Return Of The Night Of The Living Blake Masters
Masters out to win safe Arizona House seat.
That creepy haunted Victorian doll Blake Masters is back, but this time he’s scaled his ambitions back a tad. He’s ceding Arizona’s 2024 Senate race to Kari Lake and instead announced last week that he’s running to represent Arizona’s Eighth Congressional District, where he doesn’t live, so he might stand a chance because voters don’t know him.
The district’s current representative, Debbie Lesko, is not seeking re-election because Congress sickens her. Also, apparently no one told her there’d be travel involved.
“Spending, on average, three weeks out of every month away from my family, and traveling back and forth to Washington DC almost every weekend is difficult,” Lesko said. “Right now, Washington DC is broken; it is hard to get anything done.”
Lesko is the legislative giant who suggested that the “Defund the Police” movement caused a spike in violent crime. She’s defended and protected Donald Trump, despite expressing concerns on January 5 about what she feared might happen the next day: “We also have, quite honestly, Trump supporters who actually believe that we are going to overturn the election. And when that doesn’t happen — most likely will not happen — they are going to go nuts.”
Lesko won re-election with 96.5 percent of the vote (not a typo). The district has a Republican vote spread advantage of about 15 points, which probably explains why a Legion of Doom-number of Republicans have jumped into the primary. This includes failed attorney general candidate Abe Hamadeh, Isiah Gallegos, Brandon Urness, Seth Coates, and Rollie Stevens. JD Vance has already endorsed Masters, but we’re not ready to call this race over for him yet.
Neither Hamadeh nor Masters lives in the district they seek to represent. This is especially amusing because Arizona’s eighth is so heavily Republican. It’s in the West Valley, running north past Anthem, and includes Glendale, Peoria, and Sun City West — not exactly a hopping place. Masters resides about 120 miles away in Tucson, and he could never win in that more liberal district.
Nonetheless, Masters is willing to fight, fight, fight for the eighth district, even if he’s about two hours away, maybe two and a half in bad traffic. He posted on social media: “Biden has failed. We need Trump back. We need to stop inflation, Build the Wall, avoid WW3, and secure Arizona’s water future. We need to fight for our families.”
Wow, that’s a lot of random drivel loosely connected through punctuation. Maybe Masters’s message feels more authentic when we can see his totally human-like face … or we’ll just want to claw out our own eyes. There’s only one way to find out:
“Arizona is a special place,” he says, correctly identifying the state where he’s running for office. “We do things our own way here.” This is not Chicago. There is no “Arizona Way.”
Masters tortures us with incredibly awkward photos of himself and wife as children and high school sweethearts. There’s even a school formal where his creepy red eyes on are full display.
“Back then, America was optimistic, and Arizona was the best place in the whole world to raise a family.”
Blake Masters is 37, so his idyllic childhood fantasy was set during the Clinton administration. He was 15 on 9/11, which hardly ushered in a new era of American optimism. Republicans insist the past was always better than the present, yet they spend the present complaining about how much America sucks. They are never content in the “now.”
So, Masters vows to deliver (white) voters back into their comforting past. It’s a tired Republican message but it’s all they’ve got.
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AZ Dems have to put someone up against him in this race, and run hard on the ample material there is against this guy. Is this because I think Dems can win the seat? No, but with a target like Masters, they should be able to get Dem turnout higher than usual, which will make a big difference on the statewide vote (to elect Gallego to the Senate and keep the state in Biden's column).
Don't fuck this up, folks!
I'm sorry. You should have to live full time in the district you're running in for at least five years. Otherwise, how do you even know the problems you're supposed to be fixing?
Sorry, Republican. Ignore everything I just said.