Right Wing Watch reported Monday on MAGA activist Gina Swoboda’s selection as state chair of the Arizona GOP. One of her first acts as chair was to talk with MAGA operative and former Trump aide Steve Bannon about Republican efforts to change voting rules in Arizona.
“We have to win the presidency in Arizona and we have to win Kari Lake; we don’t take back the Senate unless Kari Lake wins,” Bannon said. Swoboda told Bannon that she took the job because Trump told her she had to.
Swoboda talked about AZ GOP litigation against a new state election manual and claimed that there is ongoing wrongdoing in Maricopa County, where Republican elected officials were the target of intense anger, conspiracy theories, and a bogus “audit” by Trump supporters after he lost the county in 2020. “They’re not even trying to hide it any more in Maricopa,” Swoboda told Bannon. “They’re just breaking the seals on the tabulators and running ballots through.”
Bannon was seemingly satisfied with Swoboda’s answers to his rapid-fire questions about how she and the state party were going to deal with a number of issues all while raising lots of money for the party. “Are you superwoman?” he asked.
“I’m fueled by God,” she said.
“I love that—empowered by the Holy Spirit?” Bannon asked, adding “Amen,” after she said she was “wearing the armor of God.”
“I think that the reason that God made me my nerdly election self is for this time,” Swoboda said.
“You’re saying you’re raised up for a reason,” Bannon said, to which she replied, “Amen.”
Swoboda was strongly backed by Lake, who has refused to accept her loss in the 2022 governor’s race. On Wednesday Lake posted an interview clip in which she praised Swoboda for having served in her campaign’s war room in 2022, when, Lake claimed, the election was “so rigged” against her.
Lake called Swoboda a national leader in the “election integrity” movement—MAGA-speak for efforts to make voting harder—and said Swoboda is connected to groups that will fund GOP “lawfare” litigation to “stop the cheating before it happens.”
