Photo: Ross D Franklin/AP/Shutterstock; Sarah Rice for The Washington Post via Getty Images; Kyle Rivas/Getty Images
Candidates closely aligned with former PresidentDonald Trumpand who share his stubborn stance on the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election, which he lost to PresidentJoe Biden, won Republican primaries in several key states Tuesday.
In Michigan, former Trump administration official John Gibbs defeated Republican Rep. Peter Meijer, one of10 Republicans who voted to impeachthe former president in 2021 after his supporters rioted at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
Gibbs, who Trump appointed to the Department of Housing and Urban Development during his presidency, has said Biden’s win in 2020 was “mathematically impossible,” according toThe Detroit News.
“I’m very proud of you, John,” Trump told Gibbs in a late-night phone call after it was clear he’d defeated Meijer on Tuesday,The Detroit Newsreported.
Also in Michigan, businesswoman and conservative media personalityTudor Dixonwill be the Republican nominee for governor, afterdefeating four male candidatesin the primary. Dixon, who just earned Trump’s endorsement on Friday, will face Democratic incumbent Gov.Gretchen Whitmerin November.
When a moderator asked candidates during a May debate if they believed Trump won Michigan in the 2020 presidential race, Dixon, 45, raised her hand, even though the former president earned about 154,000 less votes than Biden.
Kent Nishimura/instagram
In response to Dixon’s victory, Nancy Wang, executive director ofVoters Not Politicians— the preeminent voting rights and democracy organization in Michigan — said in a statement: “Tonight we are dismayed to see the GOP celebrate and validate the gubernatorial candidacy of a well-known election denier, who has repeatedly shown she is a danger to our democracy.”
In Arizona, state lawmaker and 2020 election denierMark Finchemwon the GOP primary election for secretary of state, a position that can influence how elections are run in the state.
Finchem attended the Trump rally on Jan. 6, 2021, that preceded the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol. He also pushed for Arizona’s legislature to overturn the 2020 election results,the AP reports, and claimed that tens of thousands of Arizona falsified ballots helped Biden win the state’s electoral votes.
“What happens when the People feel they have been ignored, and Congress refuses to acknowledge rampant fraud,” Finchemtweeted Jan. 6, 2021, with a photo of mob of flag-waving Trump supporters outside the Capitol.
Finchem, who haspublicly admitted his affiliationwith theOath Keepers, a far-right militia group, defeated three other GOP candidates in the race for secretary of state.
Blake Masters, who earned Trump’s endorsement in June and said he believed the former president won in 2020, was the victor in the GOP primary for U.S. Senate in Arizona, defeating former businessman Jim Lamon and Arizona Attorney GeneralMark Brnovich.
Blake Masters.Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty
Masters said in arecent NBC News interviewthat he would have objected to the 2020 presidential election certification on Jan. 6, 2021, had he been a sitting senator at the time. “What [Sen. Josh] Hawley and, I believe, what [Sen. Ted] Cruz did was right,” Masters said, referring to two senators who did just that. “I think their constituents had a lot of concerns.”
Former state senator David Farnsworth, who said he believes that thedevil stole the election from Trumpin 2020, defeated Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, one of the Jan. 6 committee’s witnesses who testified at a televised Capitol Hill hearing about the former president’s unsuccessful pressure campaign to overturn the 2020 election.
Trump called Bowers a “RINO,” a favorite insult of the former president that stands for “Republican in name only, in hisendorsement of Farnsworth in June.
Eric Greitens.Jeff Roberson/AP Photo
In Missouri, FormerGov. Eric Greitenswasdefeated in the state’s U.S. Senate primary Tuesday, losing the Republican nomination toEric Schmitt, the state’s attorney general.
Schmitt and 17 other attorneys general supported a Texas-led lawsuit that sought to overturn the 2020 election results in four key states Trump lost — Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. The U.S. Supreme Courtrejected the suit in December 2020.
Schmitt will face the winner of Tuesday’s Democratic primary, nurse and Anheuser-Busch heir Trudy Busch Valentine, in November.
Trumpvaguely endorsed “ERIC"just ahead of the Missouri primary, but in a bizarre twist didn’t say whether he meant Greitens, Schmitt or Eric McElroy, all of whom were on the ballot.
source: people.com
