QUEEN CREEK, Ariz. – Abe Hamadeh, the Republican candidate for attorney general in Arizona, cursed the media at a farm southeast of Phoenix when he stopped to single out a newspaper column suggesting that authoritarianism is coming to this state, which is a woman in the back of the crowd to shout: “Good!”
Blake Masters, the GOP’s pick for the Senate, argued on stage that Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease doctor, “deserves to see the inside of a jail cell.”
And Kari Lake, the former television news anchor and Republican nominee for governor, asked the audience to applaud a state senator, Wendy Rogers, who promoted white nationalists as “patriots” and called for the execution of her political opponents to make, and remarked: “We need to build more gallows.”
After the event, Rogers said she was pleased with the accolade and called Lake a friend.
This chorus of far-right messages came at a rally on Sunday night. It captures Arizona Republicans playing to their base in the final hours of campaigning, rather than calibrating their message to win over independents in a state once solidly red that has turned distinctly purple.
President Biden’s poor approval ratings and the pain of high prices have put Democrats on the defensive and encouraged Republicans to ratchet up their rhetoric, which has tapped into cultural divisions not only in Arizona but in close contests across the country.
Nowhere is the hard shift to the right more evident than in Arizona, but all the top GOP candidates have spread particular claims about the 2020 presidential election. As a group campaigns — often at exciting events that draw crowds unusual for midterm contests — the candidates reinforce each other.
They made a studied decision not to discard the more extreme messages honed during the GOP primary, said a top Republican strategist, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal strategy. The bet is that Arizona voters, long drawn to mavericks, will reward that stance.
Among the speakers at Sunday’s rally was Stephen K. Bannon, the former White House adviser and radio host who once tried to unite nationalist movements in Europe. Now, he argues, the world’s attention is on Arizona. “The media is here from all over the world, do you know why?” he asked the audience. “Because they understand that the future is here on Tuesday.”
Democrats running for the state’s top jobs share that view, though the agreement ends there. They focused their pitch in the closing days on painting their opponents as radical and agents of chaos.
“American democracy is running through the state of Arizona in 2022,” Kris Mayes, the Democratic candidate for attorney general, told voters at a union picnic in Phoenix over the weekend, asking them to keep election deniers out of office.
Katie Hobbs, the Democratic nominee for governor, told a crowd last week to see former President Barack Obama that she was offering the state “real solutions, not finger-pointing or conspiracy theories.” The race for governor, she said, was a “choice between sanity and chaos.”
But voters attending Sunday’s GOP rally southeast of Phoenix said their lives were already chaotic — and they blamed Democratic policy. Lauren, the 31-year-old who responded to the mention of authoritarianism with a call of, “Good!” and declined to give her last name, said she lost her job in the service industry because of the pandemic. Republican Gov. Doug Ducey imposed restrictions on businesses in 2020, although some Democrats in the state argued that he did not go far enough.
“The country has gone completely backwards,” said Leah Gumm, 51, who runs a local pest control business. She can no longer afford the cost of basic operations, she lamented, citing the increased cost of gas.
She was enthusiastic about the bare-footed messaging of the GOP’s slate of candidates. “This card is amazing,” she said.