Lord Help Her
Sen. Martha McSally calls for the divine intervention of negative advertising to save her as Democratic Mark Kelly continues to lead in polling and fundraising is it surprising that U.S.
Sen. Martha McSally is praying for help?
The Arizona Mirror reported last week that McSally told a crowd of Republicans that she needed independent campaign committees to start running TV ads to counter ongoing efforts to highlight her record on healthcare legislation.
“We need close air support to show up,” McSally said, according to a recording of the meeting acquired by the Mirror. “There’s outside groups. We can’t talk to them. We can’t invite them, but we pray for them every day. We need conservative outside groups, you know, to wake up, and get involved, and start muddying up the landscape a little bit, so I’m not just sitting here taking incoming and not having any A-10s show up, you know overhead, to help me out.”
Team McSally is legally precluded from coordinating efforts with such groups, but it seems like she might be sending them secret signals nonetheless.
McSally’s call for divine intervention comes as yet another poll shows Democratic challenger Mark Kelly holding a lead against her. McSally holds the distinction of being the first Republican to lose a U.S. Senate seat in Arizona in 30 years after she was defeated by Democrat Kyrsten Sinema in 2018. McSally was able to land in the U.S. Senate anyhow, having wired a backup plan with Gov. Doug Ducey to be appointed to the open U.S. Senate seat held by the late Sen. John McCain. But because she was appointed, McSally has to run for the seat this year—and while the race is shaping up to be one of the most competitive in the country, multiple polls have shown McSally trailing Kelly, the former Navy fighter pilot and retired NASA astronaut.
Kelly also happens to be the husband of former Southern Arizona congresswoman Gabby Giffords. Unsurprisingly, Team Kelly has some of the same key players who worked with both Giffords and the top aide who took her place in Congress, Ron Barber. And it was McSally who knocked Barber out of office back in 2014 by a mere 167 votes. So, Team Kelly is intimately familiar with McSally strengths and weaknesses—and given the history, this race is something of a grudge match.
The Public Policy Polling survey released last week showed Kelly with a 4 percentage point lead over McSally, with 46 percent of voters supporting Kelly and 42 percent supporting McSally. The survey of 760 Arizona voters, conducted Jan. 2-4, fits the pattern of similar polls released throughout 2019, with Kelly holding a narrow lead over McSally.
There’s a lot of time between now and the November election and we wouldn’t be surprised if this race remained too close to call even the morning after the election, as McSally’s 2012, 2104 and 2018 elections were.
But McSally knows she’s in trouble. Despite her reputation as a prodigious fundraiser during her years in Congress, she trailed Kelly in the dash for cash last year. This week, McSally said she had raised $4 million in the final quarter of 2019, bringing her total for the year to more than $12 million. That is respectable, but Team Kelly told the press this week that he’d raised $6.3 million in the same period, meaning he’d brought in more than $20 million in 2019. At the start of 2020, Kelly had $13.6 million in the bank, while McSally had $7.6 million, according to the campaigns.
And last week’s PPP survey is just the latest to show McSally trailing Kelly. Part of the reason is that voters just haven’t warmed up to her (or perhaps have cooled on her since she went from keeping her distance from President Donald Trump to embracing him). PPP’s survey shows only 37 percent of voters approve of the job she is doing, while 47 percent disapprove; that lines up (on the approval level at least) with the trend line established in 2019 by ongoing Morning Consult polling, which showed McSally with an approval rating that varied from 35 percent to 40 percent. (Her disapproval rating in that survey ranged from 35 to 37 percent.) For comparison’s sake, Morning Consult had Sinema, the Democrat who defeated McSally in 2018, with an approval rating of 47 percent and disapproval of 29 percent at the end of September—a net positive of 18 percentage points, compared to McSally’s net positive of 2 percentage points.
Given the stakes—the Arizona Senate race could determine the balance of power in the U.S. Senate next year—McSally’s prayers for third-party campaign support are likely to be answered later this year as this race breaks all previous spending records in the state.
God only knows whether all that money can save her from her own lousy voting record.
This article appears in Jan 16-22, 2020.
Hopefully we can bring her across the finish line. Mark Kelly is, in my opinion, a 2nd Amendment
radical who would support legislation that would infringe. McSally has done a good job during her tenure and is a strong supporter of Davis-Monthen. She deserves to be elected.
Hopefully Mark will win and prevent the republican lemming from stealing your vote, SS and Medicare while giving the rich even more tax breaks they don’t need while further trying to reduce workers pay. And yes, Mark will also be a big D-MAFB supporter.
So far, the only negative (and in many cases totally false) advertising I have seen, is from the Democratic side.
Send your non-elected senator a short message on her website.
Subject: Trump
Body: Mark Kelly won’t abandon his country.
This piece suggests many questions that I hope the Tucson Weekly addresses in the weeks to come.
At this moment in American history (and American politics), any seat in the US Senate remains critical.
The fact that these two contenders amass so much cash post-Citizens United, tends to raise some pretty nasty red flags. Who are their generous _donors/sponsors_? Corporations, dark money 501’s, or “bring-back-the-New-Deal” dems? Not all funding sources are created equal, ideologically speaking–as future favorable legislation _and_ tax-giveaways to those who need them least will likely ensue. Let’s remove our Pollyanna-tinged eyewear (or brain-filters). The fact that one candidate runs behind the aegis of the GOP and the other under the Democrat umbrella remains next to meaningless in this day and age; I suspect many candidates target voters who stubbornly cling to and vote based on shallow, anachronistic labels. I have come to believe that a candidate’s platform, proposed legislation, and ideas/views matter, that such matters trump party-line appeals.
Sometimes I wonder how many folks don’t bother to register, and if registered don’t bother to vote based on viewing the binary “choice,” and just stay home–expecting the next election cycle. I don’t have data on hand, but isn’t it something like 40% of folks eligible to vote? Who just say “no” to both sides of the political aisle and self-disenfranchise? With some of the choices “our betters” provide us, why bother? These past 45 years with rare exceptions, I will note that third party candidates have provided better, healthier solutions for our republic. They just weren’t able to raise corporate cash to get their message to voters who can make a difference.
One final question: why does the Tucson Weekly, an alternative paper, play the corporate media game and highlight these two candidates and their fund-raising? Surely, there must be more candidates in the running…
Be well.
Hope her “you’re a liberal hack” comment to a national journalist in the halls of the Capitol helps her demise.
“We need close air support to show up,” McSally said. “I’m not just sitting here taking incoming and not having any A-10s show up, you know overhead, to help me out.”
Sounds like Martha has popped smoke to mark her position, but she’s blowing smoke when it comes to representing all the people of Arizona and not just Republicans.
As for the incoming she’s experiencing, I suggest she advise the president to stop calling for fire on his own position by continuing to use the office of the presidency to line his pockets, carry out his personal brand of xenophobic race and political warfare, and lastly, to stop being a useful idiot to China and Russia.
When you find yourself in a hole the first step to getting out is to stop digging.