After announcing Tuesday afternoon that he will not run for re-election in 2018, Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) on Wednesday morning described how Republican politics have changed in a way that made it impossible for him to win his primary.
“The bottom line is if I were to run a campaign that I can could be proud of and where I didn’t have to cozy up to the President and his positions or his behavior, I could not win in a Republican primary. That’s the bottom line. It’s not that you have just to be with the President on policy. You can’t question his behavior and still be a Republican in good standing, apparently, in a Republican primary,” Flake said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
The senator said that polls show that the most important issue to Republican primary voters is support for Trump.
“And they take any criticism of the President as somehow something that’s not conservative. And that’s what’s got to change,” Flake said.
Flake told MSNBC that he has suddenly become a RINO, a Republican In Name Only.
“Republicans have changed quite a bit, that’s all I can say,” he said.
He said that to win a Republican primary now, you have to be “angry” and to stand with Trump no matter what.
“The problem is, it seems now to be conservative you have to be angry. And it’s a different type of politics than we’re used to, you and me,” he told MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman.
Flake said that this dynamic “may be more pronounced in Arizona than some other states, but it’s not unique.”
Watch Flake’s interview on “Morning Joe” via MSNBC:
