The summer vacation is over. With less than 100 days until the general election, the final rounds of the 2022 primaries will be fast and furious over the next six weeks, starting with a busy Tuesday with key contests across the country.
Here are some things to watch on Tuesday:
Arizona Governor primaries pit Trump against Pence
In the race to replace Arizona President Doug Ducey, a Republican, Ducey’s elected candidate, Karrin Taylor Robson, will face a Trump-backed former television journalist Kari Lake.
Lake has built her campaign around electoral fraud lies. She referred to the refusal of her leading rival, Ducey-backed Robson, to admit those lies as “disqualifying.”
Robson, meanwhile, is also backed by former Vice President Mike Pence, who visited Arizona last month to campaign with Robson and Ducey on the same day Trump held a meeting at which Lake spoke.
Pence used his trip to Arizona to urge the GOP to get past Trump’s lies about fraud in the 2020 election and look ahead.
“If you get out and vote for Karrin Taylor Robson, you can send a deafening message that will be heard across America that the Republican Party is the party of the future,” Pence said in Peoria, Arizona.
Arizona GOP could pick full list of election deniers
Beyond the governor’s office, the Arizona GOP could be ready to nominate a statewide ticket on Tuesday from Trump-backed election deniers.
The race for the Secretary of State — Arizona’s top election official — also features an election denier endorsed by former President Trump in Mark Finchem, a state legislator who falsely claims Trump was in the 2020 election and was in Washington on January 6. used to be.
Trump-backed Blake Masters, who wants to confront Democratic Senator Mark Kelly, has not only claimed that Democrats have “pulled out all the stops” to cheat in 2020, but has suggested the 2022 midterms will not be fair. to be. Masters faces other Republicans who rejected the 2020 election results, including businessman Jim Lamon, who touts his efforts to fund the fake review of Maricopa County’s 2020 results. Another Senate candidate, State Attorney General Mark Brnovich, sent a letter claiming to expose electoral fraud, without going into detail about how the elections were administered.
Trump’s chosen candidate in the race for Attorney General, Abraham Hamadeh, said he would “take seriously the fraud in our 2020 election and bring justice to those who have undermined our Republic.”
Meijer stands for Dem-supported extreme right-wing challenge
Rep. Peter Meijer, the freshman Republican from western Michigan who was one of 10 members of his party’s House to vote for Trump’s second impeachment, is taking on a Trump-approved challenger in John Gibbs.
Gibbs has fully embraced Trump’s election lies. He falsely claimed in a debate with Meijer that the results leading to Biden’s 2020 victory were “simply mathematically impossible” and said there were “anomalies in them, to put it very lightly”.
What’s unique about the GOP game in Grand Rapids’ 3rd district is that the Democrats have tried to boost Gibbs with ads portraying him as a Trump-aligned conservative.
It’s a calculated guess for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which spent more than $300,000 on ads in the race: They think Gibbs is much easier to beat in November, so they try to raise him on Tuesday, then turn around and immediately cast him as a threat to democracy in the general election.
A pro-Meijer group launched a television ad this weekend highlighting Democrats’ involvement in the Republican primary. “Fox News confirms it: Nancy Pelosi and Democrats are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to elect their chosen Congressional candidate in the Republican primary, John Gibbs,” the group’s ad warns. “West Michigan Must Say No to Nancy Pelosi’s Selected Candidate for Congress.”
Read what else you should pay attention to here.
