Former White House press secretary Sarah Sanders on May 24 won the Arkansas Republican gubernatorial primary election.
With 26 percent of the districts reporting at 9:19 p.m. ET, Sanders drew more than 80 percent of the vote and was projected as the winner by Decision Desk HQ.
Sanders will face physicist and minister Chris Jones in the general election in November. Jones is the projected winnder of the Democratic primary with more than 71 percent of the vote with 46 percent of the precincts reporting at 10:47 p.m. ET.
Sanders ran against Francis Washburn, a former conservative talk radio host in the Little Rock area.
Sanders said on the campaign trail that she would protect conservative Arkansas from the radical national agenda pushed by liberal lawmakers in Washington.
She proposed to phase out the state income tax to give taxpayers a pay raise amid inflation, support police to enforce the law, and expand public-funded school choice programs.
Sanders had endorsements from former President Donald Trump, former vice president Mike Pence, and incumbent Republican Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson.
Hutchinson cannot seek reelection due to Arkansas’ two-term limit for governors. A few weeks ago, Hutchinson publicly said he is weighing a presidential run in 2024.
According to the latest financial disclosures published by the Arkansas Secretary of State’s Office, Sanders raised a whopping 13 million during her campaign, far outpacing any other Republican or Democratic candidates.
After Sanders entered the gubernatorial race in January. Arkansas Republican Lt. Gov. Tim Griffin and Attorney General Leslie Rutledge both dropped their bids for governor and ran for each other’s post instead.
Sanders’s lone Republican primary rival, Francis Washburn, jumped into the race after Sanders endorsed U.S. Sen. John Boozman and U.S. Rep. French Hill in their respective reelection races.
Neither Boozman nor Hill fully supported Trump following the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the Capitol, and Sanders’s endorsement of both had Washburn deeply concerned, he told several local media outlets.
After the incident, Boozman issued a statement saying Trump bore some responsibility for the violence. Last May, Hill voted to establish a commission to probe the incident.
Washburn runs as an anti-establishment candidate, saying that Walmart and other big corporations have controlled state politics for too long.
As an outsider, he said he would bring about real conservative changes to the state, including drastically cutting the size of government, repealing the personal income tax, and signing a bill outlawing mask and vaccine mandates.
Washburn was fired last year by Columbus Media for refusing to take the COVID-19 vaccine. Since then, he has left his decades-long talk radio host career and started a podcast called Doc Washburn Show.
He raised a meager amount of $63,572 during his primary campaign, according to the latest financial disclosures published by the Arkansas Secretary of State’s Office.
From The Epoch Times