How to Lose a Swing State

[Nevilledog]

Arizona is moving left. But the state GOP chair, Kelli Ward, is doubling down on Trumpism.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/07/trump-turning-arizona-blue/614572/

Donald Trump needs Arizona on his side in November. Losing the state and its 11 Electoral College votes would, at the very least, mean a drastically narrower path back to the White House. Keeping Arizona red shouldn’t be a challenge; the state has long been a Republican stronghold. But Arizona is changing rapidly, and right now, the forecast for the GOP looks grim: In 2018, Kyrsten Sinema became the first Democrat to win a Senate race in the state since the 1980s, and Joe Biden has been leading in the presidential polls there for weeks. In this year’s Senate race, the astronaut turned Democratic candidate Mark Kelly is ahead of the incumbent Republican Martha McSally by a comfortable margin. And after the state was reopened by its Republican governor, it experienced a massive surge in COVID-19 infections.

One might think that, in its moment of peril, the Arizona GOP would attempt to win over moderates. Yet the person charged with shepherding the party to victory in this most crucial moment is the state GOP chairperson Kelli Ward, a pro-Trump zealot with a soft spot for conspiracy theories, a woman who is most famous for her failed primary challenge to Republican Senator John McCain in 2016. Just as polls show Arizonans—especially those in the suburbs—souring on Trump, the state party has veered sharply to the right.

Despite its history as the home of Barry Goldwater conservatism, the Grand Canyon State has been known, in recent years, for electing gentler establishment types such as McCain, Jeff Flake, and Jon Kyl. The 51-year-old Ward is a different sort of Republican. During her time as a state senator representing parts of the ultra-red La Paz and Mohave Counties in northwest Arizona, Ward paid a visit to Cliven Bundy’s Nevada ranch in solidarity with the rancher’s standoff against the Bureau of Land Management; suggested that the Affordable Care Act was part of a broader plot to push rural Americans into urban areas; and entertained constituent concerns about the chemtrail conspiracy theory, the idea that the government is using airplanes to poison American citizens. In 2016, during her Tea Party–style challenge to McCain, Ward defended Trump’s attacks on the senator’s experience as a prisoner of war. Later, in a primary bid against McSally, Ward made national headlines for suggesting that the McCain family had deliberately timed an announcement about the senator’s brain cancer to damage her campaign. (She lost both primary elections—badly.)

But as Republicans nationwide began to embrace Trumpism, Ward moved from the fringes of the party to its center. She was elected the state party’s chair in 2019, and has since used her perch primarily to help wage the president’s wars. Most recently, Ward, who is a family physician with a master’s degree in public health, made headlines for encouraging protesters planning to demonstrate against local stay-at-home orders to dress like health-care workers. She and her husband, Mike, an ER doctor, appear regularly on Facebook Live to discuss “fake news” and the tyranny of mask laws, while sipping coffee out of bright-red Trump mugs. In the past month alone, Ward has tweeted warnings about the threat of “antifa,” compared The New York Times to the devil, and shared multiple videos of Black teenagers fighting and looting stores.

*snip*

[dawg day]

1. The chemtrail lady!

Right-wing medical/science people are ...odd. I have a colleague who is a biochemist, highly educated in science and research and the scientific method, and he doesn't believe climate change is happening. Or he thinks it's happening, but it's 'natural'-- not manmade, so why bother to try to stop it. He has all these graphs (unattributed) which he says shows that it's not happening, or it has nothing to do with human activity, or there's nothing we can do anyway. (Each chart actually is in contradiction to the others, but he doesn't notice.) If we ask, who did these charts, he shrugs and says he forgets (and unlike any actual chart from a scientist ever, there's no "source" attribution at the bottom).
A scientist of course cares about sources... but he chooses not to care. A scientist cares about methodology and replicability, but he chooses not to care.

And when I say the really obvious, that pollution and reliance on fossil fuels are bad no matter what, so why not diminish them and if it helps the climate, all the better, also that Europe especially and also China and Japan are getting way ahead of us in the innovation that will make a whole new industry really soon... he says that's all 'beside the point.' The point for him has become denying what the climate scientists (those snooty ones! I gather that's his reason for disliking them?) pretty much almost universally agree on.

Anyway, this Kelli Ward and her husband are both doctors, and apparently they think being against everything the libs are for (plus also being against chemtrails!) is more important than the pandemic that is ruining the health of the nation.

[Midnight Writer]

3. Same with Right wing religious people. They act totally contrary to their faith.

[msongs]

2. the republicans have a health plan. it's called get sick and die nt

[qwlauren35]

4. What a Disaster for Arizona

When the family physician says you don't need a mask, well, who do you believe?