Washington, DC — In the 2022 attorney general race in Arizona, while extremist GOP candidate Abe Hamadeh ran on Donald Trump’s fabricated claims of a stolen election, AG Kris Mayes ran on restoring democracy — and won. Now she’s governing like it, while Hamadeh is still falsely claiming voter fraud after he lost. 

The Washington Post revealed, “Bad candidates cost the Republican Party plenty in the 2022 election. But with the possible exception of Michigan, in no state did they cost their party like they did in Arizona.”

WaPo continues, “Most of its statewide GOP candidates ran the kind of election-denying, Trump-aligned general-election campaigns that other candidates mostly shied after their primaries. The result: While the GOP had strong turnout, did relatively well down-ballot and won the state treasurer’s race by double digits, it lost campaigns for Senate, governor, attorney general and secretary of state.”

“GOP nominee Abe Hamadeh lost about 41,000 voters who otherwise cast their ballots for mostly Republicans, and 33,000 of them voted for his Democratic opponent. That’s compared to now-Attorney General Kris Mayes’s (D) loss of 11,000 mostly Democratic voters, 6,000 of whom voted for the Hamadeh, respectively. Given that Hamadeh lost by just 280 votes, this — among many other factors — apparently flipped the race.”

“Both Lake and Hamadeh have claimed unsuccessfully and without real evidence that these races were rigged; these data show pretty conclusively that they forfeited their races by alienating a potentially decisive number of would-be supporters.”

And now AG Mayes is governing on the mainstream, pro-democracy campaign she ran. As The New York Times reported, “Arizona’s new Democratic attorney general, Kris Mayes, is redirecting an election integrity unit her Republican predecessor created, focusing its work instead on addressing voter suppression. The shift by Ms. Mayes is one of her first acts since she took office this month…

The Times continued, “Ms. Mayes said that protecting voting access and limiting voter suppression would be at the forefront of her administration…“‘I will also use this unit to protect elections officials, election volunteers and poll workers against threats of violence and against interference in our elections,’ she said. In addition, the unit will seek to defend vote-by-mail rules, which she said “90 percent of Arizonans enjoy and in many cases depend on.’”

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