Trump-backed election deniers poised to sweep top Arizona primaries. Can they win in November?

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1. 'Republican ''doomday ticket'' reader for November

“ . . . I will call in a bit to talk about the doomsday ticket,” Barrett Marson, a Republican political strategist in the state, said today, when Nightly reached out to him to talk about the results. “Let me wake up and finish crying.”

A prominent Republican in the state had texted him a GIF of Thelma and Louise driving off the cliff.

Marson’s concerns are shared by mainstream Republicans in other states. But Arizona has an especially toxic relationship with Trump. The GOP during his tenure lost two Senate seats and a presidential election in the state for the first time since 1996. Trump-ism, as was painfully obvious to the GOP in Arizona in 2020, is a hard sell in Phoenix and its heavily populated suburbs.

Yet if Trump-y politics are difficult for the GOP in Arizona, that’s about all the state party has going . . . '

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