Tuesday’s primary elections, which took place in five states, showed a definite trend toward Trump-backed candidates in Republican primaries. During the vote to impeach Trump in January 2021, ten republican House members voted in favor of the measure. At the time, Trump vowed to get them voted out of office come the midterms. Of the ten, two have already been voted out as of this week, and four others are resigning and will not seek re-election. Two others are hanging on by a thread: one survived his primary, and one more, Liz Cheney, has her primary later this month.
One of the ten, Michigan incumbent Rep. Peter Meijer, lost to Trump-backed Republican John Gibbs this week. Trump’s endorsed candidate for governor in Michigan, Tudor Dixon, also won her primary in a crowded race, though Trump’s endorsement came late in the race. Tom Rice of South Carolina, another one of the ten, had already lost by 28 points in his race against a Trump-backed candidate in June.
In Arizona the results were more stark. Trump’s pick for Senate, Blake Masters, won out of a slough of other candidates. Masters is also a creature of Peter Thiel, who contributed over $13 million to Masters’s campaign. Masters ran Thiel’s hedge fund, Thiel Capital, and co-authored a book with Thiel on hedge fund gambling. A 35-year-old tool for the Silicon Valley-military industrial nexus, Masters’s election follows that of J.D. Vance, another employee of Thiel who got millions from Thiel for his campaign in Ohio. Vance won in Ohio, but at the expense of the traditional Republicans who had won the state for Trump in 2016 and were furious that Trump sold them out for the Thiel clone.
Arizona’s secretary of state seat was won by Mark Finchem, another Trump-backed candidate. For the governor, the race is still undecided and is very close between Kari Lake, Trump’s pick, and her contender, who has been endorsed by Mike Pence—although it appears that Lake will win the race. In another notable race, the Arizona Speaker of the House in the statehouse, Rusty Bowers—who testified before the January 6 Commission and famously refused to hold hearings on election fraud when personally called by Rudy Giuliani and President Trump—was trounced this week, losing 36% to 64% to a Trump-backed contender.
