Next week kicks off a new round of primary elections across the country, and upcoming editions of the CITIZEN newsletter will offer guides by CNN’s campaign team of the key races to watch each week.
Perhaps the biggest test of whether election denial has firmly taken root among the Republican faithful will come in Arizona’s August 2 primary.
Trump has endorsed several candidates in the Grand Canyon State who have embraced his baseless claims that widespread election fraud led to his 2020 defeat, including Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, secretary of state contender Mark Finchem and venture capitalist Blake Masters, who is vying to take on Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly in the general election.
(As CNN’s Alex Rogers recently reported, Masters has even begun to question whether the 2022 election will be legitimate as he works to shore up his bona fides among Trump supporters.)
And Karrin Taylor Robson, the Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate endorsed by Pence, told CNN’s Brianna Keilar this week that she does not believe the 2020 election was fair to Trump and would not she say that she accepts the 2020 results.
At the local level in Arizona, meanwhile, a four-way race for a seat on the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors includes candidates who have advanced election conspiracy theories.
One, Republican Thayer Verschoor, a former state senator who served in Trump’s administration, says on his campaign website that the 2020 election “was corrupt and a win was stolen” from the former President.
The Arizona Republic’s Sasha Hupka recently noted that the outcome of this contest in Arizona’s most populous county – home to Phoenix -- could change the united front that the board in Maricopa has steadfastly presented in defending the integrity of President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory.
(Election conspiracies about the 2020 election sparked Republicans in the state Senate to order a sprawling probe of Maricopa’s ballots. It became the butt of national jokes last year as the reviewers pursued wild conspiracy theories, such as hunting for signs of bamboo, based on a claim that 40,000 ballots had arrived from Asia. In the end, the recount concluded that Biden had actually won the county by a bigger margin than the official tally.)
Biden captured Arizona by nearly 10,500 votes of out of more than 3 million cast statewide.
Whoever wins the Maricopa seat will serve until January 2025 and help oversee the 2024 presidential election in the county.