Arizona GOP Senate nominee Blake Masters quietly scrubs abortion and false election fraud claims from website

Arizona Republican appears to attempt pivot to centre after winning GOP primary

Blake Masters seems to be making his pivot to the centre in time for the November general election — and is apparently willing to erase his own positions to do it.

The Peter Thiel-backed Senate candidate in Arizona hopes to unseat Mark Kelly, the popular astronaut and first-term senator who won a special election in 2020 to finish the term of the late Sen John McCain. But he appears to be unsure about the appeal of his far-right views on a number of topics.

Reporters at multiple news outlets including CNN and HuffPost have reported changes to Mr Masters’ website still visible on the Internet Wayback Machine that indicate the Masters campaign has been hard at work scrubbing positions from the front page that would serve as red meat for his Republican base but do little to attract independents or Democrats in a general election. Among the flat-out deletions is a section claiming that Donald Trump is the rightful victor of the 2020 election — that claim no longer appears on his site at all.

“We need to get serious about election integrity. The 2020 election was a rotten mess — if we had had a free and fair election, President Trump would be sitting in the Oval Office today and America would be so much better off,” a since-deleted section read as recently as early August.

The Independent has reached out to the Masters campaign for comment on that and other deletions.

Other parts of his platform that received stealth edits includes a section on abortion. A key passage stating Mr Masters’ support for a so-called “personhood” law at the federal level was removed some time in August; it previously vowed that Mr Masters would “support a federal personhood law (ideally a Constitutional amendment) that recognizes that unborn babies are human beings that may not be killed”. Another passage vowing to only vote to confirm anti-abortion judges in the Senate was also scrubbed at the same time.

The changes to the section outlining Mr Masters’ views on abortion rights are the most jolting shifts in his positions so far. Gone is any mention of banning abortion during the first or second trimester, despite Arizona’s 2021 “personhood” law explicitly extending such rights to fetuses and even fertilized eggs. And the vow to oppose any pro-choice judges would have prohibited a potentially-elected Mr Masters from supporting virtually any nominees from Mr Biden or other hypothetical Democratic presidents in the future.

Mr Masters’ campaign has refused to address the allegations that he is hiding or rapidly shifting his views on the topic. Instead, he released an ad on Twitter in which the candidate, surrounded by his family and holding a Tie Fighter toy, blames Democrats for supposedly “lying” about his views.

That ad has been denounced by journalists and political analysts like MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, who mocked it as “straight gaslighting” from the Senate hopeful.

Mr Masters is trailing his Democratic opponent even in polls from GOP-leaning firms like the Trafalgar Group and is among a number of Trump-endorsed candidates for US Senate who national Republicans reportedly fear have cost them any chance of retaking the upper chamber from their Democratic rivals in November.