Appointed to her seat just 43 days after losing her first Senate race, McSally wilted under an astronaut’s ad onslaught.
Appointed to her seat just 43 days after losing her first Senate race, McSally wilted under an astronaut’s ad onslaught.
PHOENIX — Two Democrats will represent Arizona in the U.S. Senate for the first time since the 1952 election.
That was the last time any Arizona senator lost a re-election bid, which had never happened to any sitting Republican senator until last week’s defeat of Martha McSally.
Two Democrats will represent Arizona in the U.S. Senate for the first time since 1952; the last time any Arizona senator lost a re-election bid.
Tuesday’s result means McSally becomes the only Republican senator ever to be unseated there.
McSally was the first woman to fly and lead combat missions for the U.S. Air Force. She retired as a colonel and was a fierce advocate for women when she spoke out about being allegedly raped by a superior officer.
McSally was elected to the House of Representatives from a Democratic-leaning southern Arizona district in 2014 on her second attempt. There, she earned recognition as a lawmaker who got things done.
Yet, McSally was unseated in a historically Republican state by a strong challenger, rapidly changing demographics, money, message, tone, policy, and COVID-19 protocols, according to Republican and Democratic strategists and a political scientist.
Gina Woodall, a senior lecturer at Arizona State University’s School of Politics and Global Studies, studied the race closely and is writing a book chapter about it.
“On paper, she looks great. She’s a very accomplished person. In reality, given the high-quality challenger, and given the political environment and her personality, Arizona voters didn’t buy it. Arizona didn’t like it,” Woodall said.
Some political strategists have said McSally never defined herself and never gained traction with voters. She never adapted from a failed plan of relentless attack, and a sour demeanor turned off moderates and independents.
“She never picked a side, and she got run over by extremes in both parties,” said Chuck Coughlin, a leading Republican strategist and CEO of HighGround Public Affairs Consultants. “She never connected with Arizona voters.”
Chad Campbell, a former Democratic minority leader in Arizona’s state assembly, now a senior vice president at Strategies 360, agrees.
“A lot of people have a hard time knowing who she really is. And if you have that problem, you’re going to have a problem getting votes,” Campbell said.
McSally’s campaign website touted her bipartisan credentials and a strong record of getting bills passed, including the Trump tax cut and the CARES Act.
But that’s not what the senator voters saw on the news, in the single debate, or in political ads.
In the Senate, she voted with Trump more than 90% of the time, according to Five-Thirty-Eight.
She voted for the border wall, to revoke the Affordable Care Act, against removing Trump from office, and for his controversial nominees, including for Attorney General William Barr and Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
In Arizona, her television campaign ads attacked her opponent, trying to paint Mark Kelly as an unscrupulous business owner in the Chinese Communist Party’s pocket. It didn’t stick.
Critics and observers described her attacks as relentless, like a machine gun, and often unfounded.
The same tactic had also failed in 2018. McSally narrowly lost to Sen. Kyrsten Sinema in a campaign noted for McSally’s debate outburst in which she called her opponent “treasonous.”
This time, McSally labeled her opponent Mark Kelly, “Counterfeit Kelly.”
Debate watchers said, at best, the incumbent did little to change the losing trajectory of her campaign and, at worst, was a poor performance.
Kelly was already healthy, and steady lead in the polls widened. The debate did nothing to reverse McSally’s image.
Kelly, too, flew combat missions in the Gulf War, as a Navy pilot, before joining NASA and commanding Space Shuttle flights. He’s married to former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who was beloved and respected on both sides of the partisan divide, before, and especially after, she was shot in the head during an unsuccessful 2011 assassination attempt.
After the shooting, the couple launched a campaign for sensible gun control, reminding the public that they own guns. In recent polls, such as a 2019 PBS survey, many Americans said they favored most of the measures.
The National Rifle Association gave McSally an “A” grade in 2018.
McSally held other positions on abortion, immigration, and the Supreme Court, which didn’t align with the majority, either. Nowhere was that more telling than with her pronouncements on the pandemic and health care.
She voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act, but she claimed to be the candidate protecting health care in her softer TV ads. Kelly told voters he’d defend Obamacare and ran ads featuring people with pre-existing medical conditions blasting McSally for trying to strip them of coverage.
During a pivotal moment in the debate, the moderator asked her if she supported Trump’s handling of the pandemic. She refused to answer.
Some moderates and critics on the left blasted her for being out of touch. Early in the summer, Arizona was breaking records when cases and deaths of COVID-19 spiked. Conservatives blasted her for not defending the president.
And he didn’t forget it, said Coughlin said. A Trump confidant told him McSally’s debate remarks angered the president, and that’s why he was dismissive of her in Arizona rallies right before the election.
McSally once had a history of bucking the luminaries in her party. In the 2018 primary, she defeated former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a GOP institution, and state lawmaker Kelli Ward, who now chairs the state party.
During Trump’s 2016 race, she criticized his Access Hollywood remarks as “disgusting” and did not endorse him.
But after she was named in 2018 by Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey to fill the seat left vacant by Sen. John McCain’s death, she “flipped the script,” Campbell noted.
Ducey appointed McSally to the vacant seat 43 days after she lost to Sinema for the other one.
Campbell said political insiders in both parties were shocked. Coughlin claimed it became a burden. It did the opposite of bestowing the traditional advantages of incumbency.
“She was appointed. She was an insider. She’s not clearing up the swamp. (To voters) she is the swamp,” Coughlin said.
As a senator, McSally draped herself in Trump’s cloak, politically and rhetorically. She famously was caught on tape refusing to answer a routine question by CNN Capitol Hill reporter Manu Raju, calling him “a liberal hack.”
It played well to the base, which started printing T-shirts, but not so well with independents and suburban women, who were growing exhausted by acrimony in Washington.
“She really doubled down as an ally of Trump. And with the changing electorate in Arizona, people rejected her,” Woodall said.
Rather than ride Trump’s coattails, McSally performed worse than the president.
The latest unofficial tally shows McSally won about 20,000 fewer votes than Trump. She was trailing Kelly by about 80,000 votes, out of more than 3.3 million cast. Comparatively, Biden was leading Trump by just 15,000.
McSally won more votes than she did in her failed 2018 bid, but her rival did even better. She took in 25,000 more votes than last time, but Kelly added to Sinema’s support by half a million votes.
Like Biden, Kelly played it safe. He campaigned on health care and bipartisanship. In one of his most prominent TV ads, Kelly appeared in a pilot jumpsuit and talked about how nobody cared if their co-pilot was a Republican or Democrat during combat sorties.
All that mattered, he said, was completing the mission. He promised to work with Republicans to get the mission done for Arizona.
One reason McSally never defined herself, Arizona political strategists say, is she was getting battered in the fundraising. Coughlin said a year before the election, a flood of dark money-funded ads that defined her, and nobody countered them.
According to the latest Federal Election Commission records, filed Oct. 15, Kelly raised $90 million to McSally’s $57 million.
By early July, Kelly’s committee had spent $5.8 million on digital advertising. McSally had only spent $245,000 on advertising by then. More recent expenditures are not yet available as of the time of this writing.
In the last two weeks of the election, Kelly ran far more primetime ads during cable news broadcasts. McSally’s message seemed to peter out.
A database of political ads on Snapchat, kept by snap.com, showed Kelly spent $142,000 on ads targeting Arizona adults, reaching nearly 12.5 million pairs of eyeballs. The most widely distributed was a 30-second spot highlighting Kelly’s NASA experience and a Space Shuttle launch.
McSally spent nothing on Snapchat.
A big generator of Kelly’s Snapchat ads was LUCHA, Living United for Change in Arizona. Democrats credited the Latino rights organization and others like it, drumming up massive support for Arizona Democrats.
New voters indeed drove up turnout. Some were young Arizona natives. Others were recent professionals who arrived from other states such as California. Metro Phoenix’s population grew by more than 200 people a day since last year, according to U.S. Census and other estimates.
But McSally trailed her challenger in almost every demographic. In the Times/Sienna poll, every group except men and white voters without college degrees gave her a higher “very unfavorable” than “very favorable” rating. She was underwater everywhere except staunchly conservative rural Arizona.
That was true even in the conservative parts of Maricopa County, in the suburbs circling Phoenix. Arpaio country. Trump country.
Maricopa County represents 60% of the Arizona electorate, according to the registration figures for the 2020 general election. Win Maricopa County, and you win Arizona.
It’s still a Republican county, but not the GOP stronghold it once was. In countywide races, Arpaio’s right-hand man was trounced by the Democratic incumbent sheriff. A Democratic challenger for a county seat was leading the Republican incumbent in a traditionally conservative-leaning district.
Countywide, Republican registrations outpace Democratic ones by 100,000 voters. Statewide, the gap only widens by 30,000 more.
Like its largest county, the state is roughly split three ways, with Republicans, Democrats, and independents each netting a third of registered voters.
“It used to be, you put an “R” after your name and you’re going to win Maricopa County. Not anymore,” Coughlin said.
At last count, Kelly had 80,000 more votes in Maricopa County than McSally. Biden outpaced Trump by closer to 45,000 votes there.
The post-mortem on McSally’s race was harsh. A column in The Arizona Republic didn’t mince words after McSally’s defeat, calling hers the “Worst. Campaign. Ever.”
It lambasted McSally for being atonal to how much Arizonans were suffering during the COVID-19 pandemic, for ignoring warning signs, and failing to recognize that she needed swing voters who were wary of political venom. Being Trump’s Mini-Me was a bad look, the Republic opined.
McSally’s campaign did not respond to email or phone requests for an interview. Kelly’s office declined to comment, citing ongoing vote-counting. Neither the Arizona Democratic Party nor the Arizona Republican Party parties responded to interview requests.
It was a uniquely challenging time to run as an incumbent, with the worst pandemic in a century and the worst economy since The Depression. Add to that the steadiness of her opponent, the adoration of his spouse, Cindy McCain’s supporting Biden, the awkwardness McSally’s appointment, her struggle to connect, and the rising tide of a more liberal electorate, and it made for a toxic brew.
“You add all these things up, that’s how victories are won,” Campbell said.
(Edited by Daniel Kucin Jr and ….)
