One candidate’s been slammed for being unmarried, childless, and for visiting Mecca in Muslim garb. He’s punched back, painting his rival as a billionaire-backed carpet-bagging opportunist who once played on a women’s college basketball team.
Welcome to the GOP primary for Arizona’s 8th Congressional District, where two staunch Republicans who campaigned arm-in-arm just two years ago are engaged in a mudslinging cage match that outsiders say could set a new low—and maybe blueprint—for intraparty battles.
“It’s one of the ugliest—if not the ugliest—primaries in the entire country,” Barrett Marson, a GOP strategist in Arizona, said. “There is really deep resentment amongst the candidates.”
The ballot is crowded, but most of the attention and vitriol surround front-runners Abe Hamadeh and Blake Masters, who ran on the same ticket in unsuccessful 2022 races. They face two state lawmakers, a former congressman, and a political newcomer in next Tuesday’s primary to replace Rep. Debbie Lesko in a safely GOP swath of cities and retirement communities in the northwest Phoenix metro area.
All the candidates largely agree on policy, but Masters, a 37-year-old venture capitalist who last ran for US Senate, and Hamadeh, a 33-year-old former prosecutor, stand out for their caustic campaigning and personal digs at each other. Both won Donald Trump’s endorsement in their 2022 bids but only Hamadeh, who lost his Arizona attorney general campaign that year by 280 votes, has it this time.
The election will test whether Masters’ well-funded attacks can overcome Hamadeh’s Trump endorsement—or if voters will be turned off enough to choose another option. Both candidates have pointed to internal polling over the past few months that shows each taking the lead. In a field of six candidates, the victor almost certainly won’t need half the votes to win, and is likely to join the House next January.
“It’s teaching us something about the new world of politics in Arizona, and I imagine nationally as well,” Stan Barnes, a Phoenix-based political consultant, said.
‘Pissed Patriot’
Many of the attacks have been lobbed on social media, in television ads and roadway signs rather than in person. Both were invited, organizers said, to a mid-July candidate forum dubbed the Patriot Connection at Fat Willy’s, a sports bar just outside the district, but only Hamadeh showed up.
Even without his rival there, Hamadeh dove right into the attacks, asking the crowd if they had seen any “nasty ads” against him. One says he defended Hezbollah and uses a photo of him at Mecca with the quote that America was “founded on Islamic principles.” The Masters campaign cites the quote to a post Hamadeh made as a teenager in 2009 on RonPaulForums.com.
The photo was from Hamadeh’s US Army Reserve deployment to Saudi Arabia, he said, noting he’s the only candidate “that had the courage to serve in uniform.” He called Masters a backstabbing former friend who’s made the insults personal.
“I’m a happy warrior still,” Hamadeh said. “Now, I’m a pissed patriot too, don’t get me wrong, but the best warriors fight for what they love.”
Masters has asserted Hamadeh “owes his entire existence in this country to illegal immigration,” a not-so-veiled reference to his parents, who are Syrian immigrants. The Arizona Republic reported in 2022 that Hamadeh’s father had overstayed his visitor visa at the time his son was born in Chicago and later faced a deportation order.
Hamadeh, who grew up and attended college and law school in the state, explained to the crowd that he was raised by a Muslim father, has Christians in his family, and views faith as something personal between a person and God. He said he knows America was founded on Judeo-Christian values, “not like what these posts are showing.”
When one audience member criticized Islam and called Hamadeh a “scary individual,” another attendee, Tony Peters, came to his defense. He said the mailers from Masters’ campaign go too far.
“They’re not Christian at all,” Peters said. He pledged a vote for Hamadeh.
Hamadeh has lobbed his own insults at Masters. In ads, social media posts, and public comments, he’s labeled him Blake the snake, an opportunist from Tucson—a few hours south—who’s desperate to be a politician and who doesn’t care about the district.
He’s also asserted that Masters lived in a nudist vegan commune and played on the women’s basketball team at Stanford—a reference to Masters’ role as a male practice player used to provide the team with an extra challenge. Another ad claims Masters supported illegal immigration, citing a nearly 20-year old blog. Jewish Insider reported in 2022 that Masters posted on LiveJournal as a college student, with one post outlining “the libertarian perspective on ‘illegal immigrants.’”
Masters’ campaign declined to address those specific claims, saying in a statement that “Hamadeh’s desperate attacks are laughable and do not deserve response.” Masters and his family are renting a home in the area and plan to buy a residence in the district with an election win, the statement said.
Hamadeh won the endorsement of Kari Lake, another Trump-backed candidate running for US Senate and an unsuccessful gubernatorial candidate in 2022.
But Masters has the money edge. He had nearly $976,000 in cash on hand as of July 10, and had loaned his campaign $3.5 million this election cycle. Hamadeh, by contrast, had roughly $214,000 for the final stretch. A crypto-linked super PAC has also run ads supporting Masters.
A few days after the Patriot forum, Masters was trying to make the case for his campaign about a half-dozen states away, at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. He touted his early endorsement from Sen. JD Vance, the newly minted GOP vice presidential pick, whom he called a friend from their venture capital days.
Billionaire Peter Thiel poured millions of dollars into supporting both men in their 2022 US Senate races but hasn’t done the same for Masters’ campaign this year.
Masters also continued to hammer Hamadeh on illegal immigration, which he says is “far and away the No. 1 issue” in this primary. He supports getting rid of birthright citizenship, or citizenship that is automatically granted by the Constitution to people born in the US—regardless of the immigration status of their parents.
“You just can’t trust him on it because he benefited from it,” Masters said in an interview with Bloomberg Government on the sidelines of the convention.
Hamadeh’s campaign didn’t address the specific claims about his parents but in a statement spokeswoman Erica Knight said Masters is “spreading falsehoods and vicious lies that go beyond the pale.”
Crowded Ballot
The race’s nasty undertone could backfire on the leading candidates, observers say. It may also be a broader test of the limits of negative campaigning.
There’s “apparently a new culture of no limit to how negative and ugly a message can be,” said Barnes. “Negative advertising in a crowded race can have a real impact.”
Attack ads tend to be most effective when they’re uncivil but also relevant—something that’s memorable for voters, said Kim Fridkin, foundation professor of political science at Arizona State University who has studied negative campaigning. There is a potential downside, though.
“They might just stay home on Election Day,” Fridkin said.
The name-calling also could give another candidate an opening in a district that’s a sweet spot for “older, conservative, lifelong Republicans that feel it’s their civic duty to show up in these kinds of primaries,” Barnes said. The behavior may push voters to consider the other options in the race, he said.
Ben Toma, speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, has promoted his leadership on tax cuts and school choice in a state legislature with margins similar to Congress. Toma, whose family fled communism in Romania when he was a child, is soft-spoken and likable with “all the makings of a guy that is not being the loudest, but might be the plurality winner,” Barnes said.
Former US Rep. Trent Franks has said his congressional seniority puts his experience above the other candidates. Franks resigned in 2017 amid claims that he had discussed surrogacy with female staffers, and those Google search results could be tough to overcome, Marson said.
Political newcomer Patrick “Pat” Briody is running primarily on term limits in Congress because “it wasn’t meant by our founders, I feel, to go there and be there forever,” he said in an interview.
State Sen. Anthony Kern is also touting support he got from Trump during his 2022 statehouse election. He was among the Arizona officials indicted on charges they plotted to falsely certify the 2020 election for the former president. His campaign paints him as the race’s Trump-backing “hometown hero.”
“He was in DC on January 6, and he’ll do it again,” Kern spokesman Ron Smith told the audience at the Patriot forum. “He signed the elector documents and he’ll do it again, if he’s asked, because he supports the president.”
Those other candidates aren’t without name recognition or funding. Franks had nearly $268,000 on hand as of July 10, and Toma had roughly $170,000.
Tuesday’s winner will face Democrat Gregory Whitten in November, though he’s not expected to mount much of a challenge. Democrats only ran write-in candidates for the district in 2022, where Lesko was reelected with nearly 97% of the vote.
Hamadeh and Masters began the final stretch in typical fashion, trading social media barbs and plotting a weekend of door-knocking and phone calls.
Election Day essentially started weeks ago, with most voters statewide choosing to receive their ballots by mail, Barnes said. It’s time for candidates to track down ballots still sitting on kitchen tables in a race where rallying supporters could provide the winning edge, he said.
“Because the race is divided between a number of profile people, I think anything is possible,” Barnes said.
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