Republicans running statewide in one battleground state are dreading a political albatross they say President Donald Trump simply won't let them shed.
Arizona GOP operatives told Politico Magazine in a report published Saturday that Trump's refusal to accept his 2020 loss keeps resurfacing on the campaign trail, putting the party's nominees on the defensive heading into the midterms.
"If I could wave a magic wand and make these questions go away, I would. But we can't. It's baked in," said one Republican strategist working on competitive races, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Another GOP strategist on a tight race echoed that frustration.
"We can't escape it," the strategist said. "We can tell people we want to move on, but that doesn't stop it from coming up over and over and over and over."
The party's ticket is stacked with nominees tied to efforts to overturn the 2020 results. Rep. Andy Biggs, running for governor, objected to the electoral count on January 6, 2021. Secretary of state nominee Alex Kolodin was disciplined by the state bar over his work on 2020 election challenges, and attorney general nominee Warren Petersen pressed then-Vice President Mike Pence to hold off on certifying.
Those candidates mostly sidestep questions about 2020, preferring to talk about issues facing voters now. But Trump keeps reviving the fight. His administration subpoenaed Maricopa County's 2020 voting records in March, and he boasted at the GOP's midterm convention in Dallas last month that, "We won the presidency three times."
"A lot of the country wants to move on, frankly, from the 2020 election," former Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) told Politico. "But the problem is the president keeps bringing it up."
Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, recalled watching her Republican predecessor Doug Ducey silence his phone in late 2020 as it played "Hail to the Chief," the ringtone he used for Trump's calls, before certifying the state's results.
"I can't say that Andy Biggs would do the same thing," Hobbs said. "If he's the governor, Arizona is the first swing state with an election denier in charge."
Biggs, Kolodin and Petersen did not respond to Politico's requests for comment.