Unelected Martha McSally Losing Even More Ground with Voters Who Call Her Actions “Profiles in Cowardice”

Arizona Republic Column: “Arizonans who once supported her are doing a double take.”

Eastern Arizona Courier Editorial: “We thought she was a principled person who would take a position one way or the other and stand up for what she believes is right….We didn’t expect her to be revealed as a political opportunist”

Arizonans’ disappointment with Martha McSally is boiling over this week as the unelected senator continues to take heat for refusing to answer basic questions about whether it’s wrong for a president to ask a foreign country to interfere in our elections and if she’d support witness testimony in the impeachment hearing. Last night, McSally finally gave Arizonans her answer when she voted to block witness testimony and documents from the Senate’s consideration in the impeachment trial.

After Monday’s “devastating” and “crushing” Eastern Arizona Courier editorial calling McSally a “political opportunist,” a columnist for the Arizona Republic questioned whether McSally “deserve[s] to be a senator.” And the National Journal is calling McSally’s strategy “a profound misreading of the Arizona electorate” and “a sign of weakness” for the candidate who has “lost control of her own race, handing the reins over to Trump instead.”

MSNBC also spoke to three unaffiliated swing voters in pivotal Maricopa County. All three voters supported Sen. John McCain and are “indicating a dissatisfaction with the way McSally has so far gone about her business in the Senate and questioning her role in this Senate trial.” Here’s what they had to say about McSally:

• “I think she puts herself out as too much of a Trump follower without appealing to two-thirds of the other part of the electorate.”

• “Martha McSally is making snide remarks to reporters….You can tell that she’s definitely in Trump’s pocket.”

• “Grow up. There’s more to life than being a Trumpee.”

WATCH:

Eastern Arizona Courier: Editorial: Profiles in cowardice

• [McSally’s] voting record hasn’t exactly mirrored her rhetoric when she’s here, however, such as voting with the White House to move funding from military bases, such as Fort Huachuca, in favor of building a border wall. She’s also voted in favor of cutting medical coverage for those with pre-existing conditions.

• Those are policy issues with which we disagree, but disagreeing over policy is how our government should operate. We can respect someone who stays true to his or her principles, even when we disagree over policy. And then there was last Thursday. While walking to a conference room, McSally was asked a question by CNN reporter Manu Raju. “Senator McSally, should the Senate consider new evidence as part of the impeachment trial?” McSally’s [response] was, to say the least, surprising. “Manu, you’re a liberal hack. I’m not talking to you.”

• McSally finds herself in a no-win situation. If she endorses witnesses and new evidence, she loses the Trump base. If she rejects the mountain of new evidence coming out almost hourly about Trump’s alleged shake-down of Ukrainian officials for Trump’s own political gain, she loses moderates and independents.

• We thought she was a principled person who would take a position one way or the other and stand up for what she believes is right. Not everyone would agree with whichever side she fell on, but we would respect her holding to her beliefs.

• We didn’t expect her to be revealed as a political opportunist, willing to debase herself and dismiss her constituency in the dying hopes of holding on to a seat she couldn’t win on her own.

Arizona Republic: Laurie Roberts: Does Martha McSally deserve to be a senator? I’m not the only one rethinking that question
Opinion: Arizona Sen. Martha McSally may be getting high fives from the far right but she is losing the people she needs to actually become an elected senator.

• Amid the high fives and back slaps coming from Fox News and the Oval Office and the 35% of voters who think President Donald Trump waltzes on water, I wonder if Sen. Martha McSally is hearing the drumbeat of disappointment here in her own backyard.

• While she’s busy hawking “You’re a liberal hack, buddy” T-shirts to anybody who will give her $35, Arizonans who once supported her are doing a double take.

• The Eastern Arizona Courier on Monday published a devastating editorial, calling out McSally for her staged schoolyard taunt and fundraising stunt after CNN reporter Manu Raju dared ask her a reasonable question. “Profiles in cowardice,” the Courier called it.

• I had hoped that McSally would regain her bearings of old, the ones that disappeared during the 2018 campaign. Throughout her first year in the Senate, I continually wrote columns urging her to put at least a sliver of daylight between herself and Donald Trump. 

• Sadly, that McSally, the one I had hoped would regain her moderate voice, is no more. 

• McSally is now reduced to doing cheap stump speeches, preaching to the choir with “liberal hack” T-shirts that will certainly earn her Trump tweets and twittered expressions of delight from Arizona’s queen of the far right, state GOP Chairwoman Kelli Ward.

National Journal: McSally hasn’t learned any lessons from losing

• There’s no better illustration of the Republican Party’s acquiescence to President Trump than the behavior of appointed Sen. Martha McSally of Arizona, a swing-state Republican up for reelection this year.

• Not only has [McSally] stuck with Trump through thick and thin, she’s gone out of her way to defend his behavior while adopting his scorched-earth attacks against the press.

• This strategy is a profound misreading of the Arizona electorate. It’s one of the few battleground states with a significant share of persuadable voters. Many of them already rejected McSally once because she wasn’t seen as independent enough. 

• Public polls show McSally already trailing her expected Democratic opponent, former astronaut Mark Kelly, even though the campaign has barely started. She has been outraised by him every quarter and lags behind him in campaign cash—a rare disadvantage for a sitting senator. 

• Her base-first approach to politics is a sign of weakness, for a candidate furiously trying to generate support in the worst possible way.

• McSally has lost control of her own race, handing the reins over to Trump instead. If the president wins Arizona, she’s hoping to be carried to victory on his coattails. But if he loses, which is very possible given the state’s political trends, she’s a surefire loser. 

• And given that she’s consistently run behind the top of the ticket in all her races, a narrow Trump victory could easily lead to a Democratic Senate pickup.

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