On a recent weekday morning, Steve Arechiga swung by the library to pick up a book he'd reserved. It was a history of authoritarian strongmen, starting with Mussolini. The topic seemed unnervingly immediate.
Arechiga is a political independent. He's so concerned, however, about the falsehoods promoted by four of Arizona's statewide Republican candidates — the claim President Joe Biden stole the White House, the lie that the 2020 election was rife with fraud — that Arechiga has been going door to door in this upscale Tucson suburb campaigning for Democrats.
It's bad enough, he said, that candidates like gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake and Senate hopeful Blake Masters refuse to acknowledge President Donald Trump's defeat. Worse, Arechiga suggested, is what might come in 2024 if Lake and the GOP candidates for secretary of state, Mark Finchem, and attorney general, Abraham Hamadeh, seize hold of the state's election machinery.
