusty Bowers, who testified before a House committee Jan. 6 about Trump’s post-2020 lobbying campaign, faced a Trump-backed challenger in his bid for the Senate.
