On Thursday, former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was pardoned by President Trump after being held in criminal contempt by a court for refusing to stop law enforcement measures determined by the court to constitute racial profiling, announced he might run for Senate in Arizona. “I am seriously, seriously, seriously considering running for the U.S. Senate,” said Arpaio, “not the congressman’s seat.”
Arpaio is famous across the country for his hardline opposition to illegal immigration and his splashy move to make prisoners wear pink in order to humiliate them for their crimes. That made him a hero among Republicans, who largely believe that political correctness has hampered law enforcement’s efforts to fight crime. But Arpaio is much more than the headline: he’s also got an extraordinarily checkered past, ranging from his ardent birtherism to the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office paying out a $3.5 million settlement to the Phoenix New Times for arresting reporters who exposed a grand jury subpoena.
Arpaio would have the advantage in any early Republican primary, if the nomination of Donald Trump nationally and Roy Moore in Alabama are any indicators. That’s because Republican candidates who are controversial for their hard-line positions have been targeted for those positions; the base therefore assumes that new media attacks aren’t factually based, but politically based. They hated Arpaio for his positions on illegal immigration, so if the media break news on any other awful thing he’s done, their motive is already clear. That’s the logic behind the conservatives who rally behind Roy Moore: the media attacked Moore for years because Moore wouldn’t bow to judicial supremacy on the Ten Commandments, and so further media attacks can be written off as more of the same, even if the attacks are based on horrifying fact patterns.
Furthermore, since the Republican base sees the media as the chief obstacle to conservative success over the past two decades — the same media that pilloried George W. Bush and Mitt Romney — they’re not sad to see the media beside themselves over Arpaio and Moore. In fact, there’s a certain glee to watching major media figures lament the base’s embrace of such figures — a feeling of “they used to control us, but they can’t anymore.”
That means that famous local right-wing politicians who have had run-ins with the press are immediately at an advantage in political primaries. Arpaio might not become a senator. But he’d have to be an early favorite to win the nominatinon based on this logic.