Democratic incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly has beaten venture capitalist Blake Masters for Arizona’s U.S. Senate seat, putting the GOP’s attempt to capture a Senate majority on more tenuous ground.
All eyes in Arizona will now turn to gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, who insists she’s “100% confident” she will defeat Democrat Katie Hobbs despite trailing her by 1 point with 83% of votes counted.
The candidates spent their time attacking one another on everything from abortion to inflation and election integrity.
During his primary campaign, Masters emerged as a provocative candidate, proudly citing former President Donald Trump as his political inspiration in both style and substance. He had all the talking points and seemed to appeal to traditional Republicans as well as the MAGA faithful.
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Masters, who counted billionaire Peter Thiel as a mentor and Trump as a friend, had a decent shot at beating the state’s popular Democratic incumbent.
But following his primary win, money for Masters dried up, his message became muddled, and the brown-haired, slightly robotic venture capitalist who had been billed as a wunderkind saw his gains largely evaporate.
Masters tried to make himself more likable and appeal to independent and centrist voters. In August, the venture capitalist gave his website’s policy page a major makeover, rewriting or erasing five of his six positions, including his stance on abortion. Masters had once called for a national abortion ban but has since pivoted and said he’d be OK with abortions up to 15 weeks. His statement “I am 100% pro-life” was gone from his page, as was the line that he supported “a federal personhood law (ideally a Constitutional amendment) that recognizes that unborn babies are human beings that may not be killed.”
Thiel, who had funneled $15 million into a super PAC that helped his protege clinch the Republican nomination, held fundraisers for Masters and reportedly weighed spending an additional $5 million on the race. The move would have been a reversal for Thiel, who had said he would help Masters in the primaries but not in the general election because it would only fuel the Democratic talking point that Masters was being used as Thiel’s mouthpiece.
Instead, Thiel wanted the Sen. Mitch McConnell-aligned Senate Leadership Fund to front the money for the general election. The brokered deal fell through in early October.
Despite losing money from the SLF, millions more poured in to help Masters. The political arm of the conservative Heritage Foundation spent more than $7 million on backing Masters, while the Club for Growth dropped $5.5 million into Arizona’s Senate race in the final days of the contest.
Kelly also raked in millions of dollars. According to his most recent Federal Election Commission filing, the former astronaut had raised nearly $75.5 million as of Sept. 30 and still had $13.3 million on hand.
Kelly spent most of his campaign painting himself as an independent, bringing up disagreements he’s had with members of his own party, including President Joe Biden. Voters across Arizona have blamed Biden for the economy, including 40-year-high inflation rates that have raised prices on everything from eggs to houses. Even though the COVID-19 pandemic triggered supply chain breakdowns, Republicans have managed to pin the economic woes on the Biden administration, making it almost essential for candidates like Kelly to distance themselves from the White House.
“Thank you to the people of Arizona for re-electing me to the United States Senate. From day one, this campaign has been about the many Arizonans — Democrats, Independents, and Republicans — who believe in working together to tackle the significant challenges we face,” Kelly said in a statement after the race was called for him. “That’s exactly what I’ve done in my first two years in office and what I will continue to do for as long as I’m there. It’s been one of the great honors of my life to serve as Arizona’s Senator. I’m humbled by the trust our state has placed in me to continue this work.”
Republicans in Arizona have also made election integrity and border security a major priority, at times eclipsing the Democratic playbook of keeping the attention on abortion rights.
During their first and only debate last month, Kelly called the U.S.-Mexico border “a mess” and said Democrats don’t understand border issues. Kelly said he stood up to members of his party when it came to illegal immigration and cross-border drug trafficking.
“When I got to Washington, D.C., one of the first things I realized was the Democrats don’t understand this issue and Republicans just want to talk about it, complain about it, but actually not do anything about it,” he said. “They just want to politicize it.”
In an attempt to separate himself from hardcore election deniers like Lake, the gubernatorial candidate, Blake suggested during the debate that Trump lost Arizona in 2020 not because of a rigged election but because of a conspiracy among powerful institutions.
“I suspect President Trump would be in the White House today if Big Tech and Big Media and the FBI didn’t work together to put the thumb on the scale to get Joe Biden in there,” Masters said. He added that unnamed institutions had worked together also to bury news stories about the contents of a laptop belonging to Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.
When pressed by the moderator to talk specifically about election denial, which has been at the forefront of Masters’s campaign, he admitted he had not seen evidence that the vote count or Arizona’s presidential election results had been manipulated, as Trump repeatedly claimed without evidence.
During a phone call with Trump, the former president pressed Masters to maintain the 2020 election was “rigged and stolen.” The call was videotaped for Tucker Carlson Originals, a short documentary by the conservative Fox News commentator, and is believed to have taken place two days after the debate.
Kelly’s campaign blasted the call and accused Masters of taking orders from Trump.
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“Arizona deserves a principled senator who always puts their interests first, not one who will sell out Arizona voters and cast doubt on our elections just because he was scolded on the phone,” Sarah Guggenheimer, a spokeswoman for Kelly’s campaign, told the Arizona Republic.
And despite his hesitancy to be linked to Biden, Kelly was all in when former President Barack Obama visited Phoenix on his behalf last week. Obama held a rally for Kelly and Katie Hobbs, the Democratic nominee for governor.
