Why Arizona Republicans Elected a Literal Cuck

How MAGA destroyed one of the most successful state parties in the country

Mark Lamb just won the Republican nomination for Arizona’s 5th congressional district. The candidate is a married man who is accused of having sexted with other women, and threatening to send law enforcement against one of them for exposing his behavior. Lamb has allegedly even facilitated other men having sexual encounters with his wife. During the 2016 Republican primaries, Trump supporters would refer to establishment types as “cuckservatives” for being weak on identity-related issues that they cared about. It’s ironic that, a decade later, MAGA has elected a literal cuck.

There’s little danger of Lamb losing the seat for Republicans, given the political tilt of the 5th district. But his victory is the latest in a story of how MAGA-fueled populism has hollowed out the Arizona Republican Party, both in terms of making it electorally weaker and less fit to govern.

This is a shame, because Arizona had been a success story demonstrating that conservative ideas work at the state level. It has seen high population and economic growth over the last several decades. Here is a comparison in real total personal income between Arizona and neighboring New Mexico, a state that is somewhat similar in terms of climate and demographics. But New Mexico has been run by Democrats, and as a result has done much worse. This includes population growth and per capita growth, but I’ve always said that states deserve to be judged based on how many people they draw in or force out.

This success has occurred under conservative governance. Between 1991 and 2023, Arizona had a Republican governor in 26 out of 32 years. The GOP has held the state House continuously from the 1966 midterms, and the state Senate since winning it in 2002.

Yet while Republicans continue to control both houses of the legislature, they’ve started to regularly lose statewide elections. Trump won Arizona in 2016 and 2024, but came up just short in 2020. Two years later, Democrat Katie Hobbs won the governorship. And when Mark Kelly took office in late 2020, it was the first time Democrats held both Arizona Senate seats since the 1950s.

The bad recent luck can be directly traced to poor candidate selection, caused by a MAGA takeover. In 2019, the state GOP selected Kelli Ward to lead the party, replacing a more conventional Republican. Her platform was that other Arizona Republicans were not Trumpy enough, and in her efforts to make the party more of a cult of personality, she reached out to right-wing conspiracy theorists as part of a conscious effort to change the type of people it was trying to reach.

Trump’s loss in 2020 accelerated the MAGA-fication of the Arizona GOP. Ward and her husband were among 11 Arizona Republicans who signed a document putting themselves forward as the legitimate electors of the state in an effort to overturn the results. But Arizona was controlled by establishment Republicans at the time, and elected leaders refused to go along with Trump’s coup attempt.

Upon losing the 2020 election, Trump and Rudy Giuliani called Arizona Speaker of the House Rusty Bowers and encouraged him to overturn the results of the state on the grounds that illegal immigrants and dead people had voted. Bowers asked for evidence, which they promised to deliver. There was of course no evidence ever provided, and there has been no evidence of substantial election fraud in 2020 since that time. Nonetheless, Trump and Giuliani put more pressure on Bowers to hold hearings on the topic, and MAGAs went to his house with bullhorns while accusing him of being a pedophile, because, of course, that’s what MAGAs do.

Since that time, election deniers have been winning nominations for statewide elections. In 2022, Republicans nominated Kari Lake for governor, a former newscaster who made Trump being cheated out of the 2020 election central to her political identity. She went on to lose in the general, and unsurprisingly refused to accept the outcome, filing a lawsuit to reverse the results. Lake raised money from supporters in order to fund her legal battles, with very little of it actually going to pay lawyers.

On the ballot alongside Lake in 2022, the Republicans put forward as their Senate candidate Blake Masters, a tech bro who has a different vibe from most MAGAs but nonetheless is a walking personification of the Based Ritual. During his campaign, Masters filmed a video explaining that the right to own a gun was about being able to shoot at the government, praised the writings of the Unabomber, and declared that those who performed abortions were “demonic.”

Masters lost, but to his credit conceded defeat. The Tech Bro/MAGA mind meld on right-wing brain worms is something I’ve written a lot about before. See Curtis Yarvin, who in 2026 is still waiting for the smoking gun (or any evidence at all, because again, there has been none) that 2020 was stolen.

In 2024, Lake was on the ballot again, this time as the Republican nominee for Senate. As with her previous race, Lake lost and of course refused to concede. Now she has a Trump administration job involving global media, since she is apparently such a credible figure who we want deciding what kind of news and information needs to be broadcast abroad.

Masters also wasn’t done after 2022. He ran for a congressional seat two years later, and campaigned by calling his opponent Abe Hamadeh— who is of Syrian descent — an “anchor baby,” and circulating pictures of him in Mecca. He also attacked his rival for not having a wife or children, which supposedly made him less fit to serve in Congress. Hamadeh won, but don’t worry, he is also “based,” and today is one of the few Republican figures still willing to defend the Tate brothers.

I enjoyed this report on a 2024 meet-and-greet involving Masters, Hamadeh, and other candidates for the 8th congressional district.

Masters came after. He hit the high notes: that there was rampant voter fraud, that millions of illegal immigrants were pouring in, that China was evil, that Democrats were evil, that crime was out of control, that Trump is awesome…

In his pitch at the Hangar, he name-checked Vance, his endorser—“he’s a good friend of mine”—and pushed a growing line, popular among his ilk, that “American business needs to work for American workers.” But the biggest hit was the call-and-response: “The correct amount of illegal immigration is how much?” Masters asked. “Zero!” the crowd responded. “Deport them all, by the way!” he lobbed as a rejoinder. Another big hit was when Masters said: “Joe Biden committed treason against this country.” Cheers and applause.

“You guys are wide-awake—you’re paying attention,” he encouraged our aged crowd. “I got this young energy,” he promised them.

Then, Hamadeh, who is even younger than Masters, so young he brought his mom along, took the mic. Similar high notes: voter fraud, fake news, illegal immigration, Democrats evil, Trump awesome. He reminded us that he and only he was endorsed by Trump (this would change a week later, when Trump would come out with a surprise co-endorsement of Masters), that he had Trump’s number, that he texted him—though it was not clear if Trump texted back. “These Marxists are not going to hand over the keys of power so easily. We have to take it from them!” Hamadeh said. “We are at war,” he added. He pledged to designate the drug cartels as terrorist organizations, in keeping with Trump’s new bluster about invading Mexico, and promised to ban ranked choice voting, which doesn’t even exist in Arizona.

Then came Kern. “I was endorsed by President Trump when I ran for the state Senate,” he assured the crowd, before launching into it. (Voter fraud, fake news, illegal immigration, Democrats evil, Trump awesome.) Kern was so committed to election security that he had nine felony counts to prove it. “I was there on Jan. 6,” he said proudly. “I was there to hope Mike Pence would do the right thing.” He continued, wistfully reminiscing: “It was a fantastic event … 2 million people … we were waiting on Mike Pence to do the right thing.” Kern’s flourish: a pledge to defund the DOJ, the FBI, and the IRS. He also called for a boycott of Chase Bank, after they had canceled his wife’s account.

Dark stuff. Such talk is designed to appeal to an electorate that is driven by nothing but self-pitying hate. The vibes of the most energized portion of the American right are truly poisonous at this moment, and Trump’s personality is the only thing that lightens the mood a bit and stops them all from looking like a bunch of raging psychos. For all the supposed patriotism, it’s hard to even discern what people in this culture like about America, other than the fact that it happens to be the place where Trump lives.

Lamb, the cuck who was just nominated for Congress, also made a name for himself denying the 2020 results, having partnered his sheriffs’ organization with a group called True the Vote, which promoted false theories about election fraud that made their way into the film 2000 Mules.

What’s particularly interesting about all of this is that there is no real ideological difference that explains this transformation of the Arizona GOP. Rusty Bowers is against illegal immigration, pro-life, and tough on crime. He became an enemy of MAGA, and even a “pedophile,” because he didn’t try to steal an election on Trump’s behalf. The same thing happened with Georgia governor Brian Kemp, another conventional Republican who would be a MAGA in good standing if only he’d thrown out the Constitution at Trump’s request. As with Mike Pence, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s genuinely funny that political leaders will become outcasts in the Republican Party, or at least hated by MAGA diehards, for the simple reason that they happened to hold a position during a time when Trump requested that they risk going to jail for him.

The goatee is always a sign

The Lamb controversy is only the latest of a series of revelations in which MAGA-coded political figures have had similar scandals involving some form of cuckoldry. Roger Stone and his wife advertised for sexual partners decades ago (“Hot former model seeks exceptional, in shape muscular … studs for threesomes with herself and body builder husband”), while hacked family messages attributed to former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort’s daughters describe him as enjoying watching his wife with other men. Jerry Falwell Jr, perhaps Trump’s most consequential evangelical supporter in 2016, acknowledged that his wife had an affair with a younger man, who himself claimed that Falwell liked being in the room when his wife and her lover had sexual relations together.

This indicates there is a peculiarly MAGA taste for cuckoldry, which might be related to the main feature of the movement being submission to a leader. I asked ChatGPT to come up with a list of cuck scandals over the last thirty years, and it gave me four cases, each of them involving someone strongly associated with MAGA. This is obviously too small of a sample size to draw any conclusions, but it is a fun thing to speculate about, and it’s interesting that I couldn’t find a single Democratic case. There might be biases in reporting one could imagine. For example, if the media was much more likely to dig deeply into family scandals involving Republicans than Democrats, we might get more specific reporting on dysfunctional MAGA behavior.

So as fun as it would be to say MAGAs are a bunch of literal cucks, the evidence we have is at most highly suggestive. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the relationship did exist, for the reason that populism is associated with lower moral standards more generally. Kakistocracy argues that character flaws tend to be correlated, and populism selects for worse people across the board. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the case that figures who are corrupt, authoritarian, sexually perverted, conspiratorial, racist, and anti-science would find themselves under the same umbrella, but that’s what you get with populism, due to the selection mechanisms involved.

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The fact that there is no ideological root at the bottom of the change in the Arizona GOP gives us a perfect test case for the theory that populism draws bad people into politics. The Republican Party of the state has been purging more respectable figures and elevating lunatics because this is what happens when you make loyalty to Trump and adherence to his false theories about voter fraud a necessary qualification for getting ahead.

This is all very bleak, but I think there is some cause for optimism here. These people are motivated by loyalty to Trump. Eventually, Trump is going to go away. Surely, as the less educated party, Republicans will still have a lot of crazy people around, but it seems that loyalty toward one man is doing a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of energizing and mobilizing them, and consolidating their efforts. Most political analysts I think underestimate the extent to which Trump is a cause of our problems rather than simply a symptom of them, because they’re educated people who don’t get leader worship at a gut level. A lot of MAGAs aren’t into politics because they care all that much about immigration, or the cost of living, or whatever. They just love Trump! And organizing around the principle of loyalty to Trump creates a more binary form of politics than organizing around some kind of idea. It’s harder to meet a movement halfway when its underlying principle is worship of one man, who commands that people lie and break the law on his behalf. Kari Lake, Blake Masters, etc. give you the baggage of MAGA without any of the benefits. That’s why Trump ran four and a half points ahead of Lake in 2024 on the same ballot.

Pre-MAGA, the mascot of the Arizona Republican Party could be imagined as the small business owner or corporate executive. Doug Ducey, the last Republican governor of the state, was once CEO of Cold Stone Creamery, a very wholesome and normal job that is usually not a step toward political office. His governorship was mostly considered a success but he was term-limited out of office. There was then talk of Ducey running for Senate, but he declined, maybe because he realized that he didn’t have a chance in the primaries due to his getting on Trump’s bad side by not helping try to steal the Arizona election in 2020.

The businessman as the heart and soul of the Arizona GOP had been replaced by the internet conspiracy theorist, or maybe a boomer who is suffering cognitive decline, watches cable news all day, and finds himself growing increasingly convinced that he might be smothered by the immigrants changing his bedpan. But neither the internet conspiracy theorist nor the senile retiree has a natural propensity toward organizing and getting into public office in the same way that the businessman does. For the MAGA to be motivated to act, he needs to be amused. The question for the future of the Republican Party is whether their new populist base will find enough entertainment in post-Trump politics to continue ruining American conservatism.