President Donald J. Trump is expected to attend a November 10 fundraiser for Arizona Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters at the president’s Palm Springs, Florida, Mar-A-Largo resort, according to media reports.
Trump has not made an endorsement yet in the race, but the president’s attendance at the event hosted by billionaire Peter A. Thiel is a clear sign an endorsement is in the offering.
Masters is a Thiel protégé and the chief financial officer of the Thiel Capital, the German-born PayPal co-founder’s family investing vehicle.
There are four major Republican candidates campaigning in the August 2, 2022, primary, which according to an Arizona Public Opinion Pulse poll released September 30, but conducted September 7 through September 12, Attorney General Mark Brnovich, whose wife Susan was put on the federal bench by Trump in 2018, leads the pack.
Head-to-head with Democrat Sen. Mark A. Kelly, Brnovich trails the former astronaut and retired Navy captain, 44 percent to the attorney general’s 39 percent.
Kelly leads Masters with 44 percent to Master’s 35 percent, and the senator’s lead over solar energy executive Jim Lamon, 43 percent to 36 percent and over retired Arizona National Guard Maj. Gen. Michael “Mick” McGuire, 44 percent to 37 percent.
Kelly, the husband of former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, won his seat in 2020 against Sen. Martha E. McSally, 52 percent to her 48 percent, to finish the unfinished term of the late Sen. John S. McCain III. McSally was appointed to fill the seat.
Despite his relative strength against Kelly, Brnovich earned the enmity of Trump when he refused to cooperate with the president’s effort to investigate the integrity of the presidential election in Arizona.
Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich (R) discusses the election lawsuits in Arizona pic.twitter.com/2UWrgUcPWP
— Neil Cavuto (@TeamCavuto) November 11, 2020
Appearing on Fox Business November 11 with host Neil Cavuto, Brnovich said his office received 1,000 complaints regarding problems with their ballots, but the attorney general dismissed those complaints.
“They did not affect anyone’s vote,” he said.
Brnovich then told Cavuto that with roughly 50,000 votes left to be counted, Trump had little or no chance of overcoming Biden. “It appears that Joe Biden will win Arizona.”
The attorney general said he conducted what he called a random audit of 2 percent of the precincts, which told him there with 100 percent certainty there were no statistical anomalies.
The official Arizona vote tally showed Biden with 1,672,143 votes to Trump’s 1,661, 686 votes for a margin of 10,457 votes.
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Neil W. McCabe is the National Political Editor for The Star News Network. In addition to The Star News Network, he has covered the White House, Capitol Hill and national politics for One America News, Breitbart, Human Events and Townhall. Before coming to Washington, he was a staff reporter for Boston’s Catholic paper, The Pilot, and the editor of two Boston-area community papers, The Somerville News and The Alewife. McCabe is a public affairs NCO in the Army Reserve and he deployed for 15 months to Iraq as a combat historian.
Photo “Blake Masters” by Blake Masters. Background Photo “Mara-a-Lago” by Christine Davis. CC BY-SA 2.0.
