Abraham Hamadeh, an election denier who ran for attorney general in Arizona in 2022, won the Republican primary for the state’s Eighth Congressional District on Wednesday, according to The Associated Press.
Mr. Hamadeh, a former prosecutor in Maricopa County, defeated Blake Masters, another Republican who has supported former President Donald J. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election.
The victory by Mr. Hamadeh in the district, which encompasses suburbs north and west of Phoenix, came after an unusual last-minute turn in the race: Mr. Trump endorsed both candidates the weekend before the primary, effectively declaring that he had no preference for who won.
Mr. Hamadeh emerges from a bitter primary fight, in which he and Mr. Masters lobbed harsh personal insults at each other as they tried to distance themselves from a field that also included Ben Toma, Arizona’s speaker of the House, and Trent Franks, a former U.S. representative.
In their unsuccessful campaigns in 2022 — Mr. Masters had run for Senate — both men had aligned themselves with the former president in hopes of capturing his support. They each received his endorsement in their primaries that year.
But both lost to their Democratic rivals in November. Mr. Masters was defeated by Senator Mark Kelly, who is under consideration to be Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate this year, by nearly 5 percentage points. Mr. Hamadeh narrowly lost the attorney general’s race to Kris Mayes, falling short by 280 votes out of about 2.5 million votes cast.
Mr. Hamadeh will most likely be favored this fall in his race against his Democratic opponent, Gregory Whitten, who did not face a primary challenger in the reliably Republican district.
The candidates are running for a seat that has been held since 2018 by Representative Debbie Lesko, a Republican who did not seek re-election.
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
