HOW MCSALLY CAN GET BACK INTO THE GAME
Slash-and-burn is not a winning strategy
U.S. Sen. Martha McSally is a political mystery.
At heart, she isn’t very ideological. She’s a center-right problem-solver who aspires to be a congressional workhorse, not a show horse. And, given her military background, she’s a bit salty in the way she practices politics.
That should be the political sweet spot in Arizona. She actually fits the state well, comparable to the way John McCain fit it.
Yet, she was defeated convincingly by Kyrsten Sinema in 2018. And she is running way behind her 2020 general election opponent, Democrat Mark Kelly, in the polls.
Now, there’s reason to question the value and validity of polling today. The failure to contact and refusal rates are sky-high. There’s cause to doubt that what results is truly a representative sample, even if balanced for demographics.
And there’s reason to believe that there is an unintentional anti-Republican bias in polls today. Republicans tend to do better at the ballot box than they do in polls. My suspicion is that conservatives generally are less willing to talk to pollsters.
That said, the consistency of results from polls conducted in Arizona suggests that McSally is, indeed, very much the underdog in the Senate race. Despite Democrats substantially closing the Republican registration advantage, a Republican candidate should still have the edge.
The only reasonable conclusion is that McSally has a serious political problem.
Contrary to claims in some circles, it is not as simple as just disassociating herself from Donald Trump.
Trump is a weak Republican candidate in Arizona and undoubtedly has a depressing effect on Republican candidates here generally. But the same polls show Trump running neck-and-neck with Joe Biden in the state. So, there is some not inconsiderable number of voters who prefer Trump to Biden but still blanch at McSally.
It’s been over two decades since I hung up my robes from the dark arts of political consulting. But, for what it’s worth, here’s what McSally could do that might get her back into the game.
McSally emerged from the 2018 Senate campaign with a public image as a nasty political brawler.
Her campaign, and the independent expenditure groups supporting her, ran a relentless slash-and-burn negative campaign against Sinema. McSally started with the pink tutu ad, about Sinema’s radical past, and ended by calling Sinema a traitor. The latter was way too salty.
Now, Sinema is a very nice person, one of the most pleasant people in politics today. She was able to project that in her own messaging. And she had long ago abandoned radical politics for a much more centrist approach. Whether that was a heartfelt transformation or a political calculation doesn’t really matter. She lived out the role of a centrist as a House member and there was every reason to believe she would continue to do so in the Senate. And she has.
So, McSally’s monomaniacal focus on the old, radical Sinema seemed to say more about her than about Sinema. And it wasn’t good.
McSally needs to invest massively in reintroducing herself to the voters of Arizona. She needs to establish in voters’ minds that she is who she really is at heart: a center-right problem-solver who aspires to be a congressional workhorse, not a show horse.
McSally doesn’t need to disassociate herself from Trump, and that’s not a winning strategy for a Republican in this election cycle anyway. But she does need to establish a political persona independent of Trump, in the way Doug Ducey has successfully done.
It will be a heavy lift, and expensive, to displace the current public image of McSally as a nasty political brawler with one of her as a center-right problemsolver with a political persona independent of Trump.
But without that investment, and getting that accomplished, I suspect McSally is doomed.
Then, she needs to not make the same mistake with Kelly that she made with Sinema.
Kelly will have a reservoir of good will among voters. That will be in part because of his background as an astronaut. And also because of the assassination attempt on his wife, former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.
The negative case against Kelly needs to be more compare-and-contrast, not slash-and-burn. Convince voters that the direction in which McSally wants to take the country and state is preferable to Kelly’s. Not that Kelly is a bad guy and a threat to the Republic.
A slash-and-burn campaign against Kelly will just reinforce the image of McSally as a nasty political brawler.
This would be an unconventional campaign. In modern politics, the assumption is that he who most destroys the opponent wins.
McSally tried that in 2018. There’s no reason to believe that doubling down in 2020 will turn out any better.