Arizona Electoral Deniers: Are They Still Running on the State? Sen. Katie Hobbs, Tim Robbins, and President Joe Biden

Voters who went to a Phoenix high school to listen to Barack Obama were looking for a message of defiance.

They said that they would not allow the voters in their state to be intimidated by activists and that they would defeat Donald Trump’s hand picked slate of election deniers.

As President Joe Biden warned Americans in Washington DC that democracy is at risk, it was here in Arizona where democratic institutions looked most fragile, with the presidential election in six years and next week’s mid-term elections being key battlegrounds.

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. And Finchem, who could become the state’s chief elections administrator, is still trying to overturn the results of the last election.

Maricopa County was the site of repeated “audits” after the 2020 election – including the sham partisan review conducted by the now-defunct firm known as Cyber Ninjas. The election results in a state where Biden won by fewer than 11,000 votes have both political parties girding for a fight over them. And the GOP candidates at the top of the ticket are setting that tone.

Rodriguez says it is scary that Republican candidates like Lake and Masters won their primaries because of Trump’s lying about the 2020 election.

“What are they running on, aside from Trump’s talking points that the election was stolen?” Rodriguez said something. She pointed out that a lot of people still drive their trucks with Trump flags around her neighborhood. “And they’re walking around with guns on their hips, showing up at the ballot boxes or showing up at the election sites – 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

Arizona Election Deniers: A Toss-Up with a Dead Heat Race with the Lonely Candidate, Nathan L. Gonzalez

She was shown in a dead heat race with Lake in a New York Times/ Siena College poll. Nathan L. Gonzalez rates the race a toss-up.

The state was on edge as Obama arrived in Arizona less than a week before the midterm election to campaign for fellow Democrats, including Sen. Mark Kelly, who is in a close race with Masters. 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.

Both Biden and Obama argue that democracy is in danger, but Biden has yet to campaign in some of the most swing states.

There are concerns over the sanctity of the election results that brought a registered republican to Obama’s rally. He said in an interview that he is not voting for Democrats in this election, and that he is voting against the Trump ticket.

Greenberg described the 2020 elections as fair and honest and said that he was no longer a member of the Republican Party. It is like the American Nazi Party, and I cannot put up with that lie.

The state of Arizona has lost its mind if the Trump ticket wins, according to Greenberg. This is not a good place to live. If Mark would win, he would say he doesn’t care what the people voted. I’m going to do this’ – then what’s the point? We’ve lost our democracy.”

There are two lawsuits that have been filed on behalf of voters who were frightened by the patrols at ballot boxes late last month.

Because of the ruling, the group’s members are no longer able to speak to or shout at voters who drop off their ballots, and they cannot take pictures or film voters at the drop boxes. The League of Women Voters brought the case and was supported by the Justice Department. The DOJ did not take sides, but in a legal brief, prosecutors said the right-wing group was probably illegal and raised serious concerns of voter intimidation.

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

The Biden-President Campaign in Pennsylvania: The Democratic Case and a Democratic Perspective from the Araucariah Crisis to the Election Day Finale

According to a CNN poll conducted on Wednesday, 66% of Republicans don’t think Biden won the election, because they don’t think he was honest with the voters.

That dynamic is even more pronounced in a state like Arizona where Trump acolytes control the Republican Party and have censured figures like outgoing Republican Gov. Doug Ducey and former Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake for what they said was insufficient loyalty to the former 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, “With everything going on, I want to hear from someone who we trust, and we believe in, that we can be hopeful about this election.” “You can see all these people out here. Thousands of people are 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.”

Democrats performed well in Pennsylvania. They ran as well as Mr. Biden did in 2020 or even better. Every seat was won by them. John Fetterman’s victory was larger than Mr. Biden’s in the state. Josh Shapiro was the winner of the Democratic primary for governor.

The two issues were less critical in New York. There was no danger that the Democratic Legislature would overturn abortion rights. No movement emerged in 2020 to overturn Mr. Biden’s victory in New York, and there is little indication that anyone feared Mr. Zeldin might do so. As a result, Republicans focused the campaign on crime. It worked out.

The democracy issues that were at stake in the states were the most obvious differences. Doug Mastriano was nominated by the Republicans in Pennsylvania as a candidate for governor to overturn the results of the presidential election. Democrats feared that a Mastriano victory could risk a constitutional crisis and a threat to democratic government. Republicans controlled the state Legislature, so it might have threatened another long held right, like Mr. Mastriano is a strident opponent of abortion.

There are exceptions like Democratic strength in Colorado or Republican durability in Texas. But most of each party’s most impressive showings fit well.

There’s the Republican landslide in Florida, where the stop-the-steal movement never sought to overturn an election result and where Gov. Ron DeSantis refused to go further than a 15-week abortion ban. Democrats made gains in several places this year, including in Michigan, where they swept most of the House districts and in Kansas, where abortion referendums were on the ballot at different points this year.

Democrat Tina Kotek will win the open gubernatorial race in Oregon, CNN projects, becoming one of the nation’s first out lesbian governors along with Democrat Maura Healey, who clinched the Massachusetts governorship Tuesday.

“I want to express my deepest gratitude to all those who supported me and put their trust in our campaign. I also want to assure Oregonians that every vote will be counted and that their voices were heard in this election. Unfortunately, given what we know about the ballots outstanding, the math for a comeback simply does not add up,” Drazan said in a statement.

No one expected Oregon – a state that President Joe Biden won by 16 percentage points in 2020 – to be difficult terrain for Democrats, especially since Republicans have not won the governor’s office since 1982. But Johnson, a former Democrat, proved to be an unusually strong contender who kept pace in fundraising with her two rivals in this three-way all-women matchup with donations from business leaders, including Nike founder Phil Knight.

But Oregonians have been unnerved by the problems with homelessness and the rise in violent crime in Portland. After more than 100 days of peaceful protests against police brutality and after the murder of George Floyd by aMinneapolis police officer in 2020, the city’s downtown has not recovered.

When Drazan was Too Extreme for Oregon, she argued against a bill that killed her campaign and urged voters to vote against it

Drazan argued that the state’s problems stem from a lack of accountability caused by single-party control over a decade.

Koek argued that Drazan was too extreme for Oregon because of her stance on abortion rights. Rather than demonstrating an ability to work with both sides, Kotek also said that Drazan demonstrated obstructionist tendencies when she led a legislative walkout in 2020 to protest a climate bill. The legislation was killed by Drazan because it would have advanced the state efforts to improve homelessness. (Drazan’s campaign said that allegation was an excuse.)

Biden urged voters to vote for the former House speaker so that the state could stay ahead of the curve.