Arizona Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters has scrubbed another major section from his campaign website.
First Masters removed his support of tough abortion restrictions and a sentence that declared he is “100% pro-life.”
Now the Senate hopeful has stripped his website of one issue that has been near and dear to the heart of former President Donald Trump: the claim that the 2020 election was stolen.
CNN’s KFile found Masters once included language on his website that claimed Democrats were attempting to “import” a new electorate.
As recently as Aug 1., just one day before the primary, his website’s section about the 2020 election stated, “We need to get serious about election integrity. The 2020 election was a rotten mess – if we had had a free and fair election, President Trump would be sitting in the Oval Office today and America would be so much better off.”
However, CNN notes that it now only reads, “We need to get serious about election integrity.”
The outlet also points out that the Senate hopeful’s campaign website was removed from the Web Archive at Masters’ request.
Arizona Republican Senate nominee Blake Masters removed language from his website following his primary win that included the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump, CNN's KFile finds https://t.co/XszoVc7fXK
— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) August 30, 2022
This can’t sit well with Trump, who has a history of flipping on his supporters if they buck his election claims. Trump withdrew his endorsement of Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) — even though he advanced claims the election was stolen — for the mere sin of saying Republicans should move on from 2020.
On its face, it’s hard to criticize a candidate stripping their website of the unfounded claim that the 2020 election was stolen.
Objectively, it is good to have one less candidate openly promulgating that claim.
It does, however, raise even more questions about Masters. Does he really believe the election was stolen? Or was he just promoting that claim because he believed he needed to in order to win the primary — and Trump’s endorsement?
If Masters really believes the election was stolen or not free and fair, that’s not really that good. There has been no evidence to substantiate those claims.
And adherents to that claim can believe some pretty wild theories — despite the lack of evidence.
Or they advance some other theory that Facebook “rigged” the election because Mark Zuckerberg donated money to liberal groups, which then gave grants to state officials to increase the use of drop boxes for mail-in ballots. It’s not clear how or why that would count as rigging the election. But there it is.
The other alternative, and the more cynical one, is that Masters does not believe the election was rigged but, for purely political reasons, thought it would be cute to toy with conspiracy theories that raise doubts about America’s electoral system because he wanted to win the primary.
If the latter is the case, it is shameful. If you’re going to promote crazy theories and lies that you don’t believe in but which further erode trust in our system of government to further your personal interests, you’re not the kind of person we should want in politics.