Masters also significantly underperformed compared to the Republican gubernatorial candidate, Kari Lake, a longtime Phoenix television news anchor and former Democrat whose outrage about Covid policies led her to resign her TV job to run for office. Lake’s looming but not yet certified loss to Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, who angered Trump supporters through her vehement attacks on his election fraud claims, would appear to have much to do with the voters’ more substantial repudiation of Masters.

As Thiel protégés go, Masters seemed to offer the New Right a good deal more than J.D. Vance, the winning Republican Senate candidate in Ohio who had spent much of 2016 and 2017 denouncing Trump and promoting his memoir Hillbilly Elegy to a target audience of political moderates. Yes, Vance eventually apologised to Trump and received his somewhat mocking endorsement, but his victory owed as much to the rising tide of Ohioans that reelected popular governor Mike DeWine, who outperformed Vance by nearly 400,000 votes. 

In any case, Vance wasn’t the cool, Silicon Valley-forged neophyte that Masters was, a point hammered home in IM—1776 editor’s Benjamin Braddock’s recent on-the-ground coverage of the Masters campaign. Braddock praises Masters for both his political aesthetics — his videos were slickly produced, though his slightly awkward personality lent them an “uncanny valley” effect — as well as his willingness to visit hole-in-the-wall border towns long lost to Republican candidates. In an accompanying interview with Braddock, Masters also channelled some of the same “fail fast” energy found in Zero to One, his book with Thiel, claiming he wanted to move beyond partisan politics to discussions of individual ideas on their own merits.

Unfortunately, some of this willingness to move quickly and break things led to abrupt shifts between his rhetoric in the Republican primary, which skewed Right, and the more moderate tone he adopted in the general election. In August 2022, Masters scrubbed much stronger pro-life language from his campaign website as well as text that suggested the 2020 election was “stolen” from Trump. Some could argue this was cynical politicking: he had, after all, already received Trump’s endorsement in June 2022, and now needed to win the support of middle-of-the-road voters. There was also something questionable about Masters’s evolution from a largely pro-immigration libertarian to a nationalist who believed in substantial immigration restrictions and border protection. 

In the final analysis, Masters’s own personality, however eccentric, was likely not responsible for his downfall. Mark Kelly, hardly a charismatic figure in his own right, benefitted from political tailwinds related not to “rigged elections” but rather to what commentator Andrew Sullivan described as the “sense that the Right-wing populist surge is retreating somewhat everywhere” because “there is a vibe shift toward the center — even in Left-media and pop culture.” 

Most likely, Masters, an expert on iterating products in pursuit of marketplace success, simply offered up the wrong version of himself at the worst possible time. If he heeds his own advice from Zero to One, he will recalibrate and return to the marketplace of ideas at a later date, perhaps without Trump’s endorsement in tow, ready to fail better than before.

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Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work

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