Hating the right people
It seems the best way to win a close United States Senate race is to get nasty.
There’s a political ad every 30 seconds or so on Arizona TV right now, sandwiched between drug and car commercials, and they’re nasty.
Tens of millions of dollars are pouring into the state’s crucial and very tight Senate race, which could easily be the difference between Donald Trump’s Republican Party holding the Senate and losing it to the Democrats, who would put his entire agenda for the next two years on ice.
The Republicans hold just a one-seat majority in the Senate, and of the 35 seats up for election early next month, just five or so are in real contention.
One of them is Arizona, where kinda-anti-Trump Republican Jeff Flake is retiring, giving the Democrats their best shot at the state in years. In a year where they are mostly busy defending Senate seats they already have, it’s nice to have a place to go on the attack, and it is very hard to see a path for a Democratic majority if they don’t win Arizona.
Hence all the money, and with it all the ads. Fully 41,000 political commercials were played in the Phoenix area over a recent 45-day period, and about $85m has been spent on ads for or against the two women battling it out this year.
These ads are almost overwhelmingly negative – whether they come from one of the two candidates themselves or an outside group supporting another one.
Republican candidate Martha McSally’s ad team particularly like using an image of her opponent Kyrsten Sinema in a pink tutu with a very-2000s haircut at a very-2000s anti-war protest, while McSally unleashes on Sinema for ‘‘denigrating’’ the troops. Ads from groups that support McSally go as far as to say Sinema has been ‘‘soft on child prostitution’’ and okay with people joining the Taleban.
Sinema’s side come with plenty of attack ads too, mostly on McSally’s votes against Obamacare, often ending with a bold claim that McSally has ‘‘betrayed veterans’’ and ‘‘lied to Arizona’’. One website called MarthaForSenate.com and dressed up like a campaign website is actually an attack ad.
Both candidates are running from their past at some level, and using each other’s past to do it. Sinema, who was far more Left wing in her early career, is projecting herself as the lightblue moderate. In the advertisements supporting her she is the protector of Obamacare and social security, while McSally is the bloodthirsty Republican who voted to repeal the healthcare law three times.
McSally herself was something like a moderate not so long ago, expressing serious concern about whether to vote for Trump in 2016 and fighting against the Grand Old Party shutting down the government. But just like Sinema, this race and the primary before it has required her to move to the right, embracing Trump and complaining about creeping Islamic (sharia) law, ‘‘illegals’’, and ‘‘chain migration’’.
Arizona does border Mexico, which means there is plenty of white anxiety to exploit, but it’s also a state with a 29-per cent Hispanic population.
This is quite the turn from a state whose last two senators – Republicans the late John McCain and Jeff Flake – did their best to project bipartisan amiability at every turn. But midterms are not always won by winning over the squishy centre: since turnout in non-presidential elections is so low, a big part of the strategy in these races is simply getting the people who already support you to come out and vote by making them see your opponent as dangerous, and hopefully in the
process making their image so toxic that the natural voters on their side don’t bother showing up. (The political science literature on whether this actually works is quite mixed.)
One man who clearly understood this strategy was South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, one of McCain’s best friends, who showed up to introduce McSally to a small rally of 200 or so die-hard fans in Phoenix on Saturday (local time). Graham was not there to preach the merits of bipartisanship or criticise the Tea Party as he has in the past: he was there to whip up the base into hating the right people.
‘‘They just can’t accept that Trump won,’’ Graham said of the Democrats. ‘‘To my Democratic friends: what are you doing? Is this where you want to take the country? Is [Sinema] really who you want to nominate for the Senate? What is it about her background that people don’t understand? How can you be a moderate when you’ve associate with the people she’s associated with?’’
Graham was in good company. The conversation in the line outside the event was mostly a discussion of protesters that had turned up at various rallies and how they must have been brought in by bus from more liberal states, why it was good Flake was resigning as he wasn’t a proper Republican anyway, and some light conspiracy theorising about whether the Trump fan who is charged with sending a group of people pipe bombs last week was
a Trump fan. As Graham started talking about Sinema, the shouts of ‘‘socialist!’’ from the crowd came thick and fast.
But Graham’s biggest applause came as he recounted the battle to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court earlier this year, a battle that became a national talking point as Kavanaugh was accused by multiple women of sexual misconduct. Republicans are hoping that Kavanaugh fight – which they see as a baseless smear campaign – will rile up the base enough to turn out.
‘‘I saw the destruction of a wonderful man for the worst thing – politics,’’ Graham said, after the whole room had chanted ‘‘innocent-until-provenguilty’’ in unison. ‘‘Sinema said she would vote no – remember that . . . It’s a noble venture in their world to destroy our judges.’’
This recounting of the Kavanaugh hearing went on so long that McSally ended up speaking for only a few minutes, mostly using the time to encourage the room to knock on more doors to increase turnout.
If every Republican did vote next month, McSally would have this in the bag. Trump won the state by 31⁄2 points, and FiveThirtyEight, a website that analyses opinion polls, rates it as 9.3 per cent more Republican than the nation at large.
But at this point it is clear neither candidate really thinks she has the edge, as the polls bounce around wildly and the national narrative sweeps from bomb threats to horrific shootings. That’s why there are still so many ads.
Midterms are not always won by winning over the squishy centre.