With former Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters declaring Thursday that he will run for a House seat this cycle, the long-brewing MAGA battle between Masters and failed Arizona governor candidate Kari Lake is on.
Lake isn’t running for the seat herself. But a close ally of hers, Abraham Hamadeh, is running. In fact, Hamadeh got in the race just hours after Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-AZ) announced she was retiring and leaving the seat vacant last week.
(The seat is R+10, meaning whoever emerges from the GOP primary is almost certain to become a member of Congress.)
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Exactly 32 minutes after Masters made it official on Thursday that he was jumping into the race, Hamadeh announced that he had Lake’s endorsement—in case it was clear how much of a proxy war the congressional race had already become.
“Proxy war without proxies!” one Arizona Republican operative told The Daily Beast, referencing Hamadeh’s tweet touting his Lake endorsement.
But even before the race kicked off, keen operatives told The Daily Beast the contest was shaping up to be a profoundly personal and petty primary.
Another Arizona Republican operative was clear to The Daily Beast that Masters and Lake don’t like each other.
“I don’t think they are friends,” this operative said. “On the campaign, the Blake and Lake thing looked great on stage, but I don’t think they were particularly close.”
The source continued that Masters is a “true intellectual,” while “Kari is an intellectual nit-wit.”
As The Daily Beast reported last month, the bad blood between Masters and Lake has been an issue for a long time. On a late-night phone call, the two clashed over warring beliefs on topics including election fraud in Lake’s race, appealing to moderate Republicans, and if Masters hid under his “bed” after his own 2020 loss.
Lake and Masters also spoke about the Arizona U.S. Senate seat up for grabs, which, at one point, they were both considering running for. Since then, former President Donald Trump ultimately weighed in by endorsing Lake before Masters could enter the race.
That left Masters free to pursue the soon-to-be vacant congressional seat.
While Lake was perhaps better positioned to win the GOP primary for that Senate seat, he’s likely in a better spot in this proxy war for the House seat.
For one, Hamadeh’s quick decision to rubbed some people in Arizona GOP circles the wrong way.
“The fact that he had an announcement up, two hours after Lesko announced she was stepping down, is just so transparently opportunistic,” one of the Arizona operatives said. “The guy clearly just wants to be something, anything.”
Another Arizona Republican operative blamed Hamadeh’s hastiness on Lake.
“Clearly, she got him into this race,” the source claimed. “There are a lot of people that like Kari for what she’s doing, but aren’t that interested in her purse chihuahua.”
According to Federal Election Commission filings reviewed by The Daily Beast, Hamadeh officially filed his paperwork the day after he announced. (Hamadeh didn’t return requests for comment on this story.)
As the campaigns get underway, one issue that both candidates will be fixated on could be a determining factor in the race: Donald Trump’s endorsement.
While it might seem like a Lake ally could get a quick endorsement, two sources involved in the race say it isn’t going to be that easy. Notably, both sources believed that Trump wouldn’t rush to weigh in.
As one Trumpworld source put it, the messaging out of Mar-a-Lago is that “they don’t want to get involved in this.”
“I don’t think he’s really getting involved,” another Republican operative said on Trump’s involvement in the race, calling the Lake endorsement an “outlier.”
In somewhat surprising move, before Masters even announced Lesko tossed her endorsement behind neither Hamadeh nor Masters. Instead, she supported the House Speaker of the state legislature in Arizona, Ben Toma, according to Punchbowl News.
“Congresswoman Lesko is a big fan of President Trump, but that’s like a different type of MAGA that Abe is pushing—they are not cut from the same MAGA cloth,” a previously mentioned operative said.
(The Trump campaign didn’t return The Daily Beast’s request for comment.)
Elsewhere, while the two MAGA candidates have different personalities, they oddly share an abnormal problem: neither exactly live in the district up for grabs.
On Masters’ side, his critics say he lives in Tucson, which is about 112 miles from the 8th Congressional District, which is just outside of the Phoenix area.
“He has zero ties to that district. He’s from Tucson. The district is nowhere near Tucson,” one of the previously mentioned Republican operatives said. “I don’t know how well that would really play.”
Likewise, when it comes to Hamadeh, he lives outside the district, too—in Scottsdale—though one GOP operative noted that Scottsdale is relatively close to the district and was once actually part of it.
“That’s different from being from an entire different county,” the source said.
