The Real Problem of 2020: Trump vs. Finchem: Dem Demographic Denials About the 2016 Ginora-Manton Election
The depth of the belief among Republicans about Trump’s election lies was underscored by a CNN poll conducted by SSRS that was released on Wednesday: 66% of Republicans said they don’t believe Biden legitimately won the election.
The fact that a lot of Republican candidates think this should come as no surprise. But could any of of those candidates end up running states where elections tend to be close? The majority of the time, the answer is no. Donald Trump easily won the election, so most election deniers running for governor have a small chance of winning.
Democrats are locked in a tight race for Secretary of State, after one of their own defeated Trump in his attempt to overturn the election, and another opponent has promised to accept the result of the election. And Finchem, who could become the state’s chief elections administrator, is still trying to overturn the results of the last election.
Three polls out this past week, which were all well within the margin of error, illustrate the point well. A CBS News/YouGov poll showed Lake and Hobbs in a tie. The Fox survey put Hobbs at 39% to Lake’s 32%. Lake was at 46% and Hobbs was at 45%.
Lake is running considerably stronger than Blake Masters, the the state’s GOP nominee for US Senate. The average of all polling puts Masters behind Mark Kelly by more than 5 points.
In fact, 2020 election denial has been a hallmark of losing gubernatorial campaigns in swing or blue states. In Maryland and Massachusetts, current Republican governors of their states, like Dan Cox, are getting trounced by their opponents in the polls.
Lake is not the only one. Masters has pushed a number of conspiracy theories about the 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.)
According to the Marist poll, less than 4% of voters in the Arizona election in four years are certain that it will be fair and accurate. A third are not very confident, and the majority are sure that it will be.
What is Lake’s Secret? Then again, what is she telling us about her decision to become a secretary of state in Arizona and what she wants to do in 2020
So what is Lake’s secret? Part of it may be that her past as a television anchor is paying off. She seems to be doing a good enough job reaching voters in the middle of the electorate.
The GOP could easily win the secretary of state races in Arizona and Nevada, based on the numbers. The Republicans running for both those posts have denied the results of the 2020 election as they aim to become the chief election officers in their given states.
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. Adam Laxalt has questioned the 2020 election in Nevada, and was involved in the legal effort to reverse Biden’s victory in the state. He is in a close race with the democrat.
It will be a big deal if another close presidential election happens in 2020 and Arizona is back in the mix.
Ms. Lake and Mr. Masters have expressed their opinion on the matter. Ms. Lake told Fox News on Thursday that she had “absolute 100 percent confidence that I will be the next governor of Arizona.” After taking a slight lead in his uncalled race, Mr. Hamadeh took a picture of himself on the campaign trail and said “I want to thank the people of Arizona forentrusting me with this great responsibility.” He lost ground and is a bit behind.
But at a debate last week with Senator Mark Kelly, the Democratic incumbent, Mr. Masters agreed that Mr. Biden had been legitimately elected. He said that the president’s son, Hunter Biden, probably lost because of the suppressed negative news on social media.
Mr. Masters mingled with attendees before a Trump rally. He shook hands and posed for pictures and said that he was in agreement with his position.
Editor’s Note: Dean Obeidallah, a former attorney, is the host of SiriusXM radio’s daily program “The Dean Obeidallah Show” and a columnist for The Daily Beast. Follow him @DeanObeidallah. The opinions in this commentary are of his own. View more opinion on CNN.
Why did President Barack Obama and Katie Hobbs get elected? The misdemeanor of the Arizona Democratic presidential primary candidate Kari Lake, Senate nominee Blake Masters, and Secretary of State Katie Finchem
Dangerously, Lake has also called for imprisoning her Democratic opponent Katie Hobbs — Arizona’s secretary of state — for unspecified alleged election offenses. It doesn’t matter that there’s no evidence that Hobbs has committed any crimes. Standing up for democracy is considered to be a crime in Lake.
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.
Perhaps most alarming of all is that despite all of this, polls show Lake and her Democratic opponent Hobbs virtually tied, with three weeks remaining until Election Day.
The voters of Arizona have a choice between two candidates, both of whom want to ruin democracy if given a chance.
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.
If Republicans win key offices in the state, said Obama, “democracy as we know it may not survive in Arizona. That’s not an exaggeration. That is a fact.”
Cyber Ninjas conducted a sham partisan review after the 2020 elections in Maricopa County. The election results in a state Biden won by fewer than 10,000 votes are now being looked at by both parties as a potential issue in the future. And the GOP candidates at the top of the ticket are setting that tone.
Rodriguez said it was frightening that the radical Republicans in her state were able to elevate candidates like Lake and Masters, who won their primaries, in part, by making fun of Trump in their campaigns.
What are they focused on, aside from what Trump said about the election being stolen? Rodriguez said. A lot of people in her neighborhood still drive their trucks with Trump flags on them. They showed up at the election sites with guns on their hips, and they were walking around with them. Do they think that their intimidation tactics will work?
Defending Democracy in the 2020 Election: When Barack Obama and Mark Kelly met at a Grand Canyon State Lobby to Make amending evidence against the illegitimacy of the 2020 election
She spoke at a Wednesday night event. “I stood for democracy when I refused to give into the insurrectionists who surrounded my home after I certified the 2020 election and I’m still doing it today in this race for governor,” she said.
Obama arrived in Arizona less than a week before the election to campaign for fellow Democrats, including Mark Kelly, who is in a tight race. 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 has not been invited to campaign in top swing states, but he had to make a case from the other side of the country when he argued that democracy is at stake.
The political climate and concerns about the sanctity of the election results are what brought Keith Greenberg, a registered Republican from Maricopa County, to Obama’s rally. He said in an interview that he was voting against the Trump ticket, and that he wasn’t voting for Democrats.
“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. That is more like the American Nazi Party and I don’t want to believe it.
Some voters in Arizona complained to the Secretary of State’s Office about activists taking pictures of them and their license plates in response to conspiracy theories that the people who stuffed the ballot boxes in 2020 are dead. 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.
Because of the ruling, the group’s members are no longer allowed to speak to or shout at voters who drop off their ballots, and they may not film voters at the drop boxes. The Justice Department weighed in on a case that the League of Women Voters brought. The DOJ does not take sides, but in a legal brief the federal prosecutors stated that the right-wing group’svigilante ballot security efforts were likely Illegal andraise serious concerns of voter intimidation.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/03/politics/arizona-election-deniers-kari-lake-obama-midterms/index.html
The Case of the 2018 Georgia Republican – Voting in the Light of the 2020 Election: Amenable Candidates to the Democrat-Progressive Biden-President Correspondence
A state like Arizona where the Republican Party is controlled by appointees of the Trump administration has more of that dynamic.
According to a registered Democrat from the county, people came to see obama so they could feel hopeful about the democratic process amid all the noise.
She believes it’s important to really hear from someone that we’re hopeful about this election. There are many people out here. Thousands of people waiting. I want to believe that people want to believe in things that are better for them and not just believe in liars and con people.
She and Trump are both very similar in the fact that election denialism sits at the core of their messaging. She has said that if she were governor, she wouldn’t have certified the results in the state.
Arizona is then, as Obama said, something of a pure litmus test: Is election denialism something that voters are, at minimum, willing to accept in their candidates? Or is it something that appeals these candidates to voters?
Can there be any hope of a fair result in a state like Florida that is likely to vote democrat in the next election?
Several Republican candidates for the jobs of Secretary of state, which are usually low-profile contests that help administer elections in a state, have drawn national attention as their competitors have spent millions of dollars trying to undermine the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election.
But the presence of election deniers on general election ballots in key battlegrounds has set off alarms for voting rights advocates because of the pivotal role these offices will play in affirming the outcome of future elections, including a potential 2024 rematch between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.
The Georgia contest features an election chief who refused to help Trump find votes he would need to win in the state. (That campaign by Trump and his allies is the subject of a special grand jury investigation in Fulton County, Georgia.)
The incumbent Democrat, Jocelyn Benson, is the national voice of counteract election denial, and she is competing against the Republican, who has made false charges about the 2020 election and who was behind the attack on the US Capitol.
Karamo, a community college professor who secured an endorsement from Trump last year, has said he won the election, and she signed on to an unsuccessful Supreme Court lawsuit that challenged Biden’s victory in four states.
He said the victory in Arizona might have been enough of a shot across the bow to stop some activists, but emphasized that the most serious attacks on elections didn’t emerge until weeks and months after the 2020 election, when lawyers for Mr. Trump repeatedly sought to reverse the outcome. Mr. Danjuma said that they were ready for more lawsuits.
Indeed, Kelli Ward, chairwoman of the Arizona Republican Party, vowed to pursue such actions. “We have been preparing for this for over a year,” she said in a tweet on Thursday. “We have a huge team of lawyers ready to take action if needed.”
The voices that advocate election conspiracy theories are not going to be silenced soon regardless of Tuesday’s results. On Wednesday morning, the organizer of a coalition of election deniers in Michigan urged the group to redouble its forces despite the fact that Democrats swept nearly every major race in the state.
“We can choose to curl up on the ledge and succumb, or we can dust ourselves off and restart the arduous climb up the steep slopes” of election integrity, wrote Patrice Johnson, the organizer of Michigan Fair Elections in a blog post. The group was scheduled to meet online on Thursday.
But the Republican candidates for Michigan governor and attorney general both acknowledged defeat on Wednesday, as did Tim Michels, the Republican candidate for governor in Wisconsin, who campaigned on a promise to change the voting system so that Republicans never lost elections again in the state.
It’s important that candidates stop spreading false theories about voting fraud, because this will ensure the stability of the election system. Public outreach by election officials can help put out fires.
Further down the ballot is Mr. Hamadeh, who also railed against the news media and is locked in a seesawing race for attorney general against Kris Mayes, a Democrat. Mr. Finchem, a Trump-backing conspiracy theorist who has been associated with the Oath Keepers militia group, is trailing Adrian Fontes, a Democrat and the former recorder of the state’s largest county.
In an email to supporters on Thursday, the Masters campaign said it had seen “troubling” issues during the election and asked for contributions: “We’re expecting a contested road forward and legal battles to come.”
On Twitter, Mr. Finchem jokingly asked his followers to “make sure” Ms. Hobbs and Mr. Fontes weren’t “in the back room with ballots in Pima or Maricopa.” Mr. Fontes fired back and said, “Stop with this conspiracy garbage.”
Both Ms. Hobbs and Mr. Fontes have called on supporters to respect the vote-counting process. The pattern of incoming votes are exactly what the team expected, even though the opponent tries to spin it.
A new Arizona law calls for an automatic recount in all electoral contests if the top two candidates have less than 1% of the total votes cast.
Tammy Patrick, a senior adviser at the Democracy Fund, spent a decade working as a Maricopa County election official, mostly as a federal compliance officer. The state’s most populous area is Phoenix, home to more than half the voters.
For one, Patrick says she thinks voters in Arizona have changed their voting behavior in response to all the misinformation that has been circulating about mail-in ballots.
“So, we don’t know if that’s because voters heard these stories around drop boxes being a bad way to turn in your ballot or because they saw the vigilantes and the watchers and some of them didn’t feel comfortable dropping them at drop boxes,” Patrick says.
“It’s typical for Maricopa County to see about 180,000 ballots be turned in on Election Day,” she says. I was there for that decade and that was usually the standard number.
Whatever the reason for the influx, though, now election officials have to process and tabulate all those ballots. That means signature verification and ballots being checked by bipartisan teams.
Patrick says one thing that could speed up this process is an “extraction” machine. Many counties in Florida, in particular, use an inhouse device that cuts the top of an envelope with a laser and then opens the envelope with air, which makes it much easier to remove the ballot.
The deadlines for mail ballots in Arizona and Florida are the same, though there are some differences that can be seen in smaller regulations and procedures. Regardless, Florida has become a popular point of comparison for those on the political right criticizing Arizona’s elections management.
Leon County, Fla., said in a statement that they have an overwhelming majority of ballots counted and the election results reported but there is still work to be done. There are ballots from outside of the country that are processed.
Patrick says even though the media calls races on election night, “there isn’t a state in the nation that declares winners on Election Day because they still have so much work to do,” which includes curing mail ballot signatures and processing overseas votes.
Ultimately, she says, Arizona is under this kind of scrutiny mostly because of the political importance of the outcomes of key races there, as well as how close vote margins have gotten in Arizona. She said that the media is not comfortable calling the race right now and that perception is that it is taking a long time.