Blake Masters

“What’s the problem with Arizona?” I’ve been asked this question countless times in the past week, as I was after Election Day 2020. That year, it took nine days for major media organizations to call my home state for President Joe Biden. This time around, the major races were called after six, but several down-ticket contests still hang in the balance. Friends as far away as Hungary and Brazil asked how their entire nations can count votes in a few hours, while it takes Arizona a week or more. Not to mention Floridians, where races were called an hour after polls closed. Back in 2000, the Sunshine State was the electoral laughing stock. Now, it’s Arizona’s turn. Boy, did we earn it. Two decades ago, Florida’s presidential tally between George W.

If conservatives interpreted Barry Goldwater’s defeat in 1964 the way Trump supporters are being told to interpret the 2022 midterms, there would be no conservative movement today. Of course, the 1964 election was an actual defeat, while this year’s elections were an advance for the new Republican right, which succeeded in its first task — gaining power in the GOP — and has strengthened its hand in Congress. The right has picked up a Senate seat with Ohio’s J.D. Vance, and Republicans look likely to control the House of Representatives come January. The GOP won the majority of votes cast in House races, nearly 52 percent overall. The official narrative of the election is meant to drive the right to suicide.

How wrong can you be? About as wrong as I was about the character of the midterm elections. I thought there would be a red wave, fueled in part by high-octane orange fuel. Clearly I was wrong. It is no consolation to know that I was hardly alone in my assumptions. Nor is it much consolation to hear from Donald Trump that it was a “GREAT EVENING” because there were “174 wins and nine losses.” I didn’t check his math, but even if accurate it is obvious that there was no red wave. Several of his high-profile candidates lost, most conspicuously Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania. The fact that he lost to a man who is ostentatiously a mental incompetent added insult to injury.

Live analysis as the results come in from your favorite Spectator editors, staffers, columnists and contributors (and some you don’t like, for good measure).

In the clusters of billboards at intersections in Phoenix, positioned to grab the attention of drivers waiting for the lights to change, one candidate’s signs stand out. In a familiar red-white-and-blue collage of names, stars and stripes, the crisp bold-type white lettering on a black background reads: “BLAKE MASTERS FOR SENATE.” The monochrome placards are one of many conspicuous displays of disruption by Masters, the thirty-six-year-old Peter Thiel acolyte hoping to topple Arizona Democrat Mark Kelly. The video with which he launched his campaign last summer was starkly shot and melancholic: the Sonora desert at dawn and a synth-y soundtrack, not the in-your-face, truck commercial aesthetic that is par for the course on the right these days.

Psephologists of the world unite: you have nothing to lose but your fibs! I write toward the end of September, when many pollsters are still treating their prognostications as a form of fan fiction. For example, one poll has star trooper Mark Kelly ahead of Blake Masters by 6.2 points in the Arizona race for US Senate. That, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is ridiculous. Punditry isn’t prophecy, but mark my words: Blake Masters, absent some intervening catastrophe, is going to win that race and win convincingly. I am going to stick my neck out and say the same about John Fetterman and Mehmet Oz in the Senate race in Pennsylvania. “The polls” have Fetterman ahead by 4.5 points.

In the world of American politics, 2010 feels like a very long time ago. The wave of Tea Party candidates swept into office in response to the overreach of Barack Obama belonged to a party that had as its champions the likes of George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney — all people who would ultimately be rejected by its nominee in 2016. The Republican Party of 2010 nominated and elected a swath of candidates bent on changing Washington. They were elected in states as diverse as Kentucky, Florida, Wisconsin and Utah. And they represented a push designed to shift the party, to transform what it did in the capital. They advocated for change that would be long-standing, not just a brief change in personnel.

Just a few months ago, Blake Masters was strongly criticizing Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, expressing hopes, as other conservative candidates have this cycle, that he would receive a viable challenge to his Senate leadership after November. But on Friday, Masters was sounding a different tune, outright hoping that McConnell would back his campaign in the Arizona Senate race as the Senate leader has for J.D. Vance in Ohio. “I’ll tell Mitch this to his face,” Masters said during a GOP primary debate in June. “He’s not bad at everything. He’s good at judges. He’s good at blocking Democrats. You know what he’s not good at? Legislating.” On Friday, Masters predicted McConnell will get another term as GOP leader and no Republicans will challenge him.

With last night's primary elections, the story of the Republicans' risky approach to the 2024 election is clear: GOP voters want a party that is populist, but they are at odds over what kind of populist that needs to be. The media's framing of the 2024 narrative has been clear from the outset, and as per usual it's the framing preferred by the Democratic Party. The entire lens of definition is Donald Trump. His endorsements supposedly reign supreme over a beholden GOP electorate, and this is leading them to nominate extreme, flawed, "election-denying" candidates who put their chances of taking the Senate and key battleground governorships at risk, even in what more honest pundits allow will be a wave year for Republicans in the House.