Karrin Taylor Robson urges Arizona GOP Chair Kelli Ward to resign after midterm ‘disaster’

PHOENIX — Former Republican Arizona gubernatorial candidate Karrin Taylor Robson on Tuesday called for state party chair Kelli Ward to step down after multiple defeats to Democrats in the midterm elections.

“The facts are pretty clear, the receipts, as they say, are in and when it comes to the state of the Republican party, it’s just an unmitigated disaster,” Taylor Robson told KTAR News 92.3 FM.

“We have a party chair who, when she took office in 2019, we had a Republican governor. We had Republican senators and now we have two Democrat senators and a Democrat elected to the highest office in the state. I call that an unmitigated disaster.”

Taylor Robson lost to Kari Lake in the Republican primary, the candidate backed by former President Donald Trump.

Lake, along with the Trump-backed candidates for U.S. Senate and secretary of state, are all projected to lose their respective races.

Trump’s candidate for Arizona Attorney General, Abe Hamadeh, was also trailing in a close race against Democrat Kris Mayes as of Tuesday evening.

Taylor Robson in a statement posted on Twitter said despite wins for some Republicans at the local level, the party is “rudderless and leaderless.”

“More concerned with stocking division and settling old scores, Kelli Ward has led our party into a deep morass with no real plan for the future,” the statement read.

“Kelli Ward is passionate about her views, and claims to be conservative. But she is not a leader. She is not a winner. The party cannot afford two more years with her as chairman.”

She urged Ward, a vigorous supporter of Trump, to do the right thing for the “good of the party she claims to love, and for the future of the state that we all cherish.”

Taylor Robson said the party has to get back to where they were before.

“It’s almost as if the party in Arizona was carjacked,” she said. “They took the wheel and the rest of us are in the car saying, what happened? And so we have an opportunity now to retake the wheel, get back to basics, get back to the fundamental conservative principles that we all believe in and quit beating each other up.”

Taylor Robson congratulated the winning candidates and encouraged them to govern for all the people of Arizona while saying she would defend election leadership and that the process was administered appropriately.

Follow @TaDunham