Joe Arpaio’s last ride
ARIZ.»It was five days before ballots were to be FOUNTAIN HILLS, counted in his bid for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate, and former Arizona lawman Joe Arpaio had no idea what he was doing.
The final days of a campaign are usually frantic, with candidates’ every moment scheduled to ensure they meet as many voters as possible. But Arpaio had nothing planned Thursday until a 4:30 p.m. meeting.
“I ought to go to a Mexican restaurant and see how they treat me,” Arpaio, 86, said as he sat in his strip mall office. So he and his aides piled into the newly rented campaign bus in the latest stage of what is likely to be the controversial lawman’s long goodbye.
Arpaio served six terms as sheriff of Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix. He won national acclaim and condemnation for his hard-line policies. He jailed inmates in tents in the desert heat. He directed deputies to hunt people in the country illegally, a practice a court found to be racial profiling. He lost his 2016 re-election bid after being convicted of contempt of court for continuing that profiling. He was pardoned by President Donald Trump last year.
Now he has disappointed some supporters with his erratic GOP Senate primary bid in which he lags badly in polls behind U.S. Rep. Martha McSally and former state Sen. Kelli Ward. Arpaio’s legacy, they fear, will be splitting the conservative vote Tuesday, letting McSally, the favorite of establishment Republicans with whom Arpaio has long feuded, win the nomination.
“It is a kamikaze mission,” said Constantine Querard, a political strategist and former Arpaio supporter who supports Ward. “Is it malpractice, or is the candidate in on it?”
The Republican nominee likely will face Democratic U.S. Rep. Kyrsten Synema, a formidable opponent whose party hopes can flip the seat from the GOP. Arpaio, analysts say, has become a mere sideshow.
“No one really understands why he’s in the race,” said Stan Barnes, a Republican lobbyist. “The whisper around Arizona political circles is this is the kind of thing that an 86-year-old egomaniac would do because no one can control him.”
As he climbed onto the bus emblazoned with his face and a classic Arizona desert landscape, Arpaio dismissed the criticism. He fumed that McSally, an Air Force colonel, the country’s first female combat pilot and a onetime Trump critic turned supporter, has gotten all the money and attention.
“They’re going for her rather than me — the loyalty I showed these people, endorsing them, getting them jobs,” Arpaio said in his gravelly monotone. “Anybody in their right mind, if they were hiring, somebody would hire me, not these two novices,” he added of McSally and Ward.
The bus was largely empty. The driver was the campaign manager, Chris Hegstrom, Arpaio’s former spokesman at the sheriff’s department. In the back were a handful of volunteers, including a former Republican candidate for Missouri’s U.S. Senate who finished eighth in that primary race and brought his pistol along during the ride.
Hegstrom angled the bus into a nearby Costco parking lot. He needed to pick up hot dogs for a campaign barbecue, and the former sheriff wanted to look for votes.
Arpaio climbed down, removed his snapon tie and immediately caused a traffic jam.