Former President Trump pushed Arizona GOP Senate candidate Blake Masters to double down on election fraud claims on a call captured in a new documentary from Fox News’s Tucker Carlson.
“If you want to get across the line, you gotta go stronger on that one thing cause that was the one thing you got a lot of complaints about,” Trump says to Masters over the phone in the documentary released on Tuesday.
The former president called Masters following a debate against incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) earlier this month in which the Republican candidate acknowledged that Joe Biden was the legitimate president and said he had seen no evidence that the vote count was rigged.
“I heard you did great on the debate but [had] a bad election answer,” Trump says to Masters on the call. “You got a lot of support. You gotta stay with those people.”
Trump pointed to Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for Arizona governor, as an example.
“Look at Kari. Kari’s winning with very little money. If they say, ‘How is your family?’ She says, ‘The election was rigged and stolen,’” the former president tells Masters. “You’ll lose if you go soft. You’re gonna lose that base.”
Masters promised Trump on the call that he’s “not going soft” on the election fraud issue.
Even though Masters has scrubbed his campaign website of a statement that suggested the 2020 election was not free and fair, he has maintained other unsubstantiated claims about the election.
At the debate in early October, Masters claimed that the media and Big Tech had censored information that impacted the 2020 election. He doubled down on this when asked about the since-deleted statement from his campaign site.
“Well, I still believe it, that’s for sure,” Masters said in an interview with Fox News. “And like I said in my debate last week, I think if everyone followed the law, President Trump would be in the Oval Office.”
Masters has tightened the race against Kelly in recent weeks, although the Republican candidate is still trailing in the polls. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report currently puts the race slightly in Kelly’s favor at “lean Democrat.”