For Republicans who are worried the Trump party is turning into a rump party, the Arizona GOP serves as a cautionary warning: Things can always get worse.
In case you missed it, political writer Jon Gabriel sounded the alarm in a recent AZCcentral political column.
“The Arizona GOP had less than $50,000 in cash reserves as of March 31. That’s not much money to fund crucial expenses such as rent, payroll, and campaign operations. Four years earlier, it had close to $770,000,” Gabriel wrote.
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“The cobwebs in the bank vault aren’t as important as all the money wasted. The party blew $300,000 on ‘legal consulting,’ much of which focused on overturning Trump’s 2020 defeat. All they have to show for it are a Democratic governor and U.S. Senate delegation,” Gabriel continued.
The obvious conclusion is that election denial hurts the deniers. This is true for multiple reasons. First, obsessively worrying about having a future election stolen from you can divert energy away from voter-contact programs that might actually prevent, you know, losing elections in the first place.
Second, in the aftermath of a loss, pretending you won guarantees zero lessons are learned, even as it continues eating up money (in, say, legal fees) and diverts attention from future elections.
Third, donors don’t want to give money to a crazy party. As Gabriel writes, “If they [Republican party bosses] waste their money on Cyber Ninjas and futile lawsuits, they can’t be shocked when donations dry up.”
This is a national problem for Republicans, but Arizona has had it twice as bad. First, when Trump claimed he won the state in 2020, and next, when Trump’s disciple Kari Lake followed his same script in 2022.
But as Arizona demonstrates, election denial isn’t the only thing to fear from a MAGAfied GOP.
From 1995 until 2019, Arizona boasted not one, but two Republican senators. What is more, from 1991 until 2023, Republicans held the governorship for all but six years. And before 2020, the last time a Democrat won the state’s presidential election was 1996.
Interestingly, the shift toward electing Democrats has little to do with the notion that the state has somehow turned blue. It has much more to do with candidate quality and incompetent management by the state’s Republican Party.
Aside from wasting money on two Big Lies, the Arizona GOP spent more than $530,000 on “vanity projects” like a 2022 victory party and bus tour. When you consider the close down-ballot races (most famously, Arizona’s Republican attorney general candidate Abe Hamadeh lost by just 280 votes out of 2.5 million cast), this expense becomes even harder to justify.
And the conspiracies and incompetence are only part of the story.
In the Grand Canyon State, independent registrations just surpassed Republicans and Democrats. At least some of this is due to Republicans and Democrats abandoning their parties. According to Chuck Warren, a Republican strategist who has worked on voter registration in Arizona, “There are 48,893 people who have switched their registration from Republican to independent since 2018.”
Because they do not believe politics is a game of addition, the MAGA forces don’t seem to mind the shrinkage. At one speech in 2022, Lake literally told John McCain supporters to “get the hell out.” That didn’t work out so well for her—or Republicans.
Of course, the fundamental problem is that the inmates have been running the asylum—and inmates don’t tend to be very good at that.
Consider, for example, Kelli Ward. After running back-to-back failed primary campaigns against John McCain and Martha McSally in 2016 and 2018, Ward—the firebrand/crackpot election denier who was accused of having “aided a coup attempt” by the Jan. 6 Committee—was (for reasons that defy logic) elected to serve as chair of the Arizona GOP for two cycles.
(Note: In January, Ward was replaced by former state treasurer Jeff DeWit. While DeWit was a prominent Trump supporter, he also appears to be a functioning adult who understands how to run an organization.)
How on Earth did Ward ever get to be in charge of a battleground state’s Republican Party, in the first place?
The first part of the answer is that the base of the Republican party has been radicalized. But the second part of the story is that Republican elites and elected officials were unwilling or unable to do what it takes to save their state’s Grand Old Party.
This is where leadership comes in. “John McCain spent hundreds of thousands of dollars getting conservative allies elected to party positions,” Warren says. But that all ended with McCain’s death in 2018. Things have been going downhill ever since.
In 2022, then-Republican Gov. Doug Ducey’s endorsed gubernatorial primary candidate, Karrin Taylor Robson, lost her primary to Lake (Note: As I worried at the time, Ducey’s endorsement turned out to be too little and too late).
Despite Lake’s subsequent loss to Democrat Katie Hobbs, there is no reason to believe that Arizona Republicans—or any other Republicans, for that matter—are tired of losing, yet.
As John McCain used to always say, “It’s always darkest... before it turns pitch black.”
