Mark Kelly, Gabrielle Giffords’ husband, will run for Senate
Mark Kelly, the former astronaut and gun-control activist who is married to Gabrielle Giffords, announced Tuesday that he would run for Senate in Arizona, challenging appointed Sen. Martha McSally and intensifying the Democratic threat to Republicans’ narrow control of the chamber.
Kelly’s entry sets up a possible general election between two combat veterans in a swiftly changing state and may elevate Arizona further as a 2020 battleground. Both parties already view Arizona as a swing state in the presidential race and in 2018 Democrats won a Senate race there for the first time in decades.
McSally, an Air Force veteran, was narrowly defeated in a statewide race last year by Sen. Kyrsten Sinema. McSally joined the Senate anyway a few months later, appointed to fill the vacancy left by John McCain’s death after a placeholder appointee, Jon Kyl, resigned.
Kelly, 54, unveiled his campaign in an online video highlighting his experience as an astronaut and Navy pilot. Giffords, a former member of Congress who was shot and nearly killed by a deranged gunman in 2011, appeared beside him in the message.
Giffords was seen as a likely future Senate candidate before the shooting and the video casts Kelly as carrying forward her legacy. For several years, the two have led a national guncontrol group that played a significant role in the midterm elections.
Narrating the video, Kelly presented himself as a nonpolitician and a unifying figure, focused on issues like health care, wage stagnation and climate change. That approach echoes the avowedly moderate course Sinema charted in her campaign last year, when she successfully assembled a coalition of young people, Latinos and centrist whites opposed to President Donald Trump.
“Solving some of the hardest problems requires one thing and that’s teamwork,” Kelly said in the video. “Partisanship and polarization and gerrymandering and corporate money have ruined our politics, and it’s divided us.”
Kelly lamented a “retreat from science and data and facts” that he said prevents problems from getting solved. He did not mention Trump or attack the Republican Party.
Kelly may not have an open path to the Democratic nomination. At least one other prominent Democrat, Rep. Ruben Gallego, has been exploring the race.
Gallego said Tuesday morning that he was still considering the race, indicating he would not make way for Kelly.