With primary near, McSally hits Sinema with attack ad
In a sign of confidence, Republican U.S. Senate front-runner Rep. Martha McSally is turning her sights on her potential Democratic rival, Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, with a new television commercial contrasting McSally’s post-9/11 military service with Sinema’s participation in a 2003 anti-war protest at Margaret T. Hance Park in central Phoenix.
The ad highlights McSally’s deployment in the Middle East fighting terrorism while Sinema, then a social
worker, protested war while wearing a pink tutu and advocating to bring terrorists to justice in a non-violent manner.
The commercial reflects McSally’s growing sense that she needs to start attacking Sinema and move beyond the contested Republican primary. For months, she’s had a nervous eye on two conservative rivals: former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Fountain Hills and former state Sen. Kelli Ward of Lake Havasu City.
Arizona’s primary election is Tuesday.
The race was said to be tightening earlier this month, but McSally has pounded Ward in an earlier TV ad and benefited from the help of outside groups that also have attacked Ward on the airwaves.
A new poll of 600 likely Republican primary election voters reached via cellphones and landlines shows McSally with a commanding lead. The Data Orbital survey shows McSally with 48 percent of the vote, Ward at 22 percent and Arpaio at nearly 18 percent. About 8 percent of voters were undecided, and the margin of error is 4 percentage points.
The new McSally ad allows her to start chipping into the carefully crafted, centrist image Sinema, a Phoenix-area congresswoman, has been building since April.
McSally, a Tucson-area congresswoman, said during a campaign event with veterans Thursday that she will work to remind voters of the “extreme fringe” positions Sinema has taken in the past in an attempt to undermine Sinema’s reinvention as a moderate Democrat.
Asked by The Arizona Republic if she thought politicians’ positions can evolve, McSally said, “When it comes to my opponent, she has a lot of explaining to do if you look at her Green Party, pink-tutu, proud Pradasocialist past and her extreme makeover.”
McSally herself has faced criticism for pivoting to the right from a more moderate lawmaker in order to appeal to GOP voters who have embraced President Donald Trump.
She said of that criticism, “Just because somebody is saying something like that doesn’t make it true.”
In multimillion-dollar TVads, Sinema has been defining herself as a practical, independent politician who will work across party lines to advance an agenda in the best interest of Arizonans. On Thursday, she released her second Spanish-language ad, which focuses on health care.
Sinema’s history of far-left stances has been used before, namely during her first bid for Congress in 2012. During that race, her challengers referenced her antiwar protests, as well as the pink tutu. However, her record has never been vetted in a statewide campaign with the amount of money that McSally and Republicans are likely to put behind their message.
McSally will take every opportunity to frame Sinema as a far-left progressive who has refashioned herself in Congress as a moderate to match her political ambition.
Sinema was a local Green Party spokeswoman while working on Ralph Nader’s presidential campaign in 2000. Years ago, she said she did not support keeping Luke Air Force Base open, but she has since changed that position.
In 2006, she criticized women who stay at home “leeching off their husbands” for claiming they are feminists, because they made the decision to stay at home.
Earlier this week, when asked about her political evolution, Sinema told reporters she was “grateful” for her “interest and willingness and capacity to learn” and grow.
“I don’t know when it became, like, uncool to compromise,” she said. “But I am working to make it cool again. And I’m really proud of the work that our team has done in the last six years serving in Congress, of reaching across the aisle and working literally with anyone to get stuff done.”
McSally’s confidence has grown as she has watched early-ballot numbers come in.
More than 60 percent of all 675,000 expected ballots have been returned ahead of the primary, according to the secretary of state.
More than half of those — 410,000 — are from Maricopa County, and more than half are from Republican voters. Another 120,000 have been returned from Pima County, where McSally is well-known and served for two terms. Of those, 53,000 came from Republican voters.
Democrats are continuing to hew to the line that McSally’s competitive primary is a liability. Sinema also has a Democratic primary opponent, though most observers do not view progressive rival Deedra Abboud as posing much of a threat to Sinema’s bid for the nomination.
“If Congresswoman McSally is struggling this much to win what should have been an easy primary, it’s hard to imagine what level she’ll stoop to next,” James Owens, Sinema’s spokesman, said in a statement to The Arizona Republic.
Owens added that McSally’s agenda is unpopular with voters, pointing to her past support of a Republican bill that would have allowed insurers to charge older adults more through a so-called “age tax.”
McSally’s latest ad opens with her walking in a hangar, a jet nearby and an American flag on display.
“Everyone remembers where they were on 9/11,” she says. “I was deployed to the Middle East, led airstrikes against the Taliban and was the first woman to fly a fighter jet in combat. I know the price of freedom.
“While we were in harm’s way in uniform, Kyrsten Sinema was protesting us in a pink tutu and denigrating our service. The world is a dangerous place. We need strong leaders who understand the threat and respect our troops. Kyrsten Sinema fails the test.”
The spot includes side-by-side views of McSally in uniform and Sinema in the tutu.
“When it comes to my opponent, she has a lot of explaining to do if you look at her Green Party, pink-tutu, proud Prada-socialist past and her extreme makeover.” Rep. Martha McSally On her likely Democratic opponent, Rep. Kyrsten Sinema