Rural Arizona district's senator cashes in on shift to the far right, becomes a face of her party's 'radicalized wing'

Republican state Sen. Wendy Rogers of Arizona has found fundraising success in espousing extremist political views. Her trajectory shows how political and financial incentives may sway some politicians to cater to conspiracist beliefs with inflammatory populist rhetoric, The Washington Post reports.

She could also be a sign of things to come: the latest round of redistricting made many districts safer, so Republicans may increasingly get challenged from the right, The New York Times reports.

Wendy Rogers
(AP photo by Ross Franklin)

Rogers, 67, made a splash on the national scene after a speech in late February at a white nationalist conference in Orlando. She called for graphic violence against "traitors" to make examples of them and called the coronavirus vaccine a "bioweapon," report Beth Reinhard and Rosalind Helderman of the Post.

The Arizona Senate voted 24-3 to censure Rogers after the speech, but she criticized "elites" for trying to silence her and has refused to apologize. Rogers "has found a rising national profile as a face of the radicalized wing of the GOP," the Post reports. Her "trajectory shows the political and financial incentives of going to extremes. After losing her earliest races as a mainstream Republican, she moved further and further right until she beat an incumbent by campaigning as the more conservative choice. Now, after a year of fanning bogus allegations about election fraud and other false claims, she is the most successful fundraiser in the Arizona state legislature."

Her increasingly extreme views gained her a re-election endorsement from former President Donald Trump and attention from his supporters, but she hasn't always taken such stances. The retired U.S. Air Force pilot ran and lost five times for state House and Senate seats with more centrist messaging that promoted her as a veteran, small-business owner and mother of two, the Post reports. Then in 2020 she essentially district-shopped her way into qualifying to run in the more conservative, more rural area around Flagstaff.

"Republicans who have watched Rogers over the past decade wonder if her views have changed or if she is merely opportunistic. Either way, Rogers’s MAGA-charged rants helped her achieve a long-elusive victory at the polls," the Post reports. "Her shift to the far right has coincided with an outpouring of grass-roots, small donors. Nearly 40,000 individuals contributed to her campaign last year, of which only a handful gave the $5,300 maximum. That means Rogers can keep dipping into this large pool of donors in 2022."

Rogers has made election reform her signature issue, promoting the false claim that Trump lost Arizona in 2020 because of vote fraud. She has sponsored a dozen voting-related bills that experts said would wreck the electoral process and other state Republicans said they couldn't endorse, Reinhard and Helderman report. The bills won't pass, but Rogers is arguably measuring success in attention and fundraising, not how many bills pass or what they do.