Tornado Alley (PROG)

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Flashback -- Ohio’s Trump-backed elections chief beats conservative foe in GOP primary

""Yep. Trump does still have much control within the GOP. See YouTube of the NBC News video in yours



Ohio. One state in which Trump got his electoral guy in. LaRose has equivocated on the election result, still he got Trump's support.

By —Andrew Welsh-Huggins, Associated Press

Politics May 3, 2022 9:57 PM EDT

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose won the Republican nomination for his second term in office on Tuesday, defeating conservative challenger John Adams, who had questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election.

LaRose will face Democrat Chelsea Clark, a suburban Cincinnati City Council member and businesswoman, in November’s general election. Clark ran unopposed in the primary.

[Insert: Frank LaRose defeats 2 challengers in Ohio secretary of state race
Anna Staver
The Columbus Dispatch
https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/politics/elections/2022/11/09/frank-larose-ohio-secretary-of-state-2022-election/69571380007/ ]

Despite Adams’ open questioning of the 2020 results, former President Donald Trump had endorsed LaRose in the race. LaRose adopted some of Trump’s talking points on voter fraud before winning Trump’s endorsement, even though he had previously defended the validity of the 2020 election.

The Ohio election was the first of several closely watched races for secretaries of state in the midterm elections. The post grew in importance on the national political scene as Trump endorsed candidates who backed his lies that massive voter fraud cost him reelection.

Primaries for the top election offices will follow over the next few weeks in Nebraska, Idaho, Alabama and the presidential battleground of Georgia. While Indiana also holds a primary Tuesday, nominees for secretary of state and some other offices won’t be decided until party conventions in June.

[-----
Nearly 1 in 3 Republican candidates for statewide office support false election claims
Politics Sep 8, 2022 1:10 PM EDT
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/nearly-1-in-3-republican-candidates-for-statewide-office-support-false-election-claims

November 8, 2022
Secretary of State Midterm Elections 2022
Races for secretary of state gained national attention in 2022 as a result of former President Donald Trump’s ongoing efforts to publicly question and deny the outcome of the 2020 race he lost to President Joe Biden. The secretary of state is, in nearly all 50 states, the top elections official, responsible for oversight of the vote and more. Trump endorsed candidates in a number of races, including in states that are expected to be pivotal 2024 battlegrounds, who similarly deny or question the 2020 election.

MAP

[If these are the Nov. 2022 results for Secretary of State elections looks Republicans won in Alabama,
Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina and South Dakota.]
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2022-elections/secretary-of-state-results

Reminds of -- Donald Trump’s hold on the Republican Party is unquestionable
[...]On the eve of the primary election on August 1st, in a muggy warehouse bar in Phoenix, Ms Lake whipped up the crowd against “those bastards back there”—the media, of which, as a television presenter, she was a member for two decades. At the same rally, Abe Hamadeh, the party’s nominee for attorney-general, declared that “we all know that our elections have been hijacked; our justice system has been corrupted.” And yet the most hardcore of the lot is Mark Finchem, a leading “stop the steal” proponent who has previously admitted to being a member of the Oath Keepers militia. He attended the January 6th riot (but maintains he did not enter the Capitol) and has said that Mr Trump would not have lost the state in Arizona had he been in charge of its elections. He is now the party’s nominee for secretary of state. If democracy dies in America, it will start in the desert.
P - The election of the Trump-appointed slate means that the “rule of law is teetering” in Arizona, according to Bill Gates (not that one), a Republican member of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors. In other times a man like Mr Gates, a Harvard-educated lawyer and businessman who supports tighter voter-identification laws and low rates of taxation, might have aspired to statewide office, too. But with openness to electoral nullification a new litmus test for such candidates he counts himself out. He says his party has a tumour which is metastasising, and that its nature has changed fundamentally. “We’ve become a European far-right party.”
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=169866970

Trump-backed candidates lose but Trumpism wins in US primaries
Georgia losses add to a losing record for Trump’s candidates,
but his hard-right politics is winning among Republicans.
25 May 2022 - https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/5/25/trump-backed-candidates-lose-but-trumpism-wins-in-us-primaries

No, Democrats and Republicans Aren’t Equally Anti-Democratic
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=168804693
-----]

Voters in about two dozen states will be deciding who will be their state’s next chief election official this year. In three politically important states —- Florida, Pennsylvania and Texas — the position will be filled by whoever wins the governor’s race. In New Hampshire, the decision will be made by the state Legislature — currently controlled by Republicans.

LaRose, a former Green Beret and ex-state senator, had supported Trump in his inaugural run for president and was part of a team that handled logistics for Trump’s 2017 inauguration.

Adams, an Army and Navy veteran and former state lawmaker, had criticized LaRose for his role in postponing the March 2020 primary during the coronavirus pandemic.

That month, as concerns about COVID-19 accelerated, LaRose directed all 88 Ohio county boards of elections to comply with the state health director’s order the night before the March 17 primary to close polls to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. He rescheduled in-person voting for June 2.

That timeline was later challenged in court by the Ohio Democratic Party, which advocated for casting all remaining votes by mail.

Lawmakers ultimately set a new, almost exclusively mail-in primary election for April 28, 2020, over LaRose’s wishes.

This year, LaRose found himself in the primary spotlight again because of his dual roles as the state’s elections chief and as a GOP representative on the seven-member Ohio Redistricting Commission, charged with drawing new legislative maps. Because the Ohio Supreme Court repeatedly shot down proposed redistricting maps as unconstitutional gerrymanders, the state is holding a partial primary Tuesday, with state legislative races being decided later.

In the weeks after the 2020 presidential election, LaRose said, “Elections are run better and more honestly than really I think they ever have been.” Months later, he said in an interview what has proved true in state after state — that voter fraud is rare.

This February, LaRose shifted his tone on Twitter, saying the “mainstream media is trying to minimize voter fraud to suit their narrative” and

“President Donald Trump is right to say that voter fraud is a serious problem.” Trump endorsed LaRose in April.

Adams said he ran for the state elections post because he didn’t believe Trump had lost the 2020 election.

“Why am I running for secretary of state?” Adams said at a campaign event last month. “Well, we had an election two years ago, and I woke up the next morning and I said, ‘You gotta be kidding me. There’s no way that Trump lost. No way.'”

Associated Press writer Julie Carr Smyth contributed to this report.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/ohios-trump-backed-elections-chief-beats-conservative-foe-in-gop-primary