By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — The Arizona Republican Party’s censure of some big GOP names around here at its annual meeting in January was followed by a contretemps for the party itself.
After assembled state GOP committeemen voted to censure Cindy McCain, the widow of the late U.S. Sen. John McCain, as well as former U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, the results of their vote for state party chairman came under challenge, even though incumbent chair Kelli Ward and opponent Sergio Arellano both are Donald Trump supporters.
Ward subsequently didn’t cooperate in a request for an audit of her victory.
The results for chairman “had little to nothing to do with Trump, and any attempt to silo the players based on if they’re pro-Trump or anti-Trump will miss the story,” conservative GOP political consultant Constantin Querard told The Wanderer.
“. . . It wasn’t a Trump thing. Sergio worked for Trump, Ward worked for Trump; frankly, all four candidates for chairman were very pro-Trump.”
The Wall Street Journal, hardly a fan of Trump, soon jumped in with an ill-informed editorial that seemed ignorant of the decades-long rivalry between conservative foot soldiers and liberal-inclined Republicans here. The editorial was an echo of failed “moderate” strategies that keep trying to put conservatives on the defensive.
“Moderate” Republicans Cindy McCain and Flake, who affect to occupy the moral high ground, had endorsed radical pro-abortionist Democrat Joe Biden for president last year over pro-life President Trump. Biden made no secret of his pro-abortion extremism.
Querard said censuring McCain and Flake made sense because of their support for the opposition presidential candidate, but he thought that Ducey, at most, merited a less stern rebuke over his COVID-19 restrictions.
Talk hosts at conservative, Phoenix-based KFYI radio (550 AM) regularly refer to the governor as “Lord Ducey,” accompanied with a royal trumpet blast, for what they view as his imperious restrictions.
“The censures against Flake and McCain were justified and hardly uncommon in Republican or Democratic Party meetings,” Querard said. “Both used their status as prominent Republicans to try to elect a socialistic Democrat as president of the United States. They knew what they were doing and they deserved to be spanked for it. The censure against Ducey didn’t make the same sense.
“People are upset about the mandates and shutdowns and damage being done to the economy, but more than anything else, the people at the meeting were most upset about wearing masks,” Querard said. “If you judge him on performance, which you ought to do, Ducey has been one of the country’s more successful governors, our economy is thriving relative to other states, and people can’t wait to move here.
“Even his response to the pandemic has had a lighter touch than most governors,” he said. “So if you wanted to craft a statement critical of wearing masks or that they’re ineffective according to scientists, then that would have made sense….I think that’s why censuring Ducey got fewer votes than censuring Flake or McCain.”
Republicans challenging vote accuracy around the U.S. are hardly a new topic these days, but this time the woman who was reelected to the Arizona party chairmanship, Ward, didn’t cooperate with a request to examine her narrow second-round win.
Querard told The Wanderer: “The entire situation is a terrible look at a time when the party can least afford it. Our entire message is about accurate and transparent elections, our voters expect us to fight for those, and election integrity is probably the Number One issue for GOP voters today.
“Now the media gets to point out that the Arizona Republican Party doesn’t practice any of those things, and voters hate hypocrisy,” Querard said. “Hopefully this all gets fixed very soon, because we’re bleeding voters when our job is to grow the party.”
A spokesman for Ward didn’t respond to two email requests for comment by The Wanderer. However, Arellano, a small-business owner and member of the national Latinos for Trump Advisory Board, told The Wanderer on February 1:
“There were a number of state committeemen who contacted me with concerns about the Arizona GOP elections, from the way ballots were distributed, to how they were secured, to how they were counted, etc. They asked me to ask for an audit and I obliged, but I thought it would be a quick process that the party would excel at — setting an example to everyone else of how to run an election, how to audit an election, the importance of paper ballots or backup, etc.”
He added, “I had no idea that the state party would flip from agreeing to having the audit to suddenly saying ‘Absolutely not!’ and I think now I’m one of a growing number of Republicans who has legitimate concerns over how the election was handled and how this double standard is going to damage our efforts to improve Arizona’s elections going forward.”
Arellano said he still was given no timeline on having an audit done.
After none of the four candidates for party chairman received a majority of the vote at the January 23 gathering, a second round of balloting gave the win to Ward, whose 654 votes led Arellano by 42 votes. On the first round, Ward had 621 votes, Arellano 356, and a third candidate, Bob Lettieri, at 332, got most of the remaining votes.
Ward told KFYI talk host James T. Harris on January 29 that there had been no complaints the day of the vote, and “Everything was above board.” Ward recalled that after her victory, Arellano and she on the stage “together” pledged cooperation for the party’s future. She told Harris there’s “no procedure, process, rule” that allowed for Arellano’s subsequent challenge, nor did she have to facilitate one.
She said she wanted to get back to “fight for election integrity” from the Grand Canyon State’s Maricopa County Board of Supervisors regarding an accurate count of the November 3 presidential election.
Sometimes party leaders resign after election embarrassments, but Ward didn’t do so after Arizona’s November 3 vote that went to Biden and also gave a U.S. Senate seat to the Democrats, nor did Ronna McDaniel step down as head of the Republican National Committee after Biden’s supposed national victory.
Indeed, possible Democrat national fraud complicated the picture of whom to blame.
Meanwhile, the Journal editorial, which ran at the bottom of its hard-copy editorial page of January 25, might as well have been composed by a speechwriter for the late Sen. McCain. It warned that censures of his style of politics — as shown by Flake and Cindy McCain — “symbolize the party divisions that could doom the GOP to minority status nationwide for years.”
In fact, in January 2014, as The Wanderer reported at that time, both the Arizona state GOP and some county Republican parties strongly censured McCain for being untrue to the Republican platform — but these rebukes didn’t have the effect of enervating Republicans.
However, those censures had deeply chagrined Sen. McCain, who set out to punish party members on the opposite side of the fence. The senator did not seek to reunite rather than excommunicate, as the January 25 Journal editorial counsels now. Even before the 2014 censures, McCain aimed to have a state party as much in his image as possible, although he publicly remained aloof.
I never once saw the senator at a county or state GOP meeting or a pro-life gathering I covered, although other Arizona Republican state and federal office-holders attended, including the accessible U.S. Sen. Jon Kyl.
For whatever reason, a robocall in McCain’s voice once invited me to visit his 2010 senatorial reelection headquarters, where he shook my and others’ hands, and I had seen him twice at a distance in 2008 when he was on the presidential ticket against Barack Obama — once in the morning when McCain and Cindy voted at their precinct, and that evening when he conceded presidential defeat at the Arizona Biltmore resort.
The Journal editorial showed its unfamiliarity with Arizona by claiming mistakenly that Republicans here “have lost three U.S. Senate races in a row.” In fact, they lost twice, and both times the losing Republican was the very same person, the “electable” Martha McSally, from the party’s McCain wing, who was shoved into this arena by the likes of national GOP “wise men” including U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) and Journal contributor Karl Rove.
And why was this same person the candidate in two consecutive Senate races, two years apart? That’s a tale of establishment corruption that the Journal editorial ignored while it expressed amazement that state Republicans in January dared censure Gov. Ducey, with his “strong conservative record.”
As The Wanderer reported in recent years, Kelli Ward, a conservative, pro-life former Arizona state senator, looked to have a clear path to winning the GOP nomination for the U.S. Senate seat that unpopular incumbent Flake, a McCain disciple, announced he was retiring from in 2018 after serving only one six-year term.
However, establishment pillars like McConnell calculated that Ward had to be blocked, and they successfully strategized to win the nomination for McSally, who had been serving as a Republican in a more-liberal southern Arizona congressional district.
McSally proceeded to lose the Senate general-election race, after nearly a week of November 2018 post-election vote-counting, to bisexual atheist Democrat Kyrsten Sinema, whose beliefs were modified as suited herself. And these days a person can wonder about vote-counting being modified as it suits the establishment.
Nevertheless, despite this loss, Ducey quickly appointed McSally to fill Arizona’s other U.S. Senate seat — which became vacant with McCain’s death in August 2018 then was abandoned by placeholder replacement Sen. Jon Kyl — instead of naming a more popular person.
Under Arizona law, the seat of a deceased politician then goes before the voters at the next general election — which meant McSally had to defend it in 2020 — with the victor filling out the rest of the term, which expires in this case in 2022.
Left-wing Democrat Mark Kelly beat McSally by campaigning like Biden — in effect, hiding in his basement while media covered up for him. Kelly is the husband of former Democrat Cong. Gabrielle Giffords, who had to resign her House seat after she was gravely injured in a mass shooting in 2011.
Ducey long has been in the orbit of Arizona’s McCain machine and he generally can be found aligned with its desires — including rushing forward in 2020 with Arizona’s strongly anti-Trump secretary of state, Democrat Katie Hobbs, to certify Biden’s supposed Arizona presidential win instead of examining the evidence against it.
While the Arizona economy may be healthier than some other states’, Ducey’s coronavirus restrictions still have a bite, from businesses’ reduced hours to vehicular traffic that’s a shadow of 2019’s.
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