Blake Masters just lost another election.
The former venture capitalist, an ideological ally of Sen. JD Vance of Ohio and tech billionaire Peter Thiel, was defeated by Abe Hamadeh in a crowded GOP primary in Arizona’s 8th congressional district.
That’s despite getting a last-minute boost from Donald Trump. After initially endorsing just Hamadeh several months ago, the former president issued a dual endorsement of both Masters and Hamadeh in the final days of the race. That came after Vance, who’d supported Masters from the beginning, became Trump’s running mate.
This is the second time Masters has lost an election in two years. In 2022, when he was the GOP nominee for US Senate in Arizona, he was handily defeated by Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona.
It came after a remarkably nasty campaign, where Masters — who lives over 100 miles away from the Phoenix-area House district where he was running — painted Hamadeh as sympathetic to terrorists and sought to make an issue out of his Muslim background.
The race first began last fall when incumbent Rep. Debbie Lesko decided to retire in the midst of the House’s struggle to elect a new speaker.
Who is Abe Hamadeh?
Given the GOP lean of the district, the 33-year-old Hamadeh is almost certain to be elected to Congress in November.
Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
A former prosecutor, he’s a close ally of Kari Lake, the former gubernatorial candidate who officially became the GOP nominee for US Senate on Tuesday.
Much like Lake, he still has conceded his 2022 statewide loss: Hamadeh was the party’s nominee for state attorney general, and he was ultimately defeated by Democrat Kris Mayes by just 280 votes. He has since filed four lawsuits over the results. He also still suggests that Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 election.
Hamadeh also has an unusual background for a GOP candidate. He’s the son of Syrian immigrants, a Muslim father and a Druze mother, who faced a deportation order in 1996 after overstaying their visas. They were ultimately allowed to stay in the country in part because their children, including Hamadeh, were citizens. Masters’s campaign had gone as far as to call Hamadeh an “anchor baby.”
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