Former President Donald Trump, left, embraces Republican candidate for governor Kari Lake at a "Save America" rally in support of Arizona GOP candidates on July 22, 2022, in Prescott Valley, Arizona. Arizona's primary election will take place Aug. 2. (Mario Tama/Getty Images/TNS)
On a recent weekday morning, Steve Arechiga swung by the library to pick up a book he’d reserved. It was a history of authoritarian strongmen, starting with Mussolini. The topic seemed unnervingly immediate.
Arechiga is a political independent. He’s so concerned, however, about the falsehoods promoted by four of Arizona’s statewide Republican candidates — the claim President Joe Biden stole the White House, the lie that the 2020 election was rife with fraud — that Arechiga has been going door to door in this upscale Tucson suburb campaigning for Democrats.
It’s bad enough, he said, that candidates like gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake and Senate hopeful Blake Masters refuse to acknowledge President Donald Trump’s defeat. Worse, Arechiga suggested, is what might come in 2024 if Lake and the GOP candidates for secretary of state, Mark Finchem, and attorney general, Abraham Hamadeh, seize hold of the state’s election machinery.
“Then you’ve got liars running the show. People who are in charge making decisions that suit themselves” said Arechiga, 69, who taught English as a second language before retiring. As he spoke, a steady stream of voters trickled in to drop off or cast early ballots at the public library, its slanted rooftop emulating the soaring peaks of the nearby Santa Catalina Mountains.
“I just think that’s the road to authoritarianism,” Arechiga went on, “People saying, ‘We’re going to do it our way and everyone else gets pushed aside that doesn’t agree with us.’ That’s the fear I have.”
After the unprecedented storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 and Trump’s relentless peddling of his stolen-election fable, it seemed the fate of democracy itself would be central to the debate this ragged campaign season.
With a few exceptions — Senate races in Nevada and Utah, the gubernatorial election in Pennsylvania, a handful of other contests where culprits in the insurrection are running — that hasn’t been the case.
But nowhere is there an election-denier slate like in Arizona.
In many ways, Arizona lies at the heart of the still-roiling fight over 2020.
When Fox News called the state for Biden it sent Trump into an election night rage, undermining his plans to prematurely declare victory and bolster his bogus claim to a second term. Leaders of the state GOP filed one of many fruitless lawsuits aimed at overturning the election, and two of Arizona’s Republican congressmen helped promote the rally that ended in the attack on Congress.
The Democrats running — incumbent U.S. Sen Mark Kelly, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs for governor, Adrian Fontes for secretary of state and Kris Mayes for attorney general — have all rejected claims of a rigged 2020 election, promising to protect voting integrity.
If they prevail, it will be in part because of voters like Raul Martinez.
He’s not particularly happy with the status quo. “Nowadays everything costs more,” Martinez said, as he headed to the grocery store in Casa Grande. “Gas prices, food prices.”
He spends close to $200 a week gassing up his cherry-red Toyota Tacoma, which the 47-year-old Martinez pilots between his home in Phoenix and a mechanical engineering job nearly 50 miles away in Casa Grande.
His frustration caused the longtime Democrat to question his loyalty to the party and consider whether a vote for Lake, Masters and other Republicans might bring about change. But their assertions of a stolen election give him pause.
“Very far-fetched,” Martinez said of the corrosive claims. “They’re not going down the right path with that.”
He’s right. Arizona faces a dangerous road on Nov. 8.
Mark Z. Barabak is a Los Angeles Times columnist focusing on politics in California and the West. ©2022 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.
Originally published at Mark Z. Barabak