The sorry state of state government politics, Part II

Is Karrin Taylor Robson faux MAGA or a faux traditional Republican?

Last week, I wrote about how watching Arizona state government politics kept bringing to mind manager Casey Stengel’s lament about his 1962 New York Mets: “Can’t anyone here play this game?” Exhibit A, covered in that column, was the unnecessary and maladroit efforts by Gov. Katie Hobbs and GOP legislative leaders to score political points over a funding shortfall for programs for the developmentally disabled.

Exhibit B is the gubernatorial campaigns of Karrin Taylor Robson.

Robson seems to really, really want to be governor. She doesn’t appear to be just another politician on the make, wanting to climb whatever political ladder is available.

That she seems genuinely to want the specific job is to her credit. Robson also has experience and expertise in the issues most important to the state at this point in time: water, housing, and education. From some polling, there’s reason to believe that a plurality of voters would welcome pragmatic, problem-solving leadership on those and other issues.

However, Robson has never presented herself as a pragmatic problem-solver to the voters. Instead, she has consistently presented herself as a loyal foot soldier for Donald Trump.

During her 2022 campaign, her claim to the Republican nomination was that she was a more authentic supporter of Trump than was Kari Lake. Inconvenient for this argument, Lake had Trump’s endorsement and Robson did not. Unsurprisingly, Robson came up short when the votes were counted.

This time, she secured Trump’s endorsement. And since then, her campaign has consisted of virtually nothing except celebrating that endorsement.

However, the state’s MAGA leadership has never trusted Robson, believing that she is a traditional Republican masquerading as a MAGA loyalist. It was inevitable that Robson would face a primary challenge from someone whose MAGA loyalties were regarded as more trustworthy. And sure enough, former state Senate president and current congressman Andy Biggs got into the race.

Once it was clear that Biggs was going to make the run, a dual endorsement from Trump was entirely predictable. In fact, it was the best Robson could hope for. From now until the primary election votes are counted, Robson will be in danger of having Trump withdraw his endorsement of her. Keeping it will require her to enthusiastically endorse and publicly support every idiotic, destructive, and offensive act he commits from now until then. Already, she has publicly enthused over Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, which were based upon the nonsensical premise that all trade deficits are the result of trade barriers, and his shameful berating of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Instead of reacting to Trump’s dual endorsement by beginning to establish independent rationales for her candidacy and differentiations from Biggs, she’s doubling down on her half of it, even though its value has been substantially depreciated. Trump’s endorsement is the entire pitch of her first television ad.

Now, Republican politics in Arizona are tricky and difficult. In 2022, when most state offices were last on the ballot, Trump’s endorsement was necessary to win the primary but fatal in the general election. In the GOP primaries for U.S. Senate, governor, secretary of state, and attorney general, Trump endorsees won over better qualified and more electable opponents. And Democrats defeated the entire Trump slate in the general election.

Not enough attention is paid to what can be called the Haley Republicans. In 2024, Arizona’s presidential primary was held after Trump had clinched the nomination and Nikki Haley had officially withdrawn. Yet Haley nevertheless received 18% of the vote. The presidential primary in Arizona is closed. Independents can’t participate as they can in the state’s other partisan primaries. So, these were high-efficacy, registered Republicans turning out for a meaningless election to cast a protest vote against Trump. This is a consequential but often overlooked political subgroup.

Robson has never done anything to persuade the Haley Republicans that she is worth their vote. Instead, her strategy against Lake seemed to be as follows: Compete completely on MAGA loyalty and assume that the Haley Republicans will intuit that Robson is the preferable choice and be motivated sufficiently to cast a vote for her.

At this point, it appears that is also Robson’s strategy against Biggs. There are some reasons to believe that it might work better against Biggs than it did against Lake, although none that are conclusive.

Lake had one political skill, the ability to wow a MAGA crowd with a stem-winder. Biggs doesn’t even have that political skill. And, this time, Robson probably won’t have to share the MAGA-Traditional Republican straddle space as she did with Matt Salmon for most of the 2022 primary.

However, MAGA forces are likely to mount a competent surrogate campaign on Biggs’s behalf. And Robson has a serious authenticity problem, and voters value authenticity in a candidate.

The MAGA leadership in the state doesn’t trust Robson’s professions of MAGA loyalty. However, she has given Haley Republicans and swing voters no reason to believe that she has an independent streak or would be the pragmatic, problem-solving governor they would prefer.

While it seems that Robson genuinely wants to be governor, and just governor, it isn’t clear why. In both campaigns, she has run on the MAGA ideological agenda, not a pragmatic problem-solving agenda of her own tailored to Arizona-specific issues. A state-specific agenda was how Glenn Youngkin successfully navigated similar political shoals in Virginia.

I have no idea why Robson wants to be governor or whether her protestations of MAGA loyalty are sincere or a political facade she thinks necessary to have a chance at holding the office. But let’s assume, for purposes of discussion, that she’s actually a pragmatic problem-solver at heart and that’s why she wants to be governor. And consider the following thought experiment: What if, rather than running in the GOP primary, Robson was running for governor as an independent?

If Robson is, at heart, a pragmatic problem-solver, it would be personally liberating. She could propound an agenda for Arizona without subjecting it to a MAGA litmus test. She could pick and choose which Trump policies to support and which to criticize. She wouldn’t be stuck supporting enthusiastically every dumb, destructive, or offensive thing he does for the next year and a half.

There are substantial obstacles to an independent gaining ballot access and running a campaign. However, Robson has the money to overcome them.

Could she win? The conventional wisdom is that an independent candidate doesn’t have a chance against the institutional support of the parties and reflexive party-affiliation voting by a large percentage of the electorate. I wouldn’t declare the conventional wisdom wrong. But dissatisfaction with the two political parties and the two-party system is growing. Cracks in the conventional wisdom are discernible.

The most serious independent campaign for governor in Arizona was mounted by Bill Schulz in 1986, another candidate with the wealth to compete for public attention with party candidates. Schulz, who came within an eyelash of defeating Barry Goldwater in the 1980 U.S. Senate race, initially was going to run for the Democratic nomination for governor. However, due to family circumstances, he withdrew. When family circumstances permitted, he re-entered the race as an independent.

Schulz came in third, but garnered 26% of the vote despite his late start. And at that time, just 11 percent of the electorate was registered independent. Today, it is 34%.

Even for Democrats, the Hobbs governorship hasn’t generated a lot of confidence in her leadership. For Haley Republicans and swing voters, Biggs’s vote to reject Arizona’s 2020 Electoral College votes is disqualifying, even if his purebred MAGAism were somehow thought preferable to Hobbs’s muddled liberalism. In a Hobbs-Biggs contest, there would seem room for a center-right, pragmatic problem-solver.

Would an independent candidacy give Robson a better shot than defeating Biggs in a primary without becoming so MAGA-tainted that she cannot win a general against Hobbs? Both involve challenging political tightropes to master.

I have no idea if Robson is a pragmatic problem-solver at heart or a true MAGA convert. I do know that running the same campaign against Biggs that was unsuccessful against Lake, or expecting MAGAism to fare better in a 2026 general election than it did in 2022, isn’t learning to play the game.

Reach Robb at robtrobb@gmail.com.