The first sign of trouble for Senate hopeful Blake Masters came earlier this month when the far-right candidate tried to back away from his own comments about privatizing Social Security. The damage, however, had already been done: It was as recently as June when the Arizonan publicly argued, “We need fresh and innovative thinking, maybe we should privatize Social Security. Get the government out of it.”
For the Senate candidate to try to argue two months later that he no longer agreed with himself wasn’t going to work.
Last week, as regular readers know, the Republican took another step in the same direction, deleting from his campaign website some of his far-right views on abortion rights.
Evidently, Masters is still at it. HuffPost reported:
Venture capitalist Blake Masters, who won the Republican nomination for Arizona’s U.S. Senate race with Donald Trump’s endorsement, has since removed language from his website that supported the former president’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. According to CNN’s KFile, Masters has modified wording on his site that supported Trump’s election claims, argued the country would be better off if Trump was still president, and claimed Democrats are trying to “import” a new electorate ― rhetoric that matches a white supremacist conspiracy theory.
Part of the problem with tactics like these is the inevitable Streisand effect: The more the GOP Senate candidate tries to edit away some of his most indefensible beliefs, the more the public ends up hearing about these indefensible beliefs.
Masters’ strategy appears designed to appear more mainstream, but his efforts are only reminding the public of his radical far-right ideology.
Complicating matters, while the Arizona candidate tries to quietly make changes intended to improve his appeal beyond the Republican base, Masters is also undermining his own cause. NBC News reported overnight that the Senate hopeful suggested in a sarcastic tweet that economic difficulties can be attributed to diversity among Federal Reserve leaders.
“Finally a compelling explanation for why our economy is doing so well,” Masters wrote Sunday, referencing an Associated Press article about the Fed’s diverse leadership. The article noted that more female, Black, and LGBTQ officials are now weighing in on policy decision-making at the central bank.
Masters has already faced credible accusations of racism, and this didn’t help.
The Senate Leadership Fund, the top super PAC aligned with the Senate Republican leadership, last week decided to cut roughly $8 million worth of ad spending in the Grand Canyon State throughout September, suggesting GOP leaders do not have high hopes about Masters’ chances. There’s no great mystery as to why the party’s expectations are falling.