Blake Masters’ Arizona Senate Loss: Why Voters Rejected Him

You need a very high I.Q. to understand Blake Masters, in his telling. The Peter Thiel protégé — Masters had long worked for Thiel and they cowrote 2014’s Zero to One — has been consistent about this through the years. In a frustrated online exchange from his college days that emerged during his failed Arizona Senate campaign, Masters made his high self-regard clear. “I don’t mean any disrespect — but it takes years to understand where I’m coming from, let alone agree or disagree,” he wrote. “To expect NOT to receive the usual (intelligent, perhaps, but still typical) objections and questions in response to a post such as mine above would be silly. . . . I don’t know what gave me the urge to try anyways.”

Earlier this year, before he had successfully managed — with Thiel’s money and Donald Trump’s endorsement — to win Arizona’s Republican Senate primary, Masters was similarly dismissive of his competition. “I don’t even feel like I’m competing with my primary election opponents,” he told Jewish Insider, “because they’re just unable to talk about some of the thornier issues, and they’re just dealing in bullet points while I’m actually like, ‘Hey, I’m a real guy with real ideas, and here’s what I think.’”

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Jack Butler

Jack Butler is a former submissions editor at National Review.

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You need a very high I.Q. to understand Blake Masters, in his telling. The Peter Thiel protégé — Masters had long worked for Thiel and they cowrote 2014’s Zero to One — has been consistent about this through the years. In a frustrated online exchange from his college days that emerged during his failed Arizona Senate campaign, Masters made his high self-regard clear. “I don’t mean any disrespect — but it takes years to understand where I’m coming from, let alone agree or disagree,” he wrote. “To expect NOT to receive the usual (intelligent, perhaps, but still typical) objections and questions in response to a post such as mine above would be silly. . . . I don’t know what gave me the urge to try anyways.”

Earlier this year, before he had successfully managed — with Thiel’s money and Donald Trump’s endorsement — to win Arizona’s Republican Senate primary, Masters was similarly dismissive of his competition. “I don’t even feel like I’m competing with my primary election opponents,” he told Jewish Insider, “because they’re just unable to talk about some of the thornier issues, and they’re just dealing in bullet points while I’m actually like, ‘Hey, I’m a real guy with real ideas, and here’s what I think.’”