GOP Senate Nominee Blake Masters Scrubs Campaign Site So It No Longer Says 2020 Election Was Stolen from Trump
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Blake Masters
The Republican nominee for Senate in Arizona is apparently having second thoughts about his public embrace of 2020 election lies as he trails in the polls ahead of the November midterm elections.
Blake Masters, a venture capitalist who's running to unseat Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly, scrubbed his campaign website clean of false claims that the 2020 presidential race was stolen from former President Donald Trump, CNN reports.
Before Arizona's GOP primary on Aug. 2, the "Secure Our Elections" section of a page on Masters' site dubbed "The Masters Plan" stated the following:
"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, the same section on The Masters Plan reads: "We need to get serious about election integrity."
The change is documented by the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, which shows how the site looked before the more extreme election integrity language was removed sometime between Aug. 1 and Aug. 26, CNN reported.
In a section on immigration, Masters' site declares, "Our border with Mexico is a disaster."
Below that, the site previously stated: "Joe Biden and Mark Kelly caused this crisis. They canceled the Border Wall construction. They invite illegals to come here and give them housing and cash. The Democrats dream of mass amnesty, because they want to import a new electorate."
The last sentence of that paragraph — which sounds a lot like the "great replacement" theory — is now gone.
(The Southern Poverty Law Center, a non-profit that monitors activities of domestic hate groups and other extremists, calls the "great replacement" theory a "racist conspiracy narrative falsely asserts there is an active, ongoing and covert effort to replace white populations in current white-majority countries.")
RELATED: Arizona Official Says 2020 Election Audit Found Just 1 Dead Voter, Not 282
The changes to sections of Masters' website were noted after he also reportedly changed language about abortion on his site.
According to NBC News, the site recently stated that Masters is "100% pro-life," but it no longer does. Abortion rights are seen to be a major factor in how people will vote in the upcoming midterms, as underdog Democratic candidates nationwide have gained in popularity since the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
A line that detailed Masters' support for "a federal personhood law (ideally a Constitutional amendment) that recognizes that unborn babies are human beings that may not be killed" was also removed, NBC News reported.
PEOPLE's request for comment from Masters' team was not immediately returned.
RELATED: 2020 Election Deniers Win Key Republican Primaries in Arizona, Michigan and Missouri
Masters was endorsed by former President Trump in June.
He said in a July NBC News interview that he would have objected to the 2020 presidential election certification on Jan. 6, 2021, had he been a sitting senator at the time.
Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE's free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer.
"What [Sen. Josh] Hawley and, I believe, what [Sen. Ted] Cruz did was right," Masters said, referring to two senators who did just that.
A mid-August poll conducted by Fox News showed Masters was trailing Kelly by eight points. A GOP polling firm found Kelly had a three-point lead over Masters.
