Democrats in this state want arizona to embrace the failed socialist polies advanced by the biden/harris administration. but arizonans knows that the future belongs to freedom. david sider was at the rally for the trump backed candidate on friday. he joins us now. and david, you report on this in a new piece which has the headline trump and spence squared off in the desert. it was one sided. you write in this part, this was billed as a split screen proxy war in the desert. donald trump versus mike pence in a midterm election skirmish that would provide an early indication about the future of the gop. it ended up more like a varsity jv scrimmage. the republican party landscape remains tilted sharply toward trump and those who came to watch the former president trump speak, seems to know it. and for them, pence, the old
Establishment wing in the gop is in the past. to trump supporters it doesn t matter how much damage was inflicted on the state party during his tenure. republicans lost two senate seats and for the first time since 1996 but it was the prospect that he might run again that they were cheering when he arrived. we heard from the former vice president. he didn t mention trump by name, the critical of those living in the past. but that is all donald trump seems to be doing. the crowd ate it up. oh, definitely. i mean, this is a group of people, especially in arizona, republicans are not over the 20 election. and i think we build this as some kind of battle royal between the two. and there is clearly a argument going on, between the pences of the gop and trump and trumpism. this kind of more institutionalist wing of the party. but the real schism going on in the gop is between pro-democracy
Politics in mellow dramatic terms, we need the big villain and then vanish the villain and all will be well. but the problem isn t just trump. trump is like a kind of cipher, a representation of something that is much more disperse, much more kind of widely shared by a segment of the country. and this takes me to, you david. in terms of what you see, right. when we think about someone like rusty bowers in arizona, he can in some ways reveal this schism, the debate that is happening. this you just described. talk about what he in some ways signals in terms of this so-called debate between these two sides and how he reveals what is happening on the ground in arizona. well fact that he was censured last week by the republican party in the state. essentially kicked out. that is an indication of where the gop is in arizona. and it doesn t matter how