Abe Hamadeh and Blake Masters are locked in a bitter primary fight for a House seat in Arizona. Masters has made attacks on Hamadeh's Muslim background a key aspect of his campaign. It's a subject that Abe Hamadeh can't seem to avoid.
In campaign trail appearances in the Phoenix area last month, the Republican congressional candidate, an Arab American with a Muslim father, inevitably made some sort of reference to the barrage of television ads and near-ubiquitous yard signs that have painted him as an Islamic terrorist sympathizer. "How many of you guys have seen these nasty ads against me?" Hamadeh asked the few dozen Republicans who had ventured to a crowded antique shop in a northern Phoenix strip mall to hear him speak. "They're pretty bad.
I look at them and I'm like, 'I've got a lot of facial hair in those ads.'" On paper, Hamadeh — his party's nominee for state attorney general in 2022 — should be the presumptive winner of the GOP primary for Arizona's 8th congressional district. He's been endorsed for Congress by former President Donald Trump and has the enthusiastic backing of Kari Lake , the former gubernatorial candidate and all-but-certain Senate nominee who remains popular among the MAGA faithful in Arizona.
Yet Hamadeh remains stuck in an apparent dead heat with the man behind the nasty ads: Blake Masters, the Peter Thiel protégé and 2022 Senate nominee who's plowed millions of dollars of his own fortune into his opposing bid for the seat. "He is running.
