Venture capitalist Blake Masters, who won the Republican nomination for Arizona’s U.S. Senate race with Donald Trump’s endorsement, has since removed language from his website that supported the former president’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
According to CNN’s KFile, Masters has modified wording on his site that supported Trump’s election claims, argued the country would be better off if Trump was still president, and claimed Democrats are trying to “import” a new electorate ― rhetoric that matches a white supremacist conspiracy theory.
Those views were on Masters’ website on Aug. 1, the day before he clinched the GOP primary. They’ve since disappeared.
One section that was edited initially read: “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.”
Now, it says: “We need to get serious about election integrity.”
Masters, who is bankrolled by tech billionaire Peter Thiel, struggled to gain momentum in the earlier leg of his campaign but picked up speed after receiving Trump’s endorsement. Trump praised him at the time for supporting his crusade to delegitimize the 2020 vote.
Masters’ campaign has similarly moderated his stances on abortion since the primary, NBC News first reported last week. Masters quietly deleted a section of his website Thursday that said he was “100% pro-life,” shortly after releasing a new ad claiming he supported “commonsense regulation around abortion.” After softening his position in the ad, he attacked his opponent, Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly, for “lying about my views on abortion.”
The revised posture comes as many GOP candidates attempt to distance themselves from controversial opinions on abortion and the 2020 election that have proved unpopular with voters ahead of the November midterm elections.
Masters, who made headlines in June for blaming gun violence on Black people, is currently trailing about 8 percentage points behind Kelly in FiveThirtyEight’s polling average for the Senate race.