The Hamadeh for Congress campaign commissioned an internal poll that it shared yesterday with Politico. Campaigns don’t share this kind of thing unless it portends good news, and this one certainly rang cherries for the campaign of the candidate who last year came thisclose to prevailing statewide in the race for Attorney General.

The survey conducted by National Public Affairs, spoke to 418 likely Republican primary voters in the district between December 16 and 17^th.

The numbers are 37% for Abe Hamadeh, with the closest challenger being Blake Masters at 14%. Masters also lost statewide last year, to incumbent senator Mark Kelly , but by a much larger margin.

Outgoing Congresswoman Debbie Lesko has endorsed House Speaker Ben Toma, who sits at 7%. Former Representative Trent Franks, looking to get back in the game after a particularly weird sex-adjacent scandal, is at 6%. State Senator Anthony Kern is at 3%.

With nine months to go until the August primary, this is hardly a done deal. But last week’s endorsement by President Trump seems to have solidified Hamadeh’s status as front runner. It’s a district that went for Trump in 2020 by more than 10 points.

Media Criticism Thrown in for Free

Because it irritates me when campaigns run to a national outlet with this kind of thing, especially a left-leaning one, I’ll add a little bit of nuance here about Politico specifically, but basically the entire Washington-to-Brooklyn axis of political reporter.

Politico’s Madison Fernandez, in dutifully reporting this story that was handed to her on a platter, remarks that “A handful of candidates, including Hamadeh, Masters and Kern, have amplified false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from former president Donald Trump.”

This notion that referring to claims about the 2020 election is “false” – sometimes you see it reported as “a lie”— makes it the sole factual matter in which reporters feel morally obligated to fact check in real time every time.

You will not see contested Democratic primaries in which any of the candidates is endorsed by Biden described as having made “false claims” that the economy is thriving or “false claims” that the border is secure. Reporters should generally trust readers to do their own thinking, and their own evaluating about what is true and what is false, especially given the benefit of their wonderful reporting.

The notion that election interference is somehow such a different and unique threat that it must be called out as false by reporters even in supposedly straight new stories, rather than opinion pieces, is pure liberal bullshit. Those claims may indeed be false. It’s not for me to say. But it’s not for Madison Fernandez or Politico to say either.