Trump 'rallies' with Arizona's Lake and Masters by phone

A couple of hours before Barack Obama took the stage in Laveen to stump for Democrats, Kari Lake’s campaign held a tele-rally with former President Donald Trump and other Republican candidates. 

Trump, Lake and U.S. Senate candidate Blake Masters focused largely on border security and the economy. 

Masters took aim at President Joe Biden for stopping the construction of the border wall, blaming the decision for the influx of immigrants. From Oct. 2021 through Sept. 2022, the latest available data, there have been 2.4 million border encounters. 

“They halted the border wall — President Trump’s big beautiful wall. Biden stopped construction,” Masters said. “They disempowered our Border Patrol. They reversed Trump’s policies, like Remain in Mexico. It was working, and Joe Biden and (U.S. Sen.) Mark Kelly actively incentivized four million illegal aliens to come here.”

When Biden announced the elimination of the Remain in Mexico policy, which forced asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico while their claims were processed, Kelly called for the decision to be delayed. Another Trump-era policy, Title 42, remains in effect and is attributed, in part, to the higher numbers at the southern border, which are themselves a result of multiple crossings by migrants, not a spike in actual encounters. 

While the construction of Trump’s border wall was initially halted, the Biden administration has announced plans to install mesh fencing and vehicle gates next year. 

Democrats and the Biden administration were blamed for the rise in gas prices and inflation. 

“Two years ago, $1.87 gasoline. Now, today, they just announced in certain parts of California — and you’ll be catching up very soon — $7.77,” Trump warned. 

Masters blamed Democrats for turning away from gas and oil industries and said the administration printing $6 trillion caused the current skyrocketing inflation rate of 13% in Arizona. The Biden administration approved a $6 trillion dollar budget for the year in May. The rise in inflation which is at 8.3% nationally and 13% in the Phoenix metro area has been worsened by supply and demand issues stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Trump touted the GOP candidates as the best choice for voters looking for an answer to concerns about the LGBTQ community and critical race theory, both focal points of the Republican culture war. 

“We will ban critical race theory in our children’s schools. We’ll keep men out of women’s sports. They say, ‘Oh, please don’t say that, it’s not politically correct.’ No, we will keep men out of women’s sports and we will defend school choice in Arizona,” he said. “We’ll protect the Second Amendment, we’ll protect free speech and we’ll preserve the Judeo-Christian principles of our nation’s founding.” 

Trump also congratulated Masters and Lake for their supposed large leads in polling, saying he had seen surveys which showed Masters and Lake overtaking their opponents by large margins. 

In reality, both races are incredibly close: Masters has made gains on Kelly and is narrowly behind him in most available polling, while polling has consistently shown Lake with a small lead over Democrat Katie Hobbs, though often in a statistical dead heat. 

Masters himself acknowledged this in his closing remarks, urging listeners to vote as his race is currently “neck and neck”. 

The only mentions of election fraud came from gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake. 

“We’re (going) to secure our elections and bring back honest elections that are transparent. Every Democrat, Republican and Independent in Arizona will know when they go to bed on election night. They’ll know the winner, they won’t be waiting 10 days for it, and they will know it was a fair and honest election,” she said. 

While most ballots are counted and reported on election night, many thousands are tallied later. The vast majority of those are early ballots dropped off at polling places on Election Day. While early ballots returned prior to that can be verified and tabulated before voters head to the polls, the so-called “late earlies” aren’t processed until the following day.

Additionally, Arizona law requires counties to give voters five days to confirm their ballot if there is a problem verifying signatures on early ballots. 

Lake vowed to take on border security as her first priority if elected, and to continue the building of Trump’s border wall. But, she said, her office would need the support of like-minded Republicans across the state. 

“The things that I want to do for Arizona include securing that border, stopping the flow of fentanyl and building President Trump’s wall. I gotta have people like Abe Hamadeh as AG in order to make that happen,” she said. “Securing our elections so your one legal vote counts and we know who won on election night. I gotta have Mark Finchem as secretary of state to make that happen. And we’ve gotta have Blake Masters and all of our congressional folks be Republican to go back to Washington and fight for us there.”