The 2020 Election Remains Closer than It Looked: Democrat vs. Independent Candidate Timing in Maryland, Massachusetts and Marist

One of the big questions going into the 2020 election was how Republican candidates would reflect their party’s base. Poll after poll has shown that a clear majority of Republicans falsely believe that President Joe Biden did not legitimately win the 2020 election.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that a lot of Republicans running for office believe this as well. Could any of them end up running states where elections are close? For the most part, the answer is no. Donald Trump easily won the presidential election, so most election deniers running for governor have little to no chance of winning.

Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, who successfully defeated Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, now finds herself locked in a tight race against Lake, who has said she will accept the results of a “fair, honest and transparent election,” after previously refusing in an interview with CNN to commit to accepting the results if she lost. The results of the last election could still be challenged by Finchem as he tries to become the state’s chief elections administrator.

Three polls out this past week were all within the margin of error. A CBS News/YouGov poll had Lake and Hobbs tied at 49%. Fox had a poll and it said Lake had the lowest number of votes with 43%. Marist College had Lake at 46% and Hobbs at 45%.

National Democrats were cheered to see Lake and Masters win their respective primaries, considering both to be too “MAGA” to win the general. This was the same strategy they tried with Donald Trump in 2016. We all know how that turned out.

Losing gubernatorial campaigns inswing or blue states have been hallmarks of 2020 election denial. Even though the Republican governors of Maryland and Massachusetts are leaving their states, they are still being beaten in the polls.

Lake is not the only one. Republican Senate nominee Blake Masters has pushed several conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. Mark Finchem, the GOP nominee for secretary of state, has suggested there are votes in some counties that should have been set aside because of supposed irregularities.(There has never been any evidence put forward of said irregularities.)

Additionally, the Marist poll showed that a mere 6% of voters are not at all confident that the 2022 election in Arizona will not be run fairly and accurately. Another 23% are not very confident; the vast majority (71%) are confident it will be.

The Politics of Peculiar Candidates: Lake, Lake, Marchant and Finchem in Arizona and Nevada (Joe Marchant), Mark Finchem and Adam Laxalt

Lake has a secret. Her past as a television anchor may be paying off. She seems to be doing a good enough job reaching voters in the middle of the electorate.

A further look at the numbers indicates that the GOP could easily win the secretary of state races in Arizona (Mark Finchem) and in next-door Nevada (Joe Marchant). The Republicans running for those posts are trying to become the chief election officers in their states, which means denying the results of the 2020 election.

It’s also the case that Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson voted against certifying the 2020 election and is a slight favorite to win another term against Democratic Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes. Likewise, Nevada’s Adam Laxalt has raised questions about the 2020 election and played a leading role in post-election legal efforts to reverse Biden’s victory in the state. He’s in a tight race with Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto.

Being a political commentator, however, the most common questions involve Arizona’s, well, peculiar politics. The race for governor is the main focus with Republican and former news anchor Linda Lake leading in some polls, while Democrat Mark Kelly is in a tight race with former tech investor Adam Masters.

CNN’s Daredevil Assassin: Inside Elections With Nathan L. Gonzales Is a Toss-Up with Dean Obeidalla

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Lake is against American democracy, and he is running for governor of Arizona. She wouldn’t commit to accepting an election loss when she spoke to CNN. She and others of her breed might be called a group of ‘democracy killers’ if they win in November. Her serial lies about the 2020 presidential election range in severity from merely kiss-ups to Trump at the most benign to bizarre recitations of dangerous nonsense.

And in a precursor of what we might expect on election night, Lake claimed in the run-up to her August primary election that the vote was being rigged — again presenting no evidence.

A New York Times/Siena College poll released this week showed her in a dead heat race with Lake. Inside Elections with Nathan L. Gonzales rates the race a Toss-up.

The voters of Arizona have a clear choice between Hobbs, who fights for election integrity, and Lake, who will bludgeon democracy if given half a chance.

What’s going on in Arizona? Tell me about the time you found a scorpion in your boot! What did you find during Arizona’s first legislative session?

Jon Gabriel is an opinion contributor and editor-in-chief of Ricochet.com. He can be followed on a social networking site, at @ExJon. The views expressed are of his own. Read more opinion at CNN.

I get a lot of questions about what’s going on in Arizona. How are you doing on the 118F summers? How “grand” is the Grand Canyon, really? Tell me about that time you found a scorpion in your boot!

Obama said that democracy might not survive in Arizona if Republicans win key offices. That’s not an exaggeration. That is a fact.

Several years back, many considered Arizona to be the reddest of red states. When Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema won in 2018 and President Joe Biden and Kelly won in 2020, national commentators thought Arizona was turning blue — or at least purple.

The Grand Canyon State usually swings from one side to the other. The Democrats held the governorship more often than Republicans over the past 45 years.

His politics were somewhere between Archie Bunker and Ron Swanson, but he would often vote to re-elect Democrats. His reason? The news does not report on them, which means they are not bothering or messing with me.

Our ballots include a raft of citizen initiatives, often ones that contradict each other. Dad voted no because he thought change and change is bad if he votes yes. He voted against retaining all the judges.

This leave-me-the-hell-alone contrarianism was present from Arizona’s founding. President William Howard Taft delayed Arizona’s acceptance into the union until the territorial legislature removed a certain progressive provision, allowing for the recall of judges, from the state constitution. The legislature removed it after a lot of arguing. Voters voted to keep the offending provision after Arizona became a state. Washington, DC, take that.

Decades later, Congress wanted to mandate nationwide daylight-saving time to save energy and eliminate confusion. The federal government wanted to force another work hour of sunshine on Phoenix – in the summer? Ornery Arizonans said, “hell no,” uniformity be damned. Hawaii joined the desert dwellers.

When Arizona was the first state to have a popular vote, they created a holiday to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. The week before the vote, the measure was leading in the polls 52% to 38%. That weekend, the NFL pompously announced that if Arizona voted ‘no,’ they would deny us the Super Bowl. The measure went down by more than 50%. (The holiday was ultimately approved two years later, 61% to 39%, after local business leaders made the NFL promise to keep its big mouth shut. The first voter-endorsed MLK Day is still here.

For better or worse, Arizona voters have a powerful defiant streak. Even if it means cutting their own nose off, they love to tinker with outsiders’ noses.

Barry Goldwater was a maverick before McCain. He infuriated the Rockefeller Republican leadership in the 1960s with his “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” then infuriated the ascendant Moral Majority in the 1980s with his vocal support of gay rights.

So, when Arizonans see Lake condemning wishy-washy Republicans before scolding news reporters, they grab the popcorn. When Masters cracks jokes about Kelly along with the GOP establishment, they toss a second bag in the microwave.

Democracy is at stake: educating the electorate in Arizona with collapsing in the wake of the 2020 election

The voters who poured into a Phoenix high school to hear from former President Barack Obama were looking to send a message of defiance Wednesday night.

They said they are determined to defeat former President Donald Trump’s hand-picked slate of election deniers – including gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake, Senate nominee Blake Masters and Secretary of State nominee Mark Finchem – and will not allow their state’s voters to be intimidated by activists who turned up to monitor ballot drop boxes late last month – some of them armed, masked and wearing camouflage.

It’s here in Arizona that democracy is at stake as the president warned Americans from Washington, DC that democracy is at stake, and as the upcoming elections in Arizona and next year’s presidential election show that democracy is at stake.

The firm known as Cyber Ninjas conducted a sham partisan review in the wake of the 2020 election. Both political parties are now girding for another potential battle over the election results in a state Biden won by less than 10,500 votes. And the GOP candidates at the top of the ticket are setting that tone.

Joann Rodriguez, a registered Democrat from Maricopa County, said it was scary that “radical Republicans” in her state were able to elevate candidates like Lake and Masters, who won their primaries in part by echoing Trump’s falsehoods about the 2020 election.

“What are they running on, aside from Trump’s talking points that the election was stolen?” Rodriguez said something. She noted that a lot of Trumpers are still driving their trucks with the flags on it. They show up at the election sites, with guns on their hips, for what reason? I mean, do they think that their intimidation tactics are going to work?”

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/03/politics/arizona-election-deniers-kari-lake-obama-midterms/index.html

An investigation of “vigilante ballot security” by right-wingers during a grand canyon state campaigning for democracy (and a defense by Greenberg and Hobbs)

Hobbs touted her record as secretary of state Wednesday night. She stood for democracy when she refused to allow insurrectionists to surround her home after she certified the 2020 election.

As Obama flew to Arizona to campaign for fellow Democrats in the upcoming election, including Mark Kelly who is in a close race with Masters, the state was on edge. The fact that those top statewide contests may be decided on a razor’s edge is what brought Obama to the Grand Canyon State as he seeks to fire up the Democratic base and make sure that young voters and Latino voters – who will be critical to victory in Arizona – turn out in a midterm election year.

Biden had to make his case for democracy from the other side of the country, because Obama did not invite him to campaign in top swing states.

The political climate and concerns about the sanctity of the election results are what attracted a registered Republican to an Obama rally. He said in an interview that he wasn’t voting for Democrats in this election, he is voting against the Trump ticket.

“The Republican Party today is not the Republican Party I’m a part of,” said Greenberg, who described the 2020 election as fair and honest. I can no longer see the resemblance to the American Nazi Party.

Voters filed complaints to the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office after some activists were taking pictures of voters and their license plates – apparently inspired by debunked conspiracy theories about so-called “mules” who stuffed ballot boxes in 2020. A federal judge issued a ruling in one of the cases on Tuesday barring members of a group known as Clean Elections USA – whose leader has falsely asserted the 2020 election was rigged – from openly carrying guns or wearing body armor within 250 feet of drop boxes.

The group members are not allowed to speak to or yell at voters who drop their ballots off, or to film voters at the drop boxes because of the ruling. The justice department weighed in on the case of the League of Women Voters. The DOJ did not formally take sides, but in a legal brief federal prosecutors said the right-wing group’s “vigilante ballot security efforts” were likely illegal and “raise serious concerns of voter intimidation.”

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/03/politics/arizona-election-deniers-kari-lake-obama-midterms/index.html

Ms. Gonzales: “It’s not going to make me liar” when I hear about the reprimanding of the Arizona GOP

In Arizona, where the Republican Party is controlled by Trump loyalists, the governor and senator have been reprimanded for their lack of loyalty to the president.

Michelle Gonzales, a registered Democrat from Maricopa County, said she believes that people came to see Obama Wednesday night “so they could feel hopeful” about the democratic process amid all the noise.

She said it was important to really hear from someone that the people they trust, and they believe in, can be hopeful about this election. There are a lot of people out here. There are thousands of people waiting. I just want to believe that people want to believe in something better – that they have morals and values that we all should have as human beings and not elect these liars and con people.”

She and Trump share the same concern that election denialism sits at the core of her messaging. She said that if she had been governor, she wouldn’t have certified the result in the state.

Is there any chance of a fair and transparent result in one of the likely swing states of the next election, if Lake and Finchem have control of the election machinery?