Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers testifies during the fourth congressional hearing on the January 6th investigation on June 21, 2022. . Photo by Kevin Dietsch | Getty Images
By Jim Small |Arizona Mirror
Rusty Bowers, the Republican speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, was trounced in Tuesday’s primary election by David Farnsworth, one of several legislative candidates endorsed by former President Donald Trump who unseated incumbent Republicans.
Bowers, who was censured last month by the Arizona Republican Party, drew the enmity of Trump and his followers in the GOP for refusing to participate in the former president’s efforts to throw Arizona’s 2020 election into doubt. In June, Bowers testified to Congress about the pressure he received from Trump and his campaign to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in Arizona, outraging Republicans.
Several weeks later, Trump endorsed Farnsworth, who has served two separate stints in the Arizona legislature, most recently as a senator from 2013 through 2021. Farnsworth, who said in a debate with Bowers that the devil stole the 2020 election from Trump, acknowledged in 2020 that he was a believer in the QAnon conspiracy theory, which posits that Trump was single-handedly dismantling a global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who drink the blood of the children they traffic around the world.
Farnsworth on Tuesday handily beat Bowers to be the GOP nominee in the solidly Republican District 10, nabbing more than 61% of the vote — an outcome that Bowers predicted in the closing days of the election.
