Predictably, former President Donald Trump isn’t taking the widespread Republican losses in this year’s midterm elections well, and he is once again making false claims of election fraud in response to little more than — well, nothing in terms of actual substance.
This time, it’s Arizona, where Trump-aligned Senate contender Blake Masters was defeated in his race to unseat Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly, who was serving for two years as he completed the last term of the late Sen. John McCain (R). Kelly’s success means he will now be serving a full term of six years and that both of Arizona’s Senators remain Democrats. In the campaign, Kelly consistently outraised Masters in key categories. After a debate, Masters was filmed in association with a Tucker Carlson-led documentary receiving a call from the former president himself, who complained about the level at which Masters was promoting false claims of a stolen election in 2020. Donald insisted it wasn’t enough.
“If you want to get across the line, you’ve got to go stronger on that one thing,” Trump told Masters. “That was the one thing you had a lot of complaints about. Look at Kari… If they say, ‘How is your family?’ She says, ‘The election was rigged and stolen.’ You’ll lose if you go soft. You’re going to lose that base.” Kari Lake, this year’s Republican nominee for governor in Arizona in the race to replace outgoing Republican Doug Ducey, was, in fact, essentially all in with the election lies. Before the actual election, she even participated in a legal push for a hand count of Arizona ballots instead of using machines. Like Masters, Lake was seemingly unsuccessful, although the Associated Press hadn’t called the governor’s race as of Saturday.
Trump, for his part, sounds all in for Masters, whose race was called. A call from a media outlet doesn’t represent an official conclusion to the race, but it constitutes what is essentially a mathematical calculation about how the election will be turning out. “So in Maricopa County they’re at it again,” Donald posted on Truth Social. “Voting Machines in large numbers didn’t work, but only in Republican districts. People were forced to wait for hours, then got exhausted or had other things to do and left the voting lines by the thousands. Even Kari Lake was taken to a Liberal Democrat district in order to vote. Others weren’t so lucky. This is a scam and voter fraud, no different than stuffing the ballot boxes. They stole the Electron from Blake Masters. Do Election over again!”
Trump has also called for a do-over of the 2020 presidential election, among other options for dealing with his fury over the outcome. The defeated GOP pick for governor in this year’s elections in Wisconsin was apparently open to the idea of invalidating the state’s results from the 2020 presidential race, but, well, he lost. The idea itself was without legal or logical foundation.
Trump is misrepresenting the nature of what happened in Maricopa County. Although ballot scanning machines weren’t working, local authorities established that voters could — as long as they took the appropriate intervening steps (like checking out at their original polling location) — simply go to another polling place. Maricopa residents participating in the election weren’t forced to simply wait in line until the machines were fixed.
Featured image: Gage Skidmore/ Creative Commons
