Sen. Wendy Rogers' smear campaign is low, even for her. And that's saying something (2024)

Opinion: Sen. Wendy Rogers smears a fellow Republican who dared to call out her running mate for racism. How does this woman get elected?

“You’re really playing with fire here,” Sen. Wendy Rogers warned the young Republican legislative candidate in December.

“You don’t realize the hot water you’re stepping into … .”

Ari Daniel Bradshaw now knows the painful price of crossing Rogers, one of the Republican Party’s nastiest politicians.

Or rather, he’s fast learning.

Rogers once called Bradshaw a 'role model'

Bradshaw is running for a north Phoenix seat in the Arizona House, a young Republican who not even a year ago was being courted by Rogers to become a part of her hard-right kook squad.

“You’re a good role model for other PC’s (precinct committee members) … ,” she wrote in August, replying to a social media post by Bradshaw. “Kudos to you because you understand the importance of working from the ground up.”

This week, Rogers partnered with College Republicans United — an antisemitic group that last summer invited white nationalist Nick Fuentes to deliver the keynote address at its second annual national convention — to smear Bradshaw.

Insinuating that Bradshaw, who is Jewish, sold fentanyl to kids.

That, apparently, is what you get for calling out Steve Slaton, a legislative candidate who Rogers is hoping to catapult into the Arizona House in this year's elections.

Slaton is the owner of The Trumped Store in Show Low — a guy who claims to be a Vietnam combat pilot, never mind that he enlisted three months after U.S. troops were pulled from Vietnam or that his official military records say he repaired helicopters in Korea.

Then Bradshaw called out use of a racial slur

In December, Bradshaw called out Slaton on social media, saying he used the N-word when referring to Rep. David Marshall, R-Snowflake, who is Black.

That earned Bradshaw a phone call from an angry Sen. Wendy Rogers, the audio of which the Mountain Daily Star published on social media on Monday.

“You don’t realize the hot water you’re stepping into even if you think you heard what you heard,” Rogers said in the call. “You are really playing with fire, legally, politically and in all respects.”

Bradshaw told me this week he was “flabbergasted” when Slaton used the racial slur during a conversation at an event last year.

Slaton called Bradshaw a “liar” and the Rogers phone call a fake.

But others in northern Arizona also claim to have heard Slaton use the N-word.

Kristie Blackman told me Slaton used it in her presence in 2020 when referring to her husband, former Rep. Walt Blackman, who also is Black and also is running in this year’s six-way GOP primary for two House seats in this rural Arizona district.

“This is nothing new,” she said. “He has been calling my husband that and Wendy is no better. She is no better. Wendy’s just as bad, anybody who condones and hangs out with that.”

Rogers' claim against Bradsaw has no evidence

Rogers didn’t return a call.

But on Wednesday, several hours after my column on her threats was published, she took to social media to repost an anonymous exchange of text messages alleging that someone named Ari sold fentanyl.

“Wait, are you talking about @AriBradshaw AZ,” Rogers asked, magnifying the anonymous exchange first posted by College Republicans United.

Rogers attacks the First Amendment: But doesn't succeed

Neither Rogers nor College Republicans United provided evidence to back up their claim. Maricopa County Superior Court records show Bradshaw was accused of a marijuana violation in 2016, but it was dismissed when he went into a diversion program. Court records elsewhere in the state turn up on a photo radar ticket.

Bradshaw denies the accusation and calls it “beyond disgusting.”

“Considering I watched my father shoot himself in front of my sister and I after he was addicted to opioids for years and I lost my cousin to heroin shortly after, I’m extremely hurt by the whole thing and feel they’re doing it on purpose to stab a knife where they know it hurts,” he told me.

Rogers has used nasty tactics for years

Politics is a blood sport and no one knows how to wield the nasty better than Rogers, who is hoping to fend off Republican Rep. David Cook, R-Globe, in the July 30 primary.

She spent a decade trying to convince voters to send her to Congress, going so far as to baselessly accuse a Republican rival of having ties to a sex-trafficking ring in 2018.

When that didn’t work, she moved from Tempe to a trailer in Flagstaff in 2020, spending more than a million dollars to run a slash-and-burn campaign against a Republican incumbent.

It worked, and she went on to become a national rock star in right-wing circles, endorsed by Donald Trump and admired near and far by the MAGA nation.

Yet I still recall that 2018 congressional campaign when she slimed her Republican opponent, Steve Smith, baselessly insinuating that he was a part of a modeling agency that sex trafficked young girls.

She won that primary, then lost the election, and Smith? He left politics.

“For 10 years, Wendy Rogers has been trying unsuccessfully to get into political office,” he said at the time. “Today she’s so desperate to win that she’s abandoned truth, decency and the values of the Republican Party.”

He was right.

Six years later, he’s still right.

Just ask Ari Daniel Bradshaw.

Reach Roberts atlaurie.roberts@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on X (formerly Twitter) at@LaurieRoberts.

Support local journalism: Subscribe toazcentral.comtoday.