Incumbent Democrat Mark Kelly launched an offensive Thursday night against Republican nominee Blake Masters, an apparent effort to remind the Arizona electorate of some of the more radical positions his opponent has taken in the run-up to this November’s election. One of Kelly’s major targets: Masters’ position on abortion.
“Arizona women have totally lost the right to make a decision about abortion,” Kelly said during the race’s first and only scheduled debate, referencing the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in June. “It’s devastating. It’s wrong. It’s exactly what my opponent Blake Masters wants. Blake Masters has called abortion demonic or religious sacrifice. He’s even said that he wants to punish the doctors.”
Masters, an ally and protégé of billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel, has appeared to spend the past two months attempting to distance himself from the hardline abortion positions he took during the primary. During the Republican primary, Masters described abortion as a form of “genocide,” and as Kelly seemed to reference, called abortion-rights activists “demonic.” During the general election, he’s tempered that language. On Thursday night, Masters said, “I believe Arizona’s got the right to make its laws. That’s the whole point of reversing Roe v. Wade. And I believe in a federal backstop.” Masters has supported the 15-week national abortion ban that Senator Lindsey Graham proposed last month.
The contest, which included libertarian candidate Marc Victor, covered a range of issues from abortion to immigration, inflation, and the outcome of the 2020 election. Kelly has consistently led the polls against Masters, most recently by a margin of three points, according to an early October CBS News/YouGov poll.
Masters pulled off an unexpected victory in the race’s bitter Republican primary in August after Donald Trump threw him an endorsement. The 36-year-old has quickly become a key figure in the “New Right”—a movement defined by economic nationalism and socially conservative zealotry—and a loyal supporter of Trump, having claimed “Trump won in 2020” and that the election was stolen. But when questioned about those comments on Thursday, Masters acknowledged that Joe Biden is, in fact, the legitimately elected president—an admission he couched by insisting that “big tech and big media and the FBI…put the thumb on the scale” to keep Trump out of office. After the moderator pressed Masters to say whether he believes vote counting swayed the 2020 race, the Republican confessed that he has not “seen evidence of that.” Kelly fired back by warning that the US “could wind up in a situation where the wheels come off our democracy, and it’s because of people like Blake Masters [who] are questioning the integrity of an election.”
Meanwhile, Masters counterpunches included tying Kelly to the economic woes and migrant influxes that have occurred in the Biden era. “Joe Biden and Mark Kelly, they laid out the welcome mat,” he said. “They surrendered our southern border. They’ve given it up to the Mexican drug cartels.”
That line of criticism did lead to Kelly calling the Biden administration‘s policies toward undocumented migrants “dumb,” one of his more notable remarks of the night. “I’ve been strong on border security, and I’ve stood up to Democrats when they’re wrong on this issue—including the president,” the incumbent Democrat said while suggesting that both parties are at fault for the “crisis” taking place along the US-Mexico border. Kelly then asserted that Biden had actively created “a bigger crisis” for border states and contrasted the administration’s policies with his own work to bring “more Border Patrol agents to the state of Arizona.”
Kelly also appeared to take a pass at his 36-year-old opponent’s experience. “Folks, I think we all know guys like this,” the freshman senator said of Masters, who has only worked in tech and has never served in public office. “Guys that think they know better than everyone about everything. That you think you know better than women and doctors about abortion. You think you know better than seniors about Social Security.” (During the primary, Masters argued in favor of privatizing Social Security, a position he has since partially retreated from.)
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