Astronaut Mark Kelly is seeking to stave off a challenge from an election-denying right-wing candidate backed by Donald Trump and bankrolled by controversial billionaire Peter Thiel.
Mark Kelly took office in December 2020 after Arizonans voting in a special election chose him to fill the seat vacated by John McCain upon his death.
The son of two police officers, Kelly has said his mom’s career as one of the first female officers in their New Jersey town inspired him to be bold when facing challenges on the way to reaching his goals.
He received a bachelor’s degree from the US Merchant Marine Academy before becoming a US Navy pilot along with his twin brother Scott. Kelly flew 39 combat missions in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and went on to earn a master’s degree from the Naval Postgraduate School.
Both Mark and Scott were selected to become NASA astronauts in 1996. Kelly made four trips to space starting in December 2001, delivering crew and equipment to the International Space Station. He retired in 2011 after commanding one of the final flights of the Space Shuttle Endeavour.
Kelly, 58, is married to Gabby Giffords, a former member of Congress who was wounded along with several others in a 2011 shooting rampage that left six people dead. Kelly and Giffords moved back to Tucson shortly after the attack and have since been outspoken proponents of gun control legislation.
Blake Masters grew up in Tucson before moving to California, eventually graduating from Stanford University and then Stanford Law School.
Masters, 36, joined the Trump transition team in 2016 and has been a vocal proponent of the baseless claim that the 2020 election was “stolen” from the former president.
According to his campaign website, Masters sees a triple threat from what he calls the “unholy alliance between Big Government, Big Tech and Big Business” – forces he blames for wreaking “havoc” on the economy and imposing a “radically liberal ideology”.
Starting in 2015 Blake served as president of the Thiel Foundation, a science and innovation nonprofit. From 2018 to 2022, Blake was chief operating officer at Thiel Capital, a tech investment firm.
Both organizations are backed by right-wing German-American billionaire Peter Thiel, one of the founders of PayPal and a Facebook investor, who has taken to funding pro-Trump candidates in the midterms including Masters in Arizona and JD Vance in Ohio.
Thiel donated some $15 million to both Saving Arizona, a group supporting Masters, and Protect Ohio Values, a super PAC backing Vance, in a series of donations during the primaries, according to Federal Election Commission filings cited by CNBC.
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