Arizona Primaries Offer Some Serious Reasons For Conservative Hope

Arizona has been very strange, but we have some good news from the primary elections there this week: It may not stay strange after November. Arizona is the state that gave us Barry Goldwater, but it’s also the state that gave us John McCain and Jeff Flake. That split personality has persisted, and a divided GOP has been a gift to the left. A conservative state with solid Republican majorities in both houses of the legislature has handed over its executive branch to an appalling gang of dismal far-left ladyboss Democrats. Factionalism in the Arizona Republican Party may have peaked with Kari Lake’s failed 2022 run for governor, as she famously told McCain Republicans to “get the hell out.” As the conservative Arizona journalist Jon Gabriel noted at the time, they did. The division has had real costs. Far-left dimwit lunatic Gov. Katie Hobbs has vetoed more than 500 bills from the Republican-led legislature, pushing hard to the left in a state that doesn’t lean that way, while Attorney General Kris Mayes has focused like a laser on her sleazy work as a political commissar. Democrats have not slept on their control of a conservative state, as (for example) an early executive order from Hobbs guaranteed public funding for sexual mutilation surgery. On Tuesday, Trump-backed conservatives swept the Arizona Republican primaries, putting up numbers that suggest a trend toward at least a modest amount of tactical conservative unity. Trump-endorsed gubernatorial candidate Andy Biggs, currently a member of the House Freedom Caucus, won more than 70 percent of the Republican vote. In Maricopa County, which is becoming East California as Gavin Newsom’s failing state bleeds taxpayers, Trump-endorsed Jay Feely won the GOP nomination for a must-hold Republican congressional seat. And in the race to replace Mayes as attorney general, Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen will almost certainly be the Republican nominee, with an unusually solid voting record in the legislature. The conservative Arizona Republican Assembly rates Petersen’s voting record as the most consistently conservative in the state Senate. The reactions tell the story. The Prickly Pear, an influential Arizona conservative news site, concludes on the basis of the numbers for Biggs that “Republican voters were not subtle. A blowout of that size is a verdict on who owns the party’s base in a true battleground, and the answer was not close.” That site now warns Republicans to keep an eye on the race for Arizona’s 1st Congressional District: “The House runs through Scottsdale. In Congressional District 1, Trump-backed Jay Feely won the GOP primary for a seat analysts say neither party can win the House without.” In the other very telling reaction, legacy media are howling a warning that far-right MAGA conspiracy theorists are surging toward power. As The Hill warns in a panicked story about the Arizona results, “election denialism holds strong.” (“Arizona Republicans have a long history of nominating election deniers or those who have questioned past election results,” the outlet adds.) And here’s NPR’s laughter-inducing headline this morning: Image CreditScreenshot On the Wednesday morning after the Tuesday primaries, Arizona conservatives are pleased and the national political media are alarmed. It would be hard to miss the meaning of those signals. Chris Bray is a senior correspondent at The Federalist and a former infantry sergeant in the U.S. Army. He has a history PhD from the University of California Los Angeles, not that it did him any good. He also posts on Substack, at "Tell Me How This Ends," here. Andy BiggsArizonaArizona Republican AssemblyBarry GoldwaterfactionalismJay FeelyJeff FlakeJohn McCainJon GabrielKari LakeKatie HobbsKris MayesMcCain RepublicansNPRprimary electionsThe HillThe Prickly PearWarren Petersen