On Friday (November 11) night, Blake Masters, the Republican Senate candidate in Arizona, criticized Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) for not spending enough taking on his opponent Sen. Mark Kelly (D) during the midterm elections.
Kelly leads Masters by 5.7 percentage points with 83 percent of the votes counted, yet the race hasn’t been called.
Masters made the claim during an interview with Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, noting that had the Senate Leadership Fund, a McConnell-aligned PAC, directed more spending on the Arizona Senate race, the contest would be over, asserting Republicans would “be celebrating a Senate Majority right now.”
Masters shared his belief that had the “people who control the purse strings,” expressly mentioning McConnell and his PAC directed more spending on the Arizona race rather than spending “millions of dollars attacking a fellow Republican in Alaska,” the race in Arizona would be over.
In August, the Senate Leadership Fund withdrew its funding from the race in Arizona after Trump-backed candidate Masters won the Republican ticket.
The move, which included canceling its advertising reservations for the month after the primary, meant $8 million — half the group’s budget for August and September — was removed from the PAC’s spending in the state.
In October, the PAC pulled a further $9.6 million in ad buys from October 4 to November 8, a critical point in the election. When the PAC made the announcement, they claimed the ad reservation had been made by external conservative groups.
