by Ray Keating
The Keating Files – June 27, 2020
U.S. Senator Martha McSally, Republican from Arizona, has a knack for making history. However, the history she might make this November is not the kind that she would appreciate.
Without a doubt, McSally is a fighter. She became the first female fighter pilot in history to fly in combat, as well as the first to command an Air Force fighter squadron in combat. She served in the Air Force for 26 years, and retired a full colonel in 2010.
McSally subsequently dove into a political career. She first lost a Republican primary in Arizona to fill the rest of the term for Democrat Rep. Gabby Giffords’ House of Representatives seat after Giffords was badly wounded in a 2011 shooting in Tucson. Ron Barber, a former Giffords’ aide who also was injured in the shooting, eventually won the seat. As the GOP candidate, McSally then narrowly lost to Barber in 2012.
McSally came back to win the seat in a tight, brutal race in 2014, and then was re-elected handily in 2016.
After Senator Jeff Flake, a Republican critical of President Donald Trump, announced in 2017 that he was retiring, McSally entered the race. She largely was seen as the traditional Republican conservative candidate in the primary versus more fringy candidates, namely, Kelli Ward and Joe Arpaio. McSally won the primary, had a tough time then uniting the GOP vote, and failed to handle the death of U.S. Senator John McCain very well, which happened just before the GOP primary.
McSally wound up losing the November election by an extremely tight margin to Kyrsten Sinema. So, McSally lost the Senate seat that had been in Republican hands since 1995.
Meanwhile, former Senator Jon Kyl, a Republican, came out of retirement to be appointed by Republican Governor Doug Ducey as a kind of placeholder for the McCain seat. Kyl then retired, again, in December, and Ducey appointed McSally to the seat – just 55 days after she lost to Sinema. According to a Smart Politics analysis, that was the quickest turnaround from losing a Senate seat to being appointed to a Senate seat.
McSally is now in a race to finish out McCain’s term, and her Democratic opponent is Mark Kelly, who is Giffords’ husband and a former astronaut.
The latest polls show Kelly holding a strong lead over McSally. For example, in the two polls on the race released in June (so far), McSally has failed to top 38 percent, and trailed in one poll by nine points and in the other by 13 points. Of course, the four-plus months remaining until the election can be an eternity in politics. But it’s clear that McSally is in deep trouble.
Part of the problem might be that Trump is not faring well in the state, either, and McSally clearly has moved closer to the Trump camp. The most recent polls show Trump either in a dead heat or slightly behind his opponent, Democrat Joe Biden, in Arizona. Since Harry Truman won Arizona in 1948, the state has only gone for a Democrat once in a presidential race – by a tiny margin for President Bill Clinton in 1996.
If McSally goes down to defeat, it would not only mean losing a seat held by Republicans since 1969 – by Barry Goldwater and then John McCain – but it would mean that McSally would make history, once again. She will have lost both Republican Senate seats in Arizona to the Democrats within a mere two years. Yep, that would rank as making history. Of course, though, it’s not the kind of history any politician wants to make.
__________
See recent...
__________
Ray Keating is a columnist, economist, podcaster and entrepreneur. You can order his new book Behind Enemy Lines: Conservative Communiques from Left-Wing New York from Amazon or signed books at RayKeatingOnline.com. His other recent nonfiction book is Free Trade Rocks! 10 Points on International Trade Everyone Should Know. Keating also is a novelist. His latest novels are The Traitor: A Pastor Stephen Grant Novel, which is the 12th book in the series, and the second edition of Root of All Evil? A Pastor Stephen Grant Novel with a new Author Introduction. The views expressed here are his own – after all, no one else should be held responsible for this stuff, right?
Also, tune in to Ray Keating’s podcasts – the PRESS CLUB C Podcast and the Free Enterprise in Three Minutes Podcast
No comments:
Post a Comment