By that standard, no one can accuse Blake Masters and Abe Hamadeh of not trying their hardest to win.
Masters and Hamadeh are two of the biggest names — and biggest MAGA-heads — running in Arizona’s wackiest and most chaotic congressional primary. The race for the Republican nomination in Arizona’s 8th Congressional District — incumbent Rep. Debbie Lesko announced in October she would not seek reelection — has become Nutjob Central.
Arizona Speaker of the House Ben Toma, whose leadership of the chamber has included a failed push to keep an 1864 near-total abortion ban on the books, also is in the race. So is disgraced former Rep. Trent Franks, who resigned in 2017 after asking two female staffers to have his children as surrogate mothers.
Yet, it’s Masters and Hamadeh, neither of whom has ever won anything other than a primary, who have stolen all the attention. And they’ve done it not with wonky policy debates or impassioned pleas to voters but instead with overt, bad-faith mudslinging. Mostly aimed at each other.
It’s an unsurprising but odd turn of events, considering the two seem to have so much in common. On most occasions, Masters and Hamadeh would be easy companions in their undying public worship of convicted felon and former President Donald Trump. Instead, they’re locked in a war of mutually assured destruction — two 30-something men leaking texts and referencing blog and social media posts from when they were teens.
Here’s a recap of the funniest and saddest bro fight in Arizona.
Texts leaked to the Arizona Republic revealed Abe Hamadeh, who owes $200,000 in court fees for his attempts to overturn the 2022 election, was dismissive of election-denying "crazies."
TJ L'Heureux
Leaked texts
Masters and Hamadeh used to be two of MAGA’s brightest stars in Arizona. Masters won the primary to take on incumbent U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly in 2022, while Hamadeh earned the Republican Party’s nod for attorney general. Then, they both lost.Kelly handily beat Masters, who one Republican operative reportedly claimed “had scored the worst focus group results of any candidate he had ever seen.” Hamadeh lost to Kris Mayes by a mere 280 votes, but he has continually embarrassed himself by attempting to overturn the result ever since.
Now both have launched comeback attempts to represent a district that neither lived in before the race started — and Masters still doesn’t. Both have relied heavily on sugar daddies during races, with Hamadeh taking at least $1 million from his brother and Masters counting on significant support from his billionaire friend, Peter Thiel.
And both, apparently, can’t stand each other.
A portion of their battle has played out in the Arizona Republic, which reported that text messages between the two in January 2023 showed Hamadeh referring to propagators of stolen election conspiracy theories as “crazies.” That’s a group to which Hamadeh wants to belong. As of May 30, he reportedly owed $200,000 in court fees stemming from his ongoing effort to overturn the results of the 2022 election.
"No matter what happens, I'm winning right now. I'm not lumped in with crazies with election stuff because I'm so close at 280," Hamadeh wrote in the text messages, referring to his narrow loss. "But the crazies love (me) because they see me fighting."
Blake Masters has been attacked by his primary opponent for endorsing illegal immigration as a teen and living in a nudist commune in college.
Gage Skidmore
A nudist vegan commune?
But mostly, their skirmish has played out in attack ads that are becoming more outrageous by the day.In an ad released May 22, Hamadeh claimed Masters “says unrestricted illegal immigration is the only choice for America.” While it certainly is not true that Masters believes that now — a Masters ad released on May 10 said he “will stand firm against the open border liberals” — he did once write something close to it in 2005 when he was a 19-year-old student at Stanford University. In a blog post originally resurfaced by Jewish Insider in 2022, Masters envisioned an immigration system in which “people are free to move from place to place, so long as they do not violate the property rights of the owners.”
Hamadeh’s ad also said that “Masters even praised drug dealers bringing narcotics into America as heroes.” That is mostly true, except that Masters wasn’t talking about drug dealers in general. He was talking about U.S. law enforcement agents and military members who were caught smuggling drugs nearly 20 years ago. Masters defended the crimes in another 2005 blog post.
“For seeking a profit while conducting trade between groups of consenting adults, in the face of government oppression, these men and women arrested in the latest cocaine sting are heroes,” Masters wrote. “By moving these drugs, the National Guard and military members helped to lower its market price, making it more affordable for users to obtain, which, if left alone by the DEA and FBI, would reduce drug related crime significantly.”
Of course, those are not positions Masters is taking in this race.
But that Hamadeh ad is tame compared with the one he released on Monday. In it, Hamadeh claimed Masters lived in a nudist vegan commune (true) where members led pro-Hamas riots (seems like a stretch in several ways) and played on the women’s basketball team (he practiced with them).
Though he's lobbed ridiculous attacks of his own, Abe Hamadeh has been the target of Islamophobic campaign ads.
Gage Skidmore
Islamophobic attacks
Masters’ ads have played just as fast and loose with the truth. Several, as well as one run by American Principles Project PAC, have Islamophobic rhetoric and images, as well as a picture of Hamadeh in Mecca.A May 10 Masters ad claimed “Abe Hamadeh said America was founded on Islamic principles,” based on something Hamadeh wrote on a Reddit-like site for Libertarian and former U.S. presidential candidate Ron Paul in 2009. According to the non-profit publication NOTUS, Hamadeh said the U.S. Constitution was “based off of Abrahamic religions, including Islam.” The other two religions that recognize Abraham as their first prophet, it’s worth noting, are Christianity and Judaism.
The same ad claimed Hamadeh blamed Israel for the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S., which, well, he did at one point. But just like Hamadeh’s attacks on Masters, Hamadeh’s general view toward Israel has done a 180-degree turn. The Arab-American whose grandfather was killed by Israeli soldiers in the 1973 Yom Kippur War has become a stalwart supporter of the country whose war in Gaza has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians.
For the majority of Arizonans who rejected both Masters and Hamadeh at the ballot box in 2022, there’s nothing to do but sit back and laugh, cry or both as the two men waste campaign funds to relitigate their teenage years. Come November, one of these two may represent Arizona in the U.S. House.
Until then, though, keep the ads coming, boys. They’re the funniest thing on TV.
