Blake Masters said of Arizona that although many people who live there aren’t originally from the state, their passion to establish roots and stay put is part of what makes the state great.
“So much of modernity is encouraging people to not put down roots, the young people to leave their hometown and go to the coasts to look for opportunity and not get married,” Masters said in an interview with the Washington Examiner.
It is a mindset the Arizona Republican Senate nominee said limits options and opportunity. “I want people to have economic opportunity in their hometowns, in their home states,” he said, explaining a certain percentage of rootedness is often the cornerstone of a healthy middle class, thanks to local connectivity, family, and traditions.
Rootedness isn’t really something a political consultant would advise him to discuss. But he says that talking about localism and the sense of community with voters does indeed resonate. “It is important to talk about things with sincerity and talk about things from the heart,” he said. “That can be very impactful … to a voter.”
HISPANIC VOTERS’ IMPACT IN PENNSYLVANIA HOUSE RACE SHOULDN’T BE IGNORED
Masters, who left Arizona himself after college but returned with his wife a few years ago to raise their young family, is running for the Senate seat held by Sen. Mark Kelly (D) in a race that is currently a toss-up. Democrats had hoped Kelly would win easily, but it has become a real contest.
Less than one week from Election Day, the 36-year-old venture capitalist-turned-candidate has gone from a long shot at best to within the margin of error in his contest with Kelly. This is in large part due to Democrats’ failure to recognize earlier how angry voters are about the economy, crime, and the border — in a border state. If he flips this seat, Masters will almost certainly enter a Republican majority in the upper chamber.
On Tuesday, the Libertarian Senate candidate Marc Victor dropped out and endorsed Masters. That comes after a survey from the Democratic firm Data for Progress showed Masters and Kelly at 47% apiece and an additional 3% supporting the now dropped-out Libertarian candidate, Victor.
“I think people really are looking for a different kind of politician, a different kind of representative, because they don’t feel like most of the establishment politicians who have been in charge actually represent them,” said Masters. “To me, that is the heart of what conservative populism actually is … looking out for the interests of most people, normal people as distinct from an established political class, whether Republican, Democrat, left or right, that has become out of touch.”
Masters says he also thinks that his youth — he is a millennial — is a plus.
“The fact that I’m a little bit younger — I think the average age of a U.S. senator is 64 and a half, and I’m 36,” he said. “I’m a whole generation behind, and I actually know what it’s like to be raising a family under current conditions.”
If he wins, and if J.D. Vance wins in Ohio, Masters said they would join Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton, the other Republican millennials in the U.S. Senate. The age gap would offer a completely different outlook in the upper chamber.
“I think we have a chance to be a new representative that’s just more awake to some of these cultural issues, that’s more conscious of this fact that the American dream is really, really in trouble and our bipartisan establishment class has been failing,” he said.
Masters also believes that his skepticism of establishment Washington puts him more in touch with voters’ lives than Kelly is. “I don’t look, sound, feel like a conventional Washington politician because I’m not that combination,” he said.
He also talks up his grasp of technology. “My understanding of these new and modern threats, this military adventurism, this wokeism that we’re seeing in the military leadership, and Big Tech kind of working hand-in-hand with big business and the government to silence us, to suppress us, to change the rules of discourse, I can articulate these problems, and, I think, propose solutions in a way that almost no other senator can,” he said.
Masters isn’t the only Republican candidate for statewide office in this state within striking distance of winning. In the race for governor, former TV anchor-turned-gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake (R) has risen to rock star status in her race against Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs. Lake has come from far behind to lead in nearly every recent poll largely due to her outsize charisma and her take-no-prisoners approach to members of her former profession.
Currently, Lake holds a 3-point average lead over Hobbs, whose campaign has struggled. Masters has joined the dynamo on the stump in the closing days, which has proven to be helpful to Masters’s numbers.
Masters said former President Donald Trump really upset the establishment apple cart. “It gave us this awesome chance to rebuild the Republican Party into a working class, middle class, multiethnic, pro-America party. … I’m trying to do my part to help move the ball down the field there.”
Everywhere he goes, he said, the issues the voters bring up are the border, crime, and inflation. “There’s a lot of other important issues, too,” he added. “I don’t want to diminish the importance of anything else. But these three crises — there’s a direct cause and effect between the Democrat policies that Biden put in place 21 months ago and that Mark Kelly votes like a rubber stamp for, and these crises.”
He points to the crime rates in Phoenix and Tucson as examples of voter concerns. In 2021, Tucson had a record 93 homicides, compared to 48 in 2019. To date, there have been 56 murders this year. In Phoenix, there were 113 murders reported from Jan. 1 to June 30, 2022 — up from the 90 homicides reported in the city over the same period last year.
Masters said that he is exasperated by Biden’s inaction over the border. He pointed out that Kelly seemingly only awoke to the problem as his reelection was thrown into doubt. Masters is equally angry at the amount of poison in the form of fentanyl that comes across that border and is killing record numbers of people in the form of overdoses.
“It is deadly, and 90% of it comes through our southern border, mostly Mexico into Texas and Arizona, then distributed out throughout the whole country,” he said.
Provisional data from CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics indicate that there were an estimated 107,622 drug overdose deaths in the United States during 2021, an increase of nearly 15 percentage points from the 93,655 deaths estimated in 2020.
“What are our leaders doing to stop it?” he asks. “Nothing. I think it’s only fair to conclude that for whatever reason, they like it this way — something I think is a dereliction of duty, allowing this poison to get into our communities. I think if that were the only bad thing the Democrats did, they would still deserve to lose their jobs this November. But of course, they’ve created a lot more trouble beyond just that issue.”
Masters bristles ever so slightly at Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s blind dig at him when discussing “candidate quality” in September, when GOP senate candidates, including him, struggled to get anywhere near the finish line.
“I think a lot of people in the media, and a lot of people in D.C., wanted to write me off as a candidate,” he says. “Mitch McConnell himself has complained about candidate quality, his perceived lack thereof. Hey, I’m getting better. I’m doing my best. I think the trajectory is good, and it’ll just be very fun to prove a lot of people wrong; part of it is the environment, and I don’t want to take all the credit.”
Will he get along with the Kentuckian were he to make it to Washington? “He will probably lead the Republicans, he probably gets one last turn,” Masters said. “I’ve suggested we need new leadership, but I think he didn’t like that. I’ll work with him, though, to get this America First agenda through.”
McConnell’s great gift to the conservative movement, Masters said, is the three Supreme Court justices — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — that he and Trump seated on the highest court in the land. “He is an extremely talented parliamentarian. He knows the rules better than anybody. And we do have him to thank for the quality of the judiciary in general.”
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“He and I definitely don’t see eye to eye all the time, but I’ll hear him out,” he added. “I’m not looking to just throw bombs for the sake of it. I want to get things done.” He said, however, that he won’t be owned by McConnell, just as Arizona’s other incumbent Democratic senator, Kyrsten Sinema, isn’t owned by Chuck Schumer.
