National Zero is still going strong on our pledge to compose only original articles (with certain very limited exceptions) by relating reporting from elsewhere in our own voice. However this Washington Post report on the state of the 2024 Republican Senate primary races does too great a job setting the scene that we have to leave it intact. To do otherwise would be butchery:

“This week, Republican officials in Arizona secretly gathered potential candidates for the state’s 2024 Senate race to deliver an urgent message: Play nice. At a meeting in a Scottsdale conference room, state party Chair Jeff DeWit urged the candidates to avoid destructive personal attacks on one another in a bid to avoid a rerun of 2022, when nearly every Republican running for statewide office lost following toxic primaries, according to four people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private conversations. ‘One lesson that everybody there claims to have learned is that bitter primaries are bad and should be avoided,’ one person said.”

“But one likely candidate wasn’t there to hear the message, despite an invitation: Kari Lake, the former TV anchor and Trump ally who lost her gubernatorial bid last year after torching her GOP rivals and focusing heavily on false claims of fraud in the 2020 election,” the Post writes before going into the rest of the national landscape, specifically in Pennsylvania where 2022 gubernatorial loser QAnon freak Doug Mastriano is “praying” on whether he should declare* for the Senate.

“All the usual levers with [Mastriano] don’t operate because he lives in a world of his own. I think some people, myself included, are kind of resigned to the fact that we have to go through this primary and vanquish Mastriano once and for all and get on with beating Casey,” Pennsylvania GOP strategist Christopher Nicholas told the Post about the likely coming shitshow of a primary.

*We fucked up. That “It’s Official: I’m Running for US Senate to Restore Freedom and Hope in our Nation,” tweet we picked up on Monday night was not from Doug Mastriano’s Senate campaign was a prank by a spoofed Twitter account. He has not officially declared yet. The Post’s report however does mention that the QAnon freak recently “retweeted a fan saying that he ‘can beat Bob Casey.'”