Venture capitalist and former senatorial candidate Blake Masters has decided to take another stab at politics by running for Congress again, announcing that he would seek the Republican nomination in Arizona’s 8th congressional district after Rep. Debbie Lesko (R) announced that she would not see reelection in 2024.
Masters, who narrowly lost against incumbent Democratic Senator Mark Kelly by less than 5 percentage points, ran and continues to run for the U.S. House of Representatives as an “America First” candidate.
During a recent interview with Cactus Politics, Masters said that after conducting a public opinion poll in Rep. Lesko’s district, he realized that had a “double-digit” lead over any of the already announced Republican congressional candidates.
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Masters said that upon praying with his family about running for Lesko’s seat, the poll helped him decide to move to Arizona’s CD 8 and throw this hat in the ring.
He also said because of the bad “trajectory” he believes the country is currently going in, Masters believes that the time to help fix the nation's woes is now, that if elected to the House of Representatives, he would be “The congressman most knowledgeable about Big Tech, about AI, about this whole host of new and modern issues that we're going to have to deal with.”
While Masters’ conservative bona fides are beyond reproach, we asked him to weigh in on the recent decision by House Republicans to vote to expel embattled former Congressman George Santos (R).
Like many conservative Republican members of the House of Representatives, Masters disagrees with the decision to expel Rep. Santos, saying that it was “the wrong move” because Santos “hadn’t been convicted of anything,” and that “Due Process” should have been allowed to play out.
“I think he will probably be convicted, we'll see how that plays out, but I believe in Due Process and I think it's a horrible precedent to vote to remove somebody from Congress when they haven't been convicted of a crime,” said Masters.
In addition, Masters described the vote against Santos as “an own goal, and echoed the sentiment of many Republicans, saying that Santos was “voting well” and House Republicans have all but “basically overturned the election results of that New York congressional district.”
“Republicans have a very narrow majority and Santos was voting well right, so I think those Republicans that voted to expel him, I think they hurt Republicans by doing that,” said Masters, adding, “I think they basically overturned the election results of that New York Congressional District right— if the voters didn't want Santos back well they'd let us know next time he's around, in fact he'd already said he wasn't even running for reelection. I think it was an own goal, I think it sets a bad precedent in terms of due process and I certainly don't believe in removing somebody absent you know some kind of felony conviction.”
The final House vote count to expel Santos was held on December 1, where 311 voted “Yea” and 114 voted “Nay.”
Two members voted “Present” and 8 others did not vote at all.
Arizona’s House Caucus was split, with Reps. Eli Crane, Debbie Lesko, Andy Biggs, and Paul Gosar, all voted against expelling Santos, while Reps. David Schweikert and Juan Ciscomani voted In favor of the measure.
All of the Democratic Caucus—Reps. Ruben Gallego, Raul Grijalva, and Greg Stanton, supported the expulsion.
