By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — Republicans seemed to face severe difficulties in U.S. Senate races in the 2020 general election. After all, this time around the GOP was defending 23 spots in the Upper Chamber, including two special elections, and the Democrats only 12 seats. Just to start with, here was a mathematical burden. In warfare, would you rather have to defend 23 forts, or only 12?
Plus, everyone was told repeatedly of the “blue wave” that would sweep away Republicans. Disaster loomed for the pachyderms, the pundits chorused.
But the commentariat failed again. The blue wave was another of its fictions. The GOP even flipped one Democratic Senate seat, in Alabama, while losing two of its own, in Colorado and Arizona. The results provided more evidence there was no honest way for cognitively declining bad Catholic Joe Biden to have defeated energetic, pro-America Donald Trump for president, but that’s an argument for a different article.
Attention turns to Georgia’s two Senate special elections on January 5, with the balance of power in the Upper Chamber to be decided in those runoffs. In the nation’s capital, the Republicans hold 50 seats and the Democrats and the allies who caucus with them are at 48.
If the donkeys win the two spots for the Peach State, a 50-50 tie vote in the Senate would be broken by the vice president, who would be anti-Catholic Dem Kamala Harris if she somehow attains that position.
However, Senate control with a GOP majority already would have been assured if only Republican incumbent Martha McSally had managed to hold her seat in Arizona, instead of losing to Biden-like Dem challenger Mark Kelly, a pro-abortion gun-grabber who, too, figuratively hid in a basement.
The loss by McSally is another powerful lesson of the negative results when meddling “wise men” off in the distance pick who they declare to be “electable” moderates to win elections. This has harmed the GOP before. One hopes that a new Trumpian spirit lessens this kind of interference henceforth — although back-patting establishments fight hard against change.
McSally enjoys the dubious distinction of having lost both of a single state’s U.S. Senate races to liberal Democrats within two years. First she was cajoled into making the 2018 race for the seat opened up by the retirement of unpopular one-term GOP Sen. Jeff Flake, but she lost that to left-wing Dem Cong. Kyrsten Sinema.
Amazingly, almost immediately after that loss, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey picked McSally off the floor and put her into Arizona’s other Senate seat that had been held by cancer-ravaged Sen. John McCain right up until his death in August 2018, even though the gravity of his poor health should have effected his resignation sooner. McCain had been elected to his sixth Senate term less than two full years earlier, in November 2016.
Let’s try to explain what brought us to the spectacle of two-time loser McSally by first recalling some other political players, without becoming too labyrinthine.
In December 2015 conservative GOP activist Kelli Ward, D.O., resigned her seat as an Arizona state senator so she could focus on challenging McCain in the late-August 2016 Republican primary. For some reason, McCain wasn’t satisfied after having served two terms in the U.S. House then five six-year terms in the Senate seat that opened up with Sen. Barry Goldwater’s retirement in 1986.
Even though McCain was a longtime internationally known politician smiled upon by the liberal elite, and had plenty of backroom clout with the Arizona political establishment, Ward managed to win nearly 40 percent of the primary vote, while McCain was just over 51 percent, with about nine percent of the vote going elsewhere. About a six percent change in the Ward-McCain tally would have toppled the incumbent.
A warning of percolating discomfort with the former Vietnam POW had occurred in 2014, when both Arizona state and county GOP committeemen had censured McCain for being untrue to the GOP platform, a rebuke that galled McCain but was brushed off by the McCain-adoring Arizona Republic, the state’s largest daily.
After her defeat, the energetic Ward paused only briefly before announcing in October 2016 that she was running against Arizona’s other “moderate” GOP Senate incumbent, Flake, whose primary still was nearly two years away. Flake continued raising money for his race but sent shockwaves when in October 2017 he announced he would only serve out his one term.
It looked like Ward would be rewarded for her campaign dedication and breeze through the GOP primary basically unopposed in August 2018 on the way to the general election. But horrors, came the cry from the Eastern wise men in 2017: Ward isn’t “electable,” she’s an “extremist,” we must instead have a “moderate” who draws in all the wonderful votes.
The wise men like GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell — back in the day before Trump had much chance to strengthen McConnell’s spine — and Karl Rove strove to beguile two-term “moderate” Cong. McSally, a more-liberal Republican who may have better suited her southern Arizona congressional district if not the state.
Reluctant to make the race, McSally finally announced her entry in January 2018, more than a year after Ward jumped in. By strange coincidence, former Maricopa County GOP Sheriff Joe Arpaio announced in January that he wanted the seat, too. The conservative Arpaio may have been entirely sincere, but he could have had the effect of draining off some momentum from Ward.
While McSally made campaign commercials depicting herself as a fire-breathing border enforcer — which wasn’t her record — she didn’t seem to care to appear at candidate debates. I attended one of them at a Mexican restaurant where both Ward and Arpaio presented themselves well, but the invitation for McSally to participate left the audience looking at an empty chair.
Meanwhile, The Arizona Republic ran some remarkably candid editorials — that is, the newspaper’s own official view, not some opinion columnist’s — to reassure “moderate” readers that McSally was just talking tough in order to win, as McCain and Flake had to do, but don’t worry about that.
Lamenting that GOP primary elections “are fought in the lowlands of the extreme right,” one prominently displayed Republic editorial said, “In the past, that has meant moderates like John McCain and Jeff Flake have masqueraded as hard-liners on immigration. . . . Now it’s McSally’s turn.”
This thinking may have wowed the moderates, but it hardly excited the conservative base.
Although Ward and Arpaio lost the primary to McSally, GOP state committeemen chose Ward in January 2019 to be state Republican chairman for a two-year term.
Over on the Democratic side for the Senate race, meanwhile, three-term left-wing Cong. Kyrsten Sinema also had been reluctant to surrender her congressional position until she saw an opportunity with Flake’s retirement creating the Senate vacancy. On this campaign trail, Sinema moderated her Green Party and strident feminist background.
On the night of the general election in 2018, McSally was ahead in the Senate vote, but one of those fabled long counts — like the one that gave left-wing Dem Janet Napolitano the Arizona governorship over conservative former Cong. Matt Salmon in 2002 — eventually designated Sinema as victor.
The Associated Press in 2018 noted that the vote count stretched from the Tuesday election until the following Monday.
Upon being declared the loser, McSally released a rather strange concession video as she relaxed on her couch at home with her golden retriever, Boomer, who wanted a handshake and may have drawn more attention than his owner. CNN headlined, “Dog steals show during concession speech video.” Time said that “unbothered dog is the true star of this concession video.”
She didn’t seem too distressed at her loss, and some Arizonans commented that she seemed to think she soon would be a U.S. senator anyway.
After all, when Gov. Ducey had named former U.S. Sen. Jon Kyl to fill the deceased McCain’s seat in September 2018, Kyl openly proclaimed he didn’t intend to stay there long. Well, the seat would come before the voters in 2020. That wasn’t so long, was it?
But Kyl was only a piece of stage dressing, a placeholder, and shortly after McSally lost to Sinema, Kyl stepped aside so Ducey could make Senate loser McSally a senator anyway, at least for two years. That left a bad taste in some voters’ mouths, but Ducey’s move was consistent with the ways of the McCain establishment that survived its originator.
When Ducey had moved to Arizona as a young man, he got his first job with beer distributor Jim Hensley, the father of McCain’s second wife, Cindy. That would draw Ducey into the McCain orbit.
McSally’s foe in the 2020 general election, unpleasant-looking Democrat Kelly, is the husband of former Cong. Gabrielle Giffords, who survived an assassination attempt in Tucson in 2011. Kelly played the Arizona equivalent of Biden by hiding out while liberal media protected him from having to account for his left-wing pro-abortion and anti-gun positions.
Whether the election results were thoroughly honest or not, Kelly defeated McSally for her second Senate loss in two years. The Eastern wise men didn’t know best either time.
Three sources replied to requests by The Wanderer for their observations.
Conservative Republican political consultant Constantin Querard said on November 15: “McSally was not a good candidate, and she ran campaigns that seemed to ignore whatever unique qualities she had that voters might want in a senator from Arizona.
“As a congresswoman she was a moderate who didn’t care very much about what her party thought of her votes, but she ran for the Senate on both occasions as a Trump Republican, which she wasn’t,” Querard said
“Voters seemed to sense that it wasn’t genuine and she lost in 2018 and then again in 2020 when she ran a campaign that was almost identical to the losing 2018 effort.”
Northern California commentator Barbara Simpson said on November 15: “It’s a sad reflection on Arizona voters that Martha McSally lost the election to Mark Kelly. It’s just another step in turning the state liberal, and Kelly is just the guy to do it. Like higher taxes? Like more government intrusion into private property? Like green politics? Like more controls on your constitutional rights to own guns? You got him — his name is Mark Kelly.
“Whether he won because of his politics or because he was an astronaut or because so many liberal Californians moved into Arizona and brought their voting habits with them, the result is the same. Arizona is on the slide down and it is sad to see,” Simpson said.
A Legendary List
A retired chairman of the Phoenix-based Maricopa County Republican Party, Rob Haney, said on November 16: “Sen. McSally’s defeats should not be viewed through a one-decade time prism. They were a century in coming and should be viewed in context to Founder John Adams’ famous comment that our Constitution was meant only for a religious and moral people.”
Haney, a veteran foe of McCain, said: “McCain’s list of moral betrayals is legendary. McSally’s campaign statement ‘I love John McCain’ identified her as part of the Republican establishment/McCain legacy and created an opposing candidate on her right in a very contentious Republican primary.”
Republican businessman Daniel McCarthy opposed McSally in the 2020 GOP primary but received only about one-quarter of the vote.
“McSally’s comment also alienated her from the religious conservatives who were well familiar with McCain’s list of betrayals and aided her defeats,” Haney said.
“The last century has seen an infiltration of Communists and socialists into all of our cultural institutions. This has culminated in the potential overthrow of our capitalist, economically based constitutional republic,” he said.
“By corruption, most Catholic hierarchy throughout the world have played their part in replacing free-enterprise governments with Godless, socialist regimes. Liberation theologies’ elevation of the Catholic teaching ‘preferential option for the poor’ has been used by them to advance their socialist ideology.
“One of their most destructive methods of this was to undermine the American judicial system through their support of illegal immigration. They conflated illegal immigration with legal immigration, which in time resulted in the overwhelming Democrat vote and the abandonment of God/Truth. This is most clearly seen in California’s flip from a Republican to Democrat stronghold and now Arizona’s also, with Texas in the wings,” Haney said.
“With the bishops’ compliance, or at the least their silence, the Democrat Party has rejected God (Truth). Their lies now dominate every aspect of our culture,” Haney said. “Even the Pope sanctions the takeover of the Catholic Church in China by the Communists. If Trump’s voice is lost, there will be no country left that will oppose China or support Israel.”
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