Failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake was given a gift by her opponent Blake Masters Thursday when he dropped out of the GOP race for a U.S. Senate seat in 2024, thereby eliminating the threat of an ugly primary campaign between the two.
With Masters instead planning to run for the House seat that's being vacated by Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-AZ), that should have been the end of their feuding – but then Lake created more problems moments after his announcement.
According to a report from the Daily Beast, Lake chose to endorse an ally of hers for the same congressional seat which, in turn, has Republicans in the state rolling their eyes.
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Abraham Hamadeh immediately announced he had Lake's endorsement, a disclosure that led one Arizona GOP operative to state it was a “proxy war without proxies!”
Speaking with the Beast's Zachary Petrizzo, another operative got right to the point about the problem with Lake as a supposed Republican kingmaker in her state, while making the case that she and Masters truly don't like each other.
“I don’t think they are friends. On the campaign, the Blake and Lake thing looked great on stage, but I don’t think they were particularly close,” they said before adding Masters is a “true intellectual,” while “Kari is an intellectual nit-wit.”
According to the report, Hamadeh's decision to run caught Republican insiders by surprise and there are suspicions Lake put him up to it.
As one GOP operative put it, "Clearly, she got him into this race. There are a lot of people that like Kari for what she’s doing, but aren’t that interested in her purse chihuahua.”
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