Halloween comes early as Kari Lake and the Trump slate try to woo independents

As early ballots hit voters’ mailboxes this week, the Great MAGA Makeover continues for Kari Lake and the rest of Donald Trump’s Arizona slate of candidates.

Lately, I hardly recognize this crew – a cast of hard-right avengers who have spent the last year railing about a stolen election, calling for an end to abortion and generally lambasting any Republican who isn’t sufficiently loyal to the Party of Trump.

Now we are witnessing a wholesale group epiphany, a lightning bolt of illumination suggesting that they have moved on from some of their more extreme views. Either that, or somebody’s been reading public opinion polls.

Simply put, they cannot win without winning over voters in the middle and they know it.

Masters tweaked his abortion, election views

Consider Blake Masters.

The Senate candidate now says he’s OK with allowing abortions up to 15 weeks of pregnancy.

This, from a man who spent most of the last year calling for a national abortion ban, telling one conservative podcater that the practice is “demonic”.

During Thursday’s Senate debate, Masters said that he hasn’t seen any evidence of fraud in the 2020 election and noted that Joe Biden was is the “legitimate president”. (Instead, he blamed Trump’s loss on a conspiracy by Big Tech, the media and the FBI to cover up “the Hunter Biden crime story”.)

Yet just a few months ago, he called the election a “rotten mess” and said he wouldn’t have voted to certify it had he been in the Senate on Jan. 6, 2021.

“We need to get serious about election integrity,” he wrote, in a statement that was scrubbed from his campaign website after his primary win. “The 2020 election was a rotten mess – if we had had a free and fair election, President Trump would be sitting in the Oval Office today and America would be so much better off.”

Even Finchem is moderating (sort of)

Consider Mark Finchem.

When asked last week by KTAR’s Larry Gaydos whether he thought Joe Biden won the 2020 election, Finchem couldn’t say.

“It’s not a yes or no answer,” he replied. “I have questions.”

This, from one of the state’s loudest Stop the Stealers, a legislator who since November 2020 has promoted conspiracy theories about the many ways in which the 2020 election was supposedly rigged. He raced around the country calling for the election to be decertified based upon a Senate audit that turned up no evidence of widespread fraud. He even called for the arrest of Secretary of State Katie Hobbs and his opponent, then Maricopa County Recorder Adrian Fontes.

And now he merely “has questions”?

3 takeaways: From Trump's scorching Sunday rally in Mesa

Finchem also assured Gaydos he’s never been a member of the Oath Keepers, that anti-government militia group that figured prominently in the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

“Apparently because I went to a meeting six or seven years ago and signed onto their roster that I was present, somehow that has been blown up to make me a quote member of the Oath Keepers,” Finchem told Gaydos. “I’m not. It’s fake news.”

Yet here is Finchem in 2014, during his 2014 campaign for the state House:

“I’m an Oath Keeper committed to the exercise of limited, constitutional governance.”

Hamadeh missed the memo, but Lake didn't

Consider Abe Hamadeh.

Actually, nix that. I’m not sure he got the memo about reimagining his campaign to woo those all-important moderate and independent voters who will decide the November elections. The ones who support abortion to at least some degree and don’t buy into election conspiracy theories.

“It’s time we lock up some people and put handcuffs on them!” Hamadeh said at Sunday’s rally, as the MAGA faithful chanted “Lock them up.”

You’ve got to give him credit, at least, for being true to who he is.

Consider Kari Lake.

Last week, she said, during a KTAR interview, that abortion should be “rare and legal” (though her campaign later told the AP she didn’t mean to say it).

“It would be really wonderful if abortion was rare and legal, the way they said it before,” she told KTAR’s Mike Broomhead, referring to Bill Clinton and other Democrats who called for abortion to be “safe, legal and rare”.

This, from a woman who has been a stanch opponent of abortion since the start of her campaign. She has called the now-on-hold 1864 abortion ban a “great law”. Last year, before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Lake vowed to sign a carbon copy of what was then the most restrictive abortion ban in the country, Texas’ heartbeat bill outlawing abortion at roughly six weeks.

'Truly a party for all'? Is that what she said?

During Sunday’s Trump rally, Lake spoke for 18 minutes and didn’t even mention the 2020 election.

Yet, as The Arizona Republic’s Stacey Barchenger points out, Lake railed about a stolen election five times during a 20-minute speech at Trump’s July rally.

That’s because Lake has made “the steal” the centerpiece of her campaign for governor. She called Joe Biden “the illegitimate president” and the election “corrupt”.

“He lost the election and he shouldn’t be in the White House,” Lake said during the primary debate. “We had a corrupt election.”

And that didn't even merit a mention, just days before eary ballots hit voters’ mailboxes.

But you know what did come up? The many ways in which the Arizona Republican Party embraces people of all views.

“The new Republican Party is truly a party for all Arizonans,” Lake told rallygoers. “It is an inclusive party, it’s the most inclusive party in the history of politics.”

Funny how moderates aren't lining up

This from a candidate who called Republican Gov. Doug Ducey a RINO doormat to the Mexican drug cartels, insulted the entire McCain wing of the Republican Party – those moderates she now needs to win – and implicated the late Sen. John McCain's widow, Cindy, in a plot to destroy America.

“I believe they’re in cahoots basically, with the (George) Soros types on the left,” she told Steve Bannon on his podcast in July. “And this is why they stabbed President Trump in the back on the fourth of November and we remember that.”

No more, apparently, in “the most inclusive party in the history of politics.”

Given all that inclusivity, you’d think you would see traditional conservatives like Republican Gov. Doug Ducey out there on the campaign trail, stumping for Lake in a race that’s now a dead heat.

And yet …

Reach Roberts at laurie.roberts@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LaurieRoberts.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Kari Lake, Blake Masters try to woo independents. Good luck with that