On the day his friend, ideological comrade, and fellow Peter Thiel protege J. D. Vance (now the Republican vice-presidential candidate) traveled to Arizona for a campaign event, Blake Masters officially lost the Republican primary for Arizona’s eighth congressional district. Masters had previously lost an Arizona Senate election in 2022 to rumored Kamala Harris vice-presidential pick Mark Kelly, the incumbent Democrat. Masters performed worse than any Republican candidate running statewide that cycle; Arizona voters wanted a Republican Senate but voted against Masters anyway.
Arizona candidates who outdid Masters that year include gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake, who (with Donald Trump’s help) forced Masters out of the Senate primary in which he had initially expressed interest (and which she just won); and Abe Hamadeh, the attorney-general candidate who lost by only a few hundred votes, and to whom Masters just lost in the congressional primary.
Hamadeh and Masters differed little on policy or bearing. Both are fervent Trump devotees. But that did not stop the mimetic primary from getting nasty. The two blew past a narcissism of small differences in favor of a bitterly personal back-and-forth. The Masters campaign was not shy about trying to make voters uncomfortable with Hamadeh’s Muslim-Druze background as the child of Syrian-immigrant parents. American Principles Project, a pro-Masters outfit, wondered if Hamadeh might be a terrorist sympathizer. (Kari Lake condemned this particular attack.) Similar to Vance, Masters argued that politicians should have children, and that his opponent’s lack thereof was disqualifying. Hamadeh cited some of the weirdness of Masters’s younger days, such as his time living in a left-leaning vegan co-op while a student at Stanford University.
As with many intra-Republican contests these days, much of the primary ended up revolving around Trump. Trump endorsed Hamadeh last December, when both he and Masters were already in the race. But (to the Trump campaign’s chagrin), Masters continued to present as though he had Trump’s endorsement, on the basis of Trump’s 2022 support for his Senate campaign. Vance had endorsed Masters for this race before Trump picked him for the VP slot. After the pick, neither Trump nor Vance initially changed his position on the race, making the Republican ticket notably incongruent on it. Then, shortly before Tuesday’s primary, Trump announced an endorsement for both Hamedeh and Masters. Masters spent the last few days of the contest proclaiming himself the only candidate endorsed by both Trump and Vance. To little avail.
In the coming days, Masters may cast about for a scapegoat to explain yet another political failure, as he has done before. His fans on the Terminally Online right may do the same. Ignore them. Masters is a bad candidate, even by the standards of what his fellow-travelers want in politics. There is no other way to explain his going politically from zero to nothing in Arizona twice over. Further tests of his brand of politics may await us.