Kelly takes commanding lead
Democrat Mark Kelly leads Republican Martha McSally in early returns. The winner will fill the remainder of the late Republican Sen. John McCain’s sixth term, which ends in January 2023.
The special election for Arizona’s U.S. Senate race between Sen. Martha McSally, R-Ariz., and her Democratic opponent Mark Kelly ended Tuesday night exactly where it had been for months: too close to call.
Standing between a win Tuesday was a fraction of the tabulated votes, with thousands of ballots still uncounted. Kelly posted a lead over McSally in the first batch of unofficial early results and was dominating her in the populous counties of Maricopa and Pima, which are home to Phoenix and Tucson.
Neither candidate is expected to claim a win in the immediate hours after results posted a win in the closely watched race that could decide which party controls the U.S. Senate, for a seat once held by the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. The winner of the election will fill the remainder of McCain’s sixth term, which ends in January 2023.
The winner could be seated as soon as the end of November, when the state is expected to certify its official election results.
As election results came in Tuesday night, Kelly was preparing to gather outdoors at a Tucson hotel with family and a small group of supporters. McSally was huddling with family and her campaign team at a hotel in Phoenix.
The candidates could be in for a long haul: In 2018, it took six days for the race for the state’s other Senate seat to be decided for Democrat Kyrsten Sinema over McSally during her bid for the state’s other Senate seat.
The 2020 race pitted two retired combat pilots from Tucson against each other.
McSally trailed Kelly in 41 out of 42 publicly released polls conducted this year and he held a strong fundraising advantage, pulling in $82 million to McSally’s $50 million this cycle.
But Kelly largely shelved traditional campaign operations since last spring as the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged the battleground state.
McSally, a Trump loyalist who rarely broke from the GOP party line during her time in the Senate, deemed those polls as “fake,” telling voters the race was instead a dead heat.
Tuesday’s early results underscored just how torn the once reliably red state was about their two choices for the seat.
McSally, who was appointed to the seat by Republican Gov. Doug Ducey after McCain’s death, sought redemption by voters who had already rejected her in 2018. Her election bid came at a time of deep political unrest under President Donald Trump, whose presidency injected hope among Democrats that they could have two Democrats in the state’s two Senate seats for the first time since the 1950s.
In Kelly, a first-time candidate for office, Democrats saw a star recruit.
His message of partisan independence, science-based decision-making, affordable health care and insurance coverage for preexisting medical conditions against the backdrop of a lethal pandemic, gave him a polling advantage that McSally sought to chip away by attacking his self-styled moderate political brand, his business record that included ties to China, and his work as a gun-control activist following the shooting of his wife, former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz. Since launching his bid in February 2019, he built a coalition of Democrats, independent voters, disaffected Republicans, suburban women, Latinos, seniors, and others.
Kelly forged a national profile as a NASA astronaut, Giffords’ husband, and a gun-control activist after the mass shooting, which killed six and wounded 13.
In the final stretch of the race, McSally took aim at Kelly’s gun-restriction advocacy through an organization he founded with his wife. She sought to convince voters that Kelly, a gun owner and supporter of the Second Amendment, would strip away their gun rights.
Kelly has called for universal background checks and the prevention of mass shootings through red-flag gun laws to try to prevent people deemed a threat from getting firearms.
McSally built a coalition of conservative voters, rural voters, faith-based voters, and pro-Trump supporters who sought to prevent a Democratic takeover of the Senate.
McSally blistered Kelly every chance she could to invoke his wealth and indirect business ties to China through a Tucson business he co-founded.
McSally, a reliable vote for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, also warned Arizonans that Kelly would be a rubber-stamp for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, of New York, should Democrats win the chamber.
She lambasted Kelly for refusing to tell voters whether he would vote for Schumer as leader, or where he stood on calls to eliminate the legislative filibuster, should he win. She cast herself as the only figure standing between economic opportunity and economic devastation.
Kelly ran largely as a centrist candidate who would make decisions independent of the Democratic Party. He questioned whether McSally’s alliance with Trump and McConnell were in the best interests of her political career, or Arizonans.
Kelly put front-and-center of his campaign McSally’s years-long opposition to the Affordable Care Act, which protected those with preexisting coverage. He elevated that issue, more than any other, throughout his campaign, leaving her on the defensive. Also at the heart of his campaign was management of the COVID-19 crisis by Trump and McSally.
Crystal Mercado, 22, of west Phoenix, said her vote for Kelly was an easy one. She viewed McSally as not doing enough to oppose Trump’s agenda, from the separation of children at the border from their parents to his rollbacks of environmental policies. “I’ve got to be honest, on the Senate race, it was an obvious choice for me,” said Mercado, a home mortgage consultant. “I wasn’t going to vote for Martha McSally.”
Jim Rhodes, 85, of Scottsdale, said he cast an early ballot for McSally about a week before Election Day because he wants her and Republicans to maintain control of the border and support law enforcement. For him, Republican control of the chamber was crucial. In Democratic candidates like Kelly, he worries about higher taxes and and a sputtering economy.