Arizona Establishment Republicans Sound the Alarm After a Kari Lake-Led MAGA Primary Sweep: ‘A Catastrophe’ for ‘Our Democracy’

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As the dust continues to settle after the MAGA-wing of the Republican Party trounced the so-called establishment wing of the party in Arizona, many of the GOP’s old guard are sounding the alarm that the party is headed for a total wipeout come November in the now purple state.

“I will call in a bit to talk about the doomsday ticket,” Barrett Marson, a Republican political strategist told Politico’s David Siders, but first “let me wake up and finish crying.”

Siders adds, using a perfect illustration for the moment, “A prominent Republican in the state had texted him a GIF of Thelma and Louise driving off the cliff.”

On Tuesday night, Republican voters in Arizona were the latest across the country to weigh in on the battle within the GOP for its future. In the gubernatorial race, the Trump-backed, election-denying Kari Lake was facing off against Pence-backed Karrin Taylor Robson whose work in GOP politics traces back to Ronald Reagan.

The chair of the Arizona Republican Party, Kelli Ward, celebrated Lake’s apparent victory on Wednesday — the race remains too close to call with Lake at 46.2% and Robson at 44.4% as of Thursday morning — and called the GOP’s slate of candidates an “exorcism of John McCain.”

Another prominent election denier, state Rep. Mark Finchem, won his bid to be the GOP nominees for secretary of state, which would put him in charge of the state’s elections.

Peter Thiel-funded former venture capitalist Blake Masters, with a string of controversial missteps in his past, won the GOP nomination for the U.S. Senate. Masters will face former astronaut and moderate Sen. Mark Kelly – one of the Democrat’s best fundraisers.

“I think the only way back is by humiliation at the ballot box, and the problem is the Democrats aren’t strong enough to do that,” Bill Gates, a Republican Maricopa County supervisor, told Siders.

“I think they are electable, which is frightening,” Gates added.

“The election last night was a catastrophe for the Arizona Republican Party and, I would argue, our democracy,” he concluded.

If recent trends in the state are any indication, Gates’s concerns may not be so warranted. In 2020, Joe Biden flipped Arizona into the blue column for the first time in a presidential election since 1996 and during the Trump years, Arizona elected two Democrats to represent the state in the Senate since 1952.

“Trump-ism, as was painfully obvious to the GOP in Arizona in 2020, is a hard sell in Phoenix and its heavily populated suburbs,” Siders notes. But, in 2022 with inflation still sky high and a host of other issues playing to the GOP’s favor in the once-solid red state, there are no guarantees.

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