Arizona Democrat Katie Hobbs is refusing to debate Republican nut job Kari Lake as the two fight for the Arizona governor’s office. Her campaign is calling off any negotiations with Lake and the state commission overseeing debates. Will this help or hurt her election? Via the AP:

The decision came after more than a week of efforts by Hobbs, currently secretary of state, to change the debate into separate half-hour interviews with the moderator. The Citizens Clean Elections Commission, which has held debates for two decades featuring candidates for statewide and legislative offices, flatly rejected that proposal on Thursday.

Instead, the commission urged its staff to work with Hobbs to come up with minor changes to the debate and gave her a week to come to an agreement. Hobbs’ campaign manager’s statements to the commissioners made it seem unlikely that a deal could be reached.

Nicole DeMont instead repeated the campaign’s concerns that debating Lake would “just create another spectacle, like we saw in the GOP primary debate. But on top of that, I would just add, you can’t debate a conspiracy theorist and at the last debate, she brought the conversation back to the 2020 election no less than a dozen times.”