As final votes are tallied in the 2024 primary elections, the 33-year-old Hamadeh has emerged at the head of the pack in the crowded Republican primary in Congressional District 8. The northwest Valley district is a safe GOP stronghold that has been represented by Rep. Debbie Lesko since 2018.
As of 5:23 p.m. according to the Arizona secretary of state, Hamadeh had notched 29.8% of votes in the primary. About 4,000 votes behind him was Blake Masters. Both are MAGA fans who lost races for statewide office in 2022 — Masters for Senate, Hamadeh for attorney general — who spent much of the lead-up to the primary sniping at each other.
The victory, called by DecisionDeskHQ at about 5 p.m. Wednesday and claimed by Hamadeh on social media, gives the Republican attorney a clear path to a seat in the U.S. House.
“They underestimated me because they underestimate the American people,” Hamadeh wrote on social media. “We are stronger than they can ever even imagine.” Erica Knight, a spokesperson for Hamadeh, declined to comment on the results to Phoenix New Times.
The district’s GOP primary has been one of Arizona’s wackiest and most closely watched political freak show contests. With five notable far-right candidates piling into the race, Hamadeh grabbed an early advantage by nabbing an endorsement from convicted felon and former President Donald Trump. Just days before voting ended, though, Trump made a puzzling move by also endorsing Masters.
Days earlier, Masters had tweeted in support of Trump’s vice president nominee, J.D. Vance — who previously had endorsed Masters over Hamadeh in the race — after news reports dug up a Tucker Carlson interview in which Vance said childless women should have less say in American democracy.
Running to replace Lesko was a second chance for both Hamadeh and Masters to actually earn elected office. In 2022, Hamadeh lost by only 280 votes to Kris Mayes in the attorney general race, while U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly handily beat Masters to retain his seat. The other candidates in the crowded field for the Republican nomination made up a coterie of Arizona’s most deranged, disgraced and notorious right-wing politicians.
One was Arizona House Speaker Ben Toma, who led a failed push to keep an 1864 near-total abortion ban on the books and passed laws that subsidized private education. Another was state Sen. Anthony Kern, a Christian nationalist bulldog who was at the Jan. 6 insurrection and has been indicted as a fake elector. Former U.S. Rep. Trent Franks, who represented the district but resigned in 2017 after reports surfaced of him repeatedly asking two female staffers to have his children as surrogate mothers, also ran.
All three sit behind Hamadeh and Masters in the vote tally. Toma came in third place with 21.2% of votes, despite being a prominent state official and the only one of the top three vote-getters who actually lives in the district. Franks in fourth with 16.5%, and Kern fifth with a lackluster 4.7%.
The losses for Toma and Kern means at least a temporary end to their time in public office, as their terms in the state legislature will end in January.
U.S. Rep. Debbie Lesko chose not to seek reelection in order to run for county supervisor.
Drew Angerer / Getty Images
A look back at the campaign
When Lesko announced she would not run for reelection, Republicans rushed to throw their hats in the ring for the deep-red district. Hamadeh did not live in the district at the time, and Masters still lives about 120 miles away in Tucson.Still, the two MAGA bros took up most of the oxygen in the race by constantly attacking each other. The pair sniped at each other with dumb, nasty campaign ads that dug up missives the other penned in college.
When not attacking Masters, Hamadeh focused his campaign on supporting Trump. “President Trump is under attack,” Hamadeh tweeted in his campaign announcement last fall. “He needs back up — and I’m ready to help him Make America Great Again.”
Ironically, Hamadeh positioned himself slightly to the left of his fellow right-wing extremists during a June debate. While other candidates supported the idea of creating federal laws restricting abortion, Hamadeh was the only candidate who stuck with what Trump and U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake have suggested: that abortion laws should be left to the states.
Hamadeh also drew scrutiny for his campaign funding. His political action committee raked in a $1 million donation from his brother, Waseem, in December, which at the time made up the vast majority of his funding. In 2022, Waseem gave Hamadeh's failed campaign for Arizona attorney general a $1 million loan. This year, the campaign also received a $400,000 loan that looks like an attempt to skirt campaign finance law.
Masters’ campaign was mostly self-funded, with about $3.5 million of the $4 million he raised coming from himself.
Much of those funds were spent lobbing bombs at each other, and there was a chance that the two aspiring politicians would split the MAGA vote — especially after Trump’s double endorsement — and send someone like Toma to Congress. Instead, Hamadeh is looking at an easy run through the general election.
If elected in November, he’ll likely be one of the youngest members of Congress. The only current member who is younger than Hamadeh is Rep. Maxwell Frost, who is a 27-year-old Democrat from Florida.
