Mother Jones; Christopher Brown/Zuma (3)
In late June, I was at a candidate forum in Sun City West, a sprawling retirement community northwest of Phoenix, when an Arizona Republican sitting next to me leaned over and offered a suggestion.
“You need to do a story,” she said, “about the ads Masters is running against Hamadeh.”
The primary, which ends on July 30, features both Blake Masters, the party’s 2022 nominee for US Senate, and Abe Hamadeh, the party’s 2022 nominee for attorney general. The candidates were close allies two years ago, touring the state as part of a slate with election-denying gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake. This time it’s a different story. The Republican primary to fill Rep. Debbie Lesko’s seat in the eighth congressional district is one of the ugliest I’ve seen in 15 years covering conservative politics.
And, as the voter at Sun City West noted, a large part of that is because of the bigoted campaign Masters and his allies have waged against Hamadeh. One ad in question, which actually was paid for not by Masters himself but by an outside group called the American Principles Project that’s supporting him, asks viewers if they “think America was founded on Islamic principles,” before informing them “that’s what dishonest Abe Hamdeh thinks.” It features a photo of Hamadeh in a white robe standing in Mecca. It goes on to say that Hamadeh rejected “the Judeo-Christian values that made America great.”
“We have enough terrorist sympathizers in Congress,” it continues. “On Election Day, never forget what’s at stake.”
The source for Hamadeh’s comment is a post at “RonPaulForums.com” from 2009. As the Arizona Republic explained, Hamadeh was responding to an Islamophobic poster by arguing that “our own Constitution of the United States was based off of Abrahamic religions, including Islam.” The photo of Hamadeh was taken during a visit to Saudi Arabia while he was serving in the US Army. His parents are Druze and Muslim, and he currently describes his faith as “non-denominational.”
Another ad, from Masters’ campaign says that Hamadeh was “born to two Syrian parents who were here illegally.” According to the Republic, his father faced deportation for overstaying his visa. The ad goes on to feature the same photo of a young Hamadeh in Mecca, with the same quote about “Islamic principles.”
Masters didn’t just plaster the airwaves with the Islamophobic attacks. His campaign also put up signs around the district with the photo of Hamadeh in Mecca:
Masters also sought to use the two candidates’ past friendship against his political rival. Earlier this year, the Republic also published text messages Hamadeh exchanged with Masters in which they discussed the fallout from the 2022 election. Hamadeh, who lost to Democrat Kris Mayes by 280 votes and—like Lake—is still challenging his loss in court a year-and-a-half later, acknowledged to Masters that “the crazies love me because they see me fighting.”
For his part, Hamadeh has attempted to take down Masters with his own bit of culture-war politics. In one digital ad, his campaign called Masters a “Leftist,” and charged that “Blake lived in a nudist vegan commune” and “played on the women’s basketball team at Stanford.” They also featured a photo of Masters wearing faux-warpaint. (All of these details were reported, as it happens, by my colleague Noah Lanard in a 2022 Mother Jones profile.) Both candidates are billing themselves as intensely anti-immigrant. Masters’ other campaign signs say “Deport Illegals” in big letters, and “Now! Now! Now!” above that; Hamadeh, nonetheless, accused Masters of being soft on border security, citing an old LiveJournal post.
Masters and Hamadeh are not the only candidates running, although they are the favorites. The field also includes state Sen. Anthony Kern, who was indicted earlier this year for serving as a fake elector following the 2020 election and was on the Capitol grounds during the January 6th insurrection. (Kern’s campaign offers t-shirts with his mug shot on it.) There’s also former Rep. Trent Franks, an extremely anti-abortion conservative Christian who represented the area in Washington for parts of seven terms before resigning in 2017 after admitting to having asked several female staffers to bear his children.
