PETE WILSONING:

After Janet Napolitano joined the Obama administration in 2009, Jan Brewer succeeded her as governor of Arizona. Two years later, Brewer won her own full term as governor, and Russell Pearce was elected to be the senate president. Pearce had neo-Nazi and white nationalist connections. His major agendum was the passing of the infamous S.B. 1070, with the support of white-nationalist groups and the votes of Republican lawmakers, signed into law by Brewer. That harshly anti-illegal-immigrant law would be struck down by the United States Supreme Court over its provision "authorizing state and local officers to make warrantless arrests of certain aliens suspected of being removable," otherwise known as racial profiling. An early indicator of how the GOP's stance on immigration had alienated Arizonans: A year after S.B. 1070 became law, Pearce was removed from office in a recall election, becoming the first Arizona lawmaker ever to be so removed. (The state party kept him around, though, making him its vice chairman, until he was forced out even from that job for saying that women on Medicaid should be sterilized. Clearly the eugenicism runs deep with him.)

The state's gerrymandered congressional districts have also had an effect on the party and its immigration stance. Case in point: The 4th congressional district--which is demographically the whitest district in Arizona, and among the most sparsely populated, encompassing most of the state's western part--first elected Rep. Paul Gosar in 2010. He is an anti-immigration hardliner and a close ally of the anti-immigrant Iowa congressman Steve King (who lost a primary re-election bid last week). Like Gosar, all of the other Republicans in the Arizona congressional delegation came into office in the last decade. And like Gosar, they all currently have rankings of A or A+ from the anti-immigration group Numbers USA.

By 2014, the state GOP had shifted so far that it passed a resolution censuring McCain--its longtime incumbent senator and the GOP's presidential nominee in 2008--over his "disastrous and harmful" record. What had sparked the resolution was McCain's championing of the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013 that had passed the Senate and was stalled in the House.

The same year, the governorship opened up again as Brewer's term came to a close. Polls in July 2014 showed that the difference between the top contenders for the Republican nomination, Doug Ducey and Christine Jones, was within the margin of error. But an August 1 endorsement from the notoriously anti-Hispanic--and soon-to-be nationally disgraced--Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio boosted Ducey and helped get him the nomination. After securing the nomination, Ducey would continue to make joint appearances with Arpaio. He won the general election that year.

In 2018--the year Ducey ran for and won re-election--two members of Arizona's congressional delegation, Rep. Gosar and the similarly anti-Hispanic Rep. Andy Biggs, signed a letter calling for forced labor for illegal immigrants for a $1 a day wage, something that one might call slavery.

The same year, Kelli Ward, a former state senator and a failed 2016 Republican challenger to John McCain for his U.S. Senate seat, announced her intention to challenge incumbent Jeff Flake. Knowing that he would lose, Flake announced he would retire rather than run for re-election. This created an opening for Martha McSally, who was at the time pro-immigration, having twice won a House seat twice in Hispanic-heavy southern Arizona.

But in the race to replace Flake, McSally had to fight off two other major Republican contenders who were strongly anti-immigration: not just Ward but "Sherrif Joe," who was trying to stage a comeback. To secure the nomination, McSally took a hard line on immigration. Then, during the general election, she lamely tried to portray her opponent, Kyrsten Sinema, as an elite by calling her "Hollywood Sinema" and framing her as too feminine. McSally lost to Sinema by a very narrow margin, with 70 percent of Latinos voting for Sinema. Arizona had elected a Democrat to the Senate for the first time in 30 years.

Why did Kelli Ward lose the GOP nomination to McSally? Because Ward is just awful. She liked to pal around with Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka. She won praise from white nationalists. She associated with alt-right figures like Mike Cernovich. A day after McCain's announcement of his illness, she suggested that McCain should resign and the governor should appoint her. The day that McCain announced that he had stopped treatment, she claimed that the announcement was timed to hurt her Senate campaign. McCain would die a day later. Her husband is infamous for such acts as spitting on one of Ward's former volunteers for switching allegiance to McSally.

With baggage like that, surely the state GOP would want nothing to do with Ward, right? Wrong: Five months after losing the primary, Ward was elected the chairwoman of the state GOP. Ever since, Ward has made headline after headline in the Arizona press for her ridiculous actions, outrageous tweets, and mismanagement--not to mention an allegation of corruption. In a fundraising email from last September, Ward wrote that "we'll stop gun-grabber Mark Kelly dead in his tracks." This is grotesque. Kelly, the Democratic nominee, is nationally famous in his own right for being a NASA astronaut (and the twin brother of another NASA astronaut) but also for being the husband of former Arizona congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who was shot in the head at point-blank range in an attack that nearly killed her and did kill six others.

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