RNC looks to Blake Masters for advice on how to win? Sure, that makes sense

The Republican National Committee has sent out a search party to dive deep and figure out whatever happened to that long-awaited, oft-touted red tsunami that was supposed to engulf the country earlier this month.

Among those tapped to help the party regain its mojo: Blake Masters.

No, really.

Politico reports that RNC has tapped nearly a dozen outside Republican advisers from across the country to review the party’s poor performance in the midterm elections and help “chart a winning course in the years to come.”As RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel put it, to figure out “where the party excelled and where we need to improve, especially in the clear underperformance among independent voters that we saw … and offer ideas as to how we do better in the future.”

So naturally, the party is looking to the guy who was at the top of the Republican ticket in Arizona yet attracted fewer voters than any other Republican candidate in the six major statewide races.

Blake Masters knows how to woo women, minorities?

Politico reports party leaders are hoping the new Republican Party Advisory Council, as it’s being called, will help with outreach to minority voters and suburban women.

And they chose Masters, a guy who blamed our nation’s epidemic of gun violence on Black people.

A guy who promoted the “Great Replacement” theory so popular with white supremacists who run around warning about a plot to replace white Americans with non-white people.A guy who early in his campaign called for a national ban on abortion.It’s understandable that the RNC would look for advice on how to regain their long-solid control of Arizona, a swing state in which Democrats swept all the major races this year.

But the selection of Masters makes me wonder if the Republican Party is serious about a party reboot.

Wouldn't Kimberly Yee have been a better choice?

State Treasurer Kimberly Yee would have been a better choice, given that she’s a woman, a member of a minority group and, well, the only Arizona Republican to breeze to a win in the big races this year.

Yee – who wasn’t part of Donald Trump’s America First slate − attracted nearly 194,000 more votes than Masters.

Instead, the RNC is looking to the hard right white guy to advise them on how to win over minorities and those suburban women and independents who were key to his loss − the ones who swept Democrats into all of the state’s top offices.

The guy who recently charged that thousands of Arizona voters were disenfranchised and called on every member of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors to “resign in disgrace”.

Masters issued a statement to Politico, saying the party needs to modernize.

“We’re fighting against Big Tech, the media, and now, the Democrats’ GOTV early voting machine,” Masters wrote. “I look forward to working with Ronna to make sure the party effectively supports our candidates and wins big in 2024.”

3 ways the GOP can win again in Arizona

Perhaps instead of modernizing, Masters and the RNC might want to take a page from Republicans of yore in Arizona – the ones who invented the get-out-the-vote early voting strategy and as a result, ran the state for decades.

Perhaps, instead of fighting with Big Tech and the media, the RNC might want to work on a strategy that help them win once again in Arizona. Here are a few ideas on how to do it:

• Stop telling Republican voters that early voting is the devil. Republicans in Arizona pioneered early voting several decades ago, using it in election cycle after election cycle to boost turnout and win elections. It wasn’t until Donald Trump lost in 2020 that the early voting program − the one long hailed as a national model − suddenly became suspect. Now Arizona Republican Party wants to ban the wildly popular program.

• Stop nominating extreme candidates who are out of step with Arizona voters. Martha McSally lost not one but two Senate races because she was tied to Donald Trump. The result is two Senate seats, held by Republicans for decades, now in Democratic hands. This year’s slate of America First candidates tied themselves even more tightly to the aggrieved former president, building their campaigns around the “stolen election” schtick and campaigning until the end inside their hard right echo chamber. The Republican Party’s establishment candidate, Karrin Taylor Robson, would be preparing for her swearing in as Arizona’s next governor had she been the party’s nominee.

• And finally, stop attacking RINOs and especially the late Sen. John McCain. State GOP Chairwoman Kelli Ward, who lost her own 2016 campaign to McCain, has engaged in a years-long battle to purge moderates from the party. Kari Lake slashed and burned her way through a 17-month gubernatorial campaign, scorching anybody and everybody who didn’t march in lockstep with her America First “movement.”

At the beginning of her general election campaign, she jubilantly proclaimed, “We drove a stake through the heart of the McCain machine.” At one of her final campaign rallies, she sneered at “the party of McCain”, calling him a “loser”.

“We don’t have any McCain Republicans in here, do we?” she asked.

“Well, get the hell out!” Lake told them.

So they did.

And until the once-upon-a-time-Party of the Big Tent invites them back in ...

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

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Blake Masters will advise the RNC on how to win. Sure, why not?