As Republican Senate candidates in Pennsylvania and Georgia face accusations of scientific research that cruelly killed dogs, abuse, and — illustrating hypocrisy — paying for an abortion, Arizona Republican Senate contender Blake Masters is also struggling.
Following funding problems, he remains down in polling in his race against Democratic Senate candidate Mark Kelly, who is running for re-election to what would be a full term of six years after serving the final two years of the last term of John McCain. In new polling from CBS conducted by YouGov, Kelly was at 51 percent, while Masters nabbed 48 percent — which is close to the margin by which Kelly originally won against Republican contender Martha McSally. In the new survey, Kelly has a substantial lead among women, with 58 percent of the support compared to Masters’s 41 percent, but Masters leads among men, mirroring trends seen elsewhere. (In this survey, both groups were drawn from likely voters.)
As is the case with other polling measuring how enthusiastic candidates’ supporters rate themselves — and finding key Republican contenders running behind their Democratic counterparts, it also seems more of Kelly’s voters support him on account of qualities of his work, rather than simply a desire to oppose the other side. A full 50 percent of Kelly’s supporters agreed they support the Democratic candidate because they “like him.” For Masters, that was 21 percent. Just 31 percent of Kelly’s supporters tied their support to opposing the other candidate — and for Masters, that was 48 percent. Although it’s phrased differently, there’s another enthusiasm gap, results show.
Masters is generally associated with extremist causes. A paragraph on his campaign website lays it out: “At home, we see an unholy alliance between Big Government, Big Tech and Big Business, who collude to wreak havoc on our economy, destroy our border, impose their radically liberal ideology on our culture, and censor any dissent. Blake uniquely gets how this regime, working hand in hand with the Democrats, is weaponizing technology to destroy America as we know it.”
First of all, like with so much other rhetoric along these lines, what does any of that even mean? “Big business”? Is Masters scared of businesses? Can he get more specific? Obviously, however, this sort of thinking, outlining an imaginary vision of the United States in which Republicans and conservatives in general are persecuted, leads to extreme reactions in the name of the cause, like the Capitol riot. The idea of destroying America as we know it also seems often closely associated with racist beliefs, with the so-called destruction tied to basic cultural change, including natural demographic shifts — and fearmongering over demographics connects to incidents like the Buffalo and El Paso mass shootings.
