Maddow Blog | Arizona GOP makes matters worse after fake-electors indictment

One of the great things about Laurie Roberts’ columns in The Arizona Republic is that she has a knack for summarizing multifaceted political stories in a straightforward ways. Consider the lede, for example, in Roberts’ latest piece.

For those outside of Arizona, Hoffman and Harris are probably unfamiliar figures, though there are plenty of reasons the Arizona GOP sent a “we be crazy” message with its latest selections for the Republican National Committee.

Harris, for example, is a former state legislator who, as NBC News reported, “was expelled from the Legislature a year ago after she invited an election denier to provide testimony laced with unsubstantiated allegations at a televised legislative hearing on elections.”

It’s likely that Republican officials in Arizona chose Harris for the RNC role, not despite this record, but because of it.

Hoffman, meanwhile, is an even more amazing case. In fact, regular Rachel Maddow Show viewers might remember his face, even if they don’t remember his name.

In January 2022, about a year after Hoffman served as a fake elector in the wake of the 2020 presidential election, an Arizona Republic reporter caught up with the GOP state senator and asked him how we came to participate in the allegedly illegal partisan scheme. The brief interview did not go well for the lawmaker.

This, of course, was the same Hoffman who, on Jan. 5, 2021, sent a letter urging then-Vice President Mike Pence to delay the counting of Arizona’s electors and to “seek clarification from the Arizona legislature as to which slate of electors were proper and accurate.” (Earlier, Hoffman was also allegedly involved in a scheme to pay teenagers to create bogus social-media accounts pushing messages intended to undermine public confidence in the elections.)

More than two years later, Hoffman was among the 18 Republicans indicted by the state attorney general’s office as part of the fake-elector scheme, which included allegations of conspiracy, fraud, and forgery.

Two days after Hoffman was charged, the Arizona GOP thought it’d be a good idea to elevate Hoffman to the Republican National Committee.

“These are not just your run-of-the-mill election deniers,” Barrett Marson, a Republican strategist in Arizona, told NBC News in reference to Hoffman and Harris. “They are leaders in the whole experiment of election denialism.”

Or as Roberts’ column concluded, “So this then, is really who the Arizona Republican Party is now: An all-out conspiracy kook and a troll farmer-turned-indicted fake elector.”

President Joe Biden narrowly carried Arizona four years ago, and Democrats fared even better in the state in the 2022 elections, which should’ve been a wake-up call to the state GOP that it needed to be less radical and less eager to alienate mainstream voters. The party appears to have missed the message.

This article was originally published on MSNBC.com