ONE OF THE WORST ELECTION DENIERS MAY BE ON THE VERGE OF WINNING ARIZONA'S SECRETARY OF STATE RACE

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Republican Mark Finchem, who doesn’t believe that President Joe Biden won in Arizona in 2020, leads Democratic opponent Adrian Fontes in the first notable poll for the secretary of state race.

The OH Predictive Insights poll of likely Arizona voters released Wednesday shows Finchem leading 40%-35%, although a quarter those surveyed were undecided....

Mike Noble, OH Predictive Insights chief of research, said down-ticket races such as secretary of state tend to go along the lines of the generic ballot, which favors Republicans in Arizona.

“Mark Finchem is sitting in much better position, I think, than many would expect right now,” Noble told KTAR News 92.3 FM.

OH Predictive Insights isn't a polling outfit whose surveys routinely lean right, like Rasmussen or Trafalgar. In fact, in the same poll, Democrat Mark Kelly was found to have a 47%-35% lead over Republican candidate and Peter Thiel lab experiment Blake Masters.

Finchem is bad news:

I asked AZ GOP Secretary of State nominee Mark Finchem if he would certify the election if Biden wins the state in 2024. This is what he said: https://t.co/Noe0vAKjwf pic.twitter.com/7BUNlO6U4U

— Charlotte Alter (@CharlotteAlter) September 20, 2022

(Alter quotes her own article in Time magazine. On Gab, Finchem calls Time "Marxist propaganda.")

More:

... Finchem was outside the U.S. Capitol at the Jan. 6 riot. Though he maintains he never entered the building, video footage shows he was much closer than he originally claimed. Ali Alexander, the organizer of the rally that helped fuel the deadly mayhem, declared there wouldn’t have been a Stop the Steal movement in Arizona without Finchem....

Finchem is still pushing baseless theories about how the election was rigged, texting a link to a conservative activist project that he claims shows the “Chinese Communist Party now has operational control over many elections across the United States because they control the servers where all of the electronic data sits.”

And:

The Republican nominee for secretary of state in Arizona is a self-proclaimed member of the far-right extremist group the Oath Keepers who repeatedly shared anti-government conspiracies and posts about stockpiling ammunition on social media.

... posts Finchem pinned on his “Thought Provoking” [Pinterest] board included conspiracy theories that the Mexican Army was making incursions into the United States in preparation for a full-scale invasion and repeated anti-Muslim posts arguing Sharia law was coming to the US soon....

On Twitter, he shared conspiracies that multiple ships docked at a Virginia naval station might be a target for a second Pearl Harbor-type attack. He said Satan ruled the United States and said gun ownership should be mandatory. In one post, he called for the impeachment of Obama, who was then President, for letting his daughter go on vacation in Mexico.

If Finchem defeats Democrat Adrian Fontes, he'll oversee the 2024 election in Arizona, possibly working with fellow denialist Kari Lake, who has a one-point lead in the Arizona governor's race according to Real Clear Politics. (FiveThirtyEight shows Lake trailing Democrat Katie Hobbs, but only by 3.4.)

This is just one poll of the secretary of state race, and the number of undecided respondents suggests that Republicans and right-leaning independents might be much more focused on he race than the rest of the electorate, who'll be repulsed by Finchem when they find out about him. But time is running out. Early vote starts in a couple of weeks.

Democracy might die in Arizona because state gas prices are higher than the national average. That's how it goes in America, right?

Donate to Democrat Adrian Fontes here. (I just did.)