MAGA warrior Mark Finchem is a leading contender to be Arizona’s next secretary of state and to take over the Arizona elections. If he loses, Finchem said he will not concede the election.
In the spring of this year, Finchem was in Mar-a-Lago for the premiere of a documentary advancing the specious notion that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from former president Donald Trump by an army of leftists stuffing election boxes with absentee ballots.
As a state representative and candidate for secretary of state in Arizona, Finchem was a small name among the assembled MAGA big stars, including massive names like Rudolph Giuliani and conspiracy theorist and far-right Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.
But Finchem had his face time with Trump.
During a campaign stop, Finchem bragged that Trump gave him 20 minutes of face time and that Trump said “I want you to understand something. The Arizona secretary of state race is the most important race in the United States.”
Arizona holds a very special place in Trump’s map of election indignities. The state was the onetime Republican stronghold where, President Joe Biden’s narrow and crucial victory was first called by, of all networks, his favorite, Fox News.
Should Trump run again for president in 2024, a friendly secretary of state, as the administrator of the state’s elections, could be in a position to help him avoid a repeated loss once again.
Now Arizona is currently preparing for its primaries on Tuesday. Finchem is the candidate of a Trump-backed America First coalition of more than a dozen 2020 election deniers who have sought once-obscure secretary of state posts across the country.
While most of them have been considered extremist long shots, a recent poll gave Finchem an edge in Arizona’s four-way Republican race. However, there is a significant majority of voters are undecided.
Finchem’s campaign pronouncements are a testament to the evolution of the “Stop the Steal” movement. His campaign is just as much about influencing future elections as it is about what happened in 2020.
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