Two months ago, Blake Masters was riding high, having just clinched the GOP nomination for Senate in Arizona. These days, he’s barely hanging on.
The brown-haired, slightly robotic venture capitalist who counted billionaire Peter Thiel as a mentor and former President Donald Trump as a pal had a decent shot at beating the state’s popular Democratic incumbent, Sen. Mark Kelly.
He had all the talking points and seemed to appeal to traditional Republicans as well as the MAGA faithful.
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During his primary campaign, Masters emerged as a provocative candidate, proudly citing Trump as his political inspiration in both style and substance.
Masters said he wanted to increase the size of the border wall and implement high-tech surveillance; he claimed an influx of “illegal aliens” from Mexico are carrying over enough drugs each month to “kill every American twice over.”
He surged in the polls not only with the help of Thiel’s money but also with a full-throated endorsement by Trump, who claimed Blake was the kind of candidate who “brings exactly the kind of toughness, courage, and intellectual firepower we need in the Senate to take our country to the next level.”
Masters’s sleek black campaign signs dotted almost every curb in Scottsdale.
But soon after his primary win in August, things started to go south for Masters.
Now, he’s considered the underdog in one of the most closely watched U.S. Senate races in the country.
In a survey released this week by the Arizona Republic and Suffolk University, Masters is trailing Kelly 42% to 49%, with 7% undecided. More alarmingly, he trails Kelly 36% to 51% among independents. The poll, which surveyed 500 state residents, was conducted Sept. 21-25 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.4 percentage points.
So, what happened? Money woes and muddled messaging, analysts say.
Masters said he supported privatizing Social Security during the primary and espoused hard-line views on abortion, but he may have gone too far right, and his attempt to correct course may be too little too late, said GOP strategist Chuck Coughlin.
“I think you can stick a fork in Masters,” he told the Arizona Republic, referring to the 36-year-old’s about-face on abortion and Social Security. “I don’t think he’s capable of recovering. The biggest debate that’s going on is between Masters and himself. Who really is he?”
Coughlin said it might prove too hard for Masters to “get above the ceiling of more than 40% or so” voting for him.
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Masters has tried to make himself more likable and appeal to independent and centrist voters. In August, the political newcomer 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,” NBC News reported.
In addition to mixed messages, Masters is also suffering from money problems.
His fundraising is anemic compared to Kelly’s, and major GOP outside groups are skittish about the race.
A super PAC aligned with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) pulled $10 million in television ads supporting Masters in the battleground state this month. In July, the Senate Leadership Fund cut $8 million in Senate ads, waiting until October to spend money.
Steven Law, president of the SLF, justified pulling the money because “Republican outside forces” are showing up and have “pledged to take down Mark Kelly in the final stretch.” Law said spending by outside groups freed up funds that would allow the PAC to “pursue offensive opportunities” to flip the Senate in the GOP’s favor in November.
His comments have struck a chord with strategists who noted that SLF has not pulled money in New Hampshire, Georgia, or Nevada races in which the GOP nominee is significantly trailing the Democratic opponent.
McConnell and Thiel have also traded barbs over who should bankroll Masters’s campaign as it heads into the final stretch. Thiel put up $15 million in the primary but has since closed his wallet.
Arizona’s Senate race is the fourth most expensive in the United States, according to OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan group that tracks campaign finance. Kelly raised $52.4 million, spent $29 million, and has $24.7 million in cash on hand as of the latest filings. Masters raised $4.9 million, spent $3.4 million, and has $1.5 million on hand.
As the attacks against Masters by a better-funded opponent ramp up online and on TV, Masters is left in a tough spot.
“He’s just getting massacred,” one Arizona GOP strategist told the Hill. “You can’t watch a YouTube clip about how to cook a roast chicken without seeing an ad about how he’s the crazy dad at the football game and shows him saying all these crazy things.”
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The operative said Masters is “kind of in a perilous place where he probably doesn’t have much money to address any of this stuff. He can’t be on offense. He can’t defend himself. He has said a lot of things that are ill-advised and a problem for him. So, I don’t see a huge opportunity at this point in the race. He started to build a real team, but it’s kind of too little too late.”
Calls to Masters’s campaign by the Washington Examiner for comment were not returned.
