By Yvonne Wingett Sanchez | Arizona Republic
Jim Lamon, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, speaks during the Turning Point Action event at the Arizona Federal Theatre in Phoenix on July 24, 2021.
Republican Senate candidate Jim Lamon dresses like an Old West lawman in a new ad in which he engages in a gunfight with actors representing President Joe Biden, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly, whose wife was gravely injured in a 2011 mass shooting near Tucson that left six dead and a dozen others injured.
The ad shows Lamon, with spurs jangling, coming to the rescue of a town from actors resembling Biden, Pelosi and Kelly, D-Ariz., dubbed in the video as “the D.C. gang.” The ad introduces Biden as “Old Joe,” Kelly as “Shifty Kelly,” and Pelosi as “Crazyface Pelosi.”
Across the town’s desert landscape, Lamon steps on camera, wearing a sheriff’s badge and Western wear.
“Well, if it isn’t Big Jim Lamon,” the man resembling Biden says.
Behind Lamon, townspeople shout complaints about “open borders” and fuel prices.
“The good people of Arizona have had enough of you,” Lamon said. “It’s time for a showdown.”
The actors playing Kelly and Biden draw guns; Pelosi draws a blade. Lamon draws a gun and shoots the weapons out of their hands, forcing the Democrats to flee.
Sarah Guggenheimer, a spokesperson for Kelly’s campaign, declined to comment Thursday, but the ad drew immediate blowback on social media and criticism from two of Lamon’s Republican Senate rivals, Blake Masters, a venture capitalist, and Michael “Mick” McGuire, the retired adjutant general of the Arizona National Guard.
“Absurd and desperate,” Masters said in a statement to The Arizona Republic. “Fits his campaign.”
