Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican, said Wednesday he believed President Donald Trump would likely lose the state and that there were no “facts” to back up claims of rampant voter fraud, the latest in a small group of GOP officials to undercut the White House line following Trump’s loss to President-elect Joe Biden.
“Right now, there is less than 50,000 votes to count, and the president would have to get about 65% of them to win Arizona, so it does appear that Joe Biden will win Arizona,” Brnovich told Fox Business anchor Neil Cavuto on Wednesday. “If indeed there was some great conspiracy, it apparently didn’t work.”
“That’s the reality,” he said. “There is no evidence, there are no facts that would lead anyone to believe that the election results will change.”
Votes are still being counted in Arizona, but many news networks have declared Biden the winner in the state. Brnovich said Wednesday he believed those calls would hold true (even without a win in Arizona, Biden would still secure the White House with enough electoral votes).
The comments add to a small contingent of Republican lawmakers that have openly undercut Trump’s claims of voter fraud. Brnovich is the number 2 Republican in Arizona, behind GOP Gov. Doug Ducey.
Ducey has so far refused to publicly congratulate Biden and has not overtly thrown water on Trump’s claims that there were voting irregularities in the state, although he stressed the state’s laws had made it “easy to vote and hard to cheat.”
“We’ve already seen the outcome of races change to a dramatic degree, and some results remain unclear,” the governor said in a statement this week. “The president, just like any other candidate, has the right to all available legal challenges and remedies, and we are confident they will be properly adjudicated. We will respect the election results.”
Trump and his surrogates have spent the days since Democratic nominee Joe Biden was declared the president-elect filing a bevy of lawsuits and claiming, without evidence, that there was widespread voter fraud around the nation that deprived the president of a second term.
Many Republicans in Congress have lined up behind the lie, refusing to congratulate Biden and kowtowing to Trump’s ongoing effort to try and bend the will of the election in his favor. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said this week that the president was “100% within his rights” to challenge the election result, while Democrats have said the effort will only further undermine American’s faith in the electoral process.
Biden, for his part, has said Trump’s refusal to concede is an “embarrassment.”
“The only thing that — how can I say this tactfully? — I think it will not help the president’s legacy,” the president-elect said this week.