The Reagan Republican

Ronald Reagan came back from the dead to endorse one of Arizona’s U.S. Senate candidates. But most people don’t even know she’s running.

U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake’s campaign is defined by her affiliation with, and endorsement from, former President Donald Trump.

But the original creator of the “Make America Great Again” slogan is backing a different candidate. 

Elizabeth Jean Reye has granted herself an endorsement from deceased President Ronald Reagan, whose policies influence nearly every aspect of the little-known Senate contender’s key positions. Reagan delivered the beyond-the-grave endorsement in a deepfake audio that the Reye campaign made in which the Gipper trashes Lake. It’s all part of Reye’s full frontal assault strategy to attack Lake and raise her own name ID above its current 0%.

Reye is challenging Lake and Mark Lamb in the GOP primary election for Arizona’s U.S. Senate. Unlike write-in candidate Dustin Williams, her name will actually appear on the GOP primary ballot that millions of Arizonans will receive.

She knows the odds aren't in her favor. But she’s a neuroscientist, tornado chaser and she ran for a state House seat once in Oregon. In other words, she’s smart and tough and this isn’t her first rodeo. And she still thinks she has a chance of beating Lake and winning the U.S. Senate seat against Democrat Ruben Gallego.

“I understand the chances. But as a scientist, I can also say that mathematics change very quickly, and so do polls,” she said. 

The candidate presents herself as a more palatable alternative to Lake’s personal brand of deplorable politics. She believes in Second Amendment rights, but also background checks for gun owners. She wants to crack down on the border – via U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s bipartisan border security package that Republicans blew up. And she calls the Jan. 6 Capitol riots a “sacrilege.” 

To qualify for the U.S. Senate GOP primary, Reye paid petition circulators to gather 8,893 signatures. She says she’s “not comfortable” admitting how much she’s spent on her campaign so far. But candidates in this election cycle were paying above $10 per signature, depending on when they started collecting them, so it wasn’t cheap. 

Getting on the ballot doesn’t guarantee getting noticed, though. 

If you bring up her name to almost anyone involved in local Republican politics, the near-universal response is: “Who?”

Reye says she has “the Conscience of a Conservative” on her campaign website.

Reye is trying to raise her inconspicuous profile by picking fights and firing off incendiary statements, like telling her primary challengers to “debate me bitches.” 

“I will meet The “Governor” at a pillow stand in front of Mar-a-Lago,” Reye’s campaign website says. As for Lamb, he’s “free to wear his flack jacket because that won’t stop me from blowing his mind.”

Her disdain for the MAGA politics that have defined Republican campaigns has manifested in brutal and creative attacks against Lake specifically — like when she cut together a video of the former news anchor’s comments about Reagan juxtaposed against the reincarnated president's deepfaked voice trashing Lake. 

“If there were any lawyers in heaven, Kari, I'd be talking to them about suing you,” the undead Reagan says in the video. “Get back to standing for liberty and justice for all or get out of the way for those like Beth Reye, who will.”

The self-funded, quixotic candidate archetype is a staple of the Arizona political scene, but they rarely fare well with the electorate. 

In 2022, Jim Lamon, a wealthy businessman, pledged to spend $50 million of his own money for his campaign to unseat U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly, but he didn’t even make it out of the GOP primary. Christine Jones spent nearly $2 million on her campaign for Congress in 2016 and lost in the primary. Two years earlier, she had lost a bid for governor after spending more than $5 million.

And who can forget colorful biscotti baron Paola Tulliani Zen’s run for governor in 2022? Or her prosciutto?

Wealthy candidates can pay petition circulators to wrangle up enough signatures to qualify for the ballot, run pricey advertisements and assemble a campaign staff to do the heavy lifting. So far, Reye’s campaign has accomplished getting her name on the ballot. It’s not clear how much she’s willing to spend to boost her own profile beyond simply being on the ballot.

Even when news articles are kind enough to mention Lamb’s name as a challenger to Lake, the presumptive nominee, they almost never mention Reye. We found exactly four references to her candidacy in the news. None mentioned anything about her other than her name.

When we asked Lamb’s campaign advisor Ed Morabito what he knows about Reye, he told us “almost nothing.” 

Reye said her federal campaign finance reports are empty because she’s only spent her own money so far, but she’s “starting to get donations.” While federal candidates don’t have limits on how much they can spend on their own campaigns, they still have to report the expenses. 

But money doesn’t mean much without name recognition. And despite pouring an amount of funds into a Senate campaign that’s too sensitive to disclose, she seems to recognize that it doesn’t mean much if nobody knows who you are. 

“Why not run for Senate, just because I don't have the name yet? The general rule is you have to run three times before you win,” Reye told us in a telephone interview. “So you know what, if I'm running way behind, then I'm running way behind. But it's happened so many times in political history, someone coming out from behind can win.”

In a past life, Reye says she got her PhD in neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University and worked for the National Institutes of Health. 

But politics has always been her true love. Reye recalls laying on the floor next to her mother, who’s an author, as she would write with CNN playing in the background. She would watch Wolf Blitzer “for hours,” and instead of existential dread, she found fascination. 

Reye ran a failed campaign against a long-time incumbent in Oregon’s House of Representatives in 2018. On her website, she blames the poorly received candidacy on being a “Libertarian Republican running on an anti-corruption platform in Portland! Antifa threatened me and my family but I took them on because the conscience of a conservative never backs down!” 

Five years later, Reye said she heard about an Arizona charter school that specializes in treating kids with autism. She’s a mother of three, including a daughter with autism who got accepted to the school despite its years-long waiting list. Reye’s husband, a process engineer at Intel, got the go-ahead to transfer from the company’s offices in Oregon to Arizona. 

While most politicians entertain the unspoken rules of working one’s way up from lower offices before starting a Senate run, Reye said she felt a special calling to step into the race after watching Lake literally throw Sinema’s border bill in the trash. 

“I felt it was necessary for me to jump in,” Reye said. “This was the only seat that really worried me.”

Reye thinks Arizona’s 1864 abortion ban went too far, but still thinks states should have the right to legislate their own abortion laws. Like almost all of her policies, it’s based on Reaganism, she says. 

She points to a letter Reagan sent Charles M. Schulz, creator of the Peanuts comic strip. The president said a Charlie Brown line reminded him of the “soul searching” he did when considering whether to sign a California abortion rights law: “I could only reconcile abortion with the right of self-defense,” Reagan wrote in a take that Reye has co-opted as her own.

And her approach to border security is also Reaganesque.  

“When President Reagan signed the last comprehensive immigration bill passed in this country, He¹ was sure to congratulate both Republicans and Democrats,” Reye’s website says. 

Besides a fanatical obsession with Reagan, Reye’s defining feature as a candidate is playing offense against Lake. Her campaign Twitter account is full of jabs at the frontrunner, and most of the posts have little to no engagement. 

“I have so many clips of (Lake) lying about her background and about her stances. The thing is, my stances have never changed,” Reye said. “You can go back and look at my 2018 campaign over in Oregon … And so the voters in Arizona need to know that I will represent them as a native Arizonan that does not flip flop on political winds.” 

But to successfully prove true to one’s word, the public has to know what a candidate has promised. And it helps if they know who a candidate is in the first place.

1. This isn’t a typo. Reye capitalized Reagan’s pronoun.