The reason McSally lost the election

The conventional wisdom is that Martha McSally lost the U.S. Senate race because she became too much of a Trump loyalist and abandoned her more-moderate roots.

I think that’s an insufficient explanation. Instead, I think her campaign made two strategic mistakes that cost her the election.

McSally lost the election in Maricopa County. As of Monday night, she was behind in the county by around 48,000 votes, more than her statewide deficit of 38,000 votes.

By contrast, Doug Ducey was carrying Maricopa County by 185,000 votes.

Kimberly Yee in the state treasurer’s race can serve as a proxy for the default Republican performance. The treasurer’s race was a low-visibility affair, with little money or attention showered on it by either party. So, it serves as a partyi dentification test.

Yee was carrying Maricopa County by 120,000 votes. So, McSally was running 168,000 votes behind the GOP norm.

A desire to express disapproval of President Donald Trump undoubtedly contributed to this. That can be seen in the thumping victory Greg Stanton achieved in the Congressional District 9 race for the seat being vacated by Kyrsten Sinema. Stanton got 61 percent of the vote in a district in which Democrats have only a slight registration advantage.

But Republicans did very well in the other Maricopa County congressional races, with candidates not distinguishable from McSally with respect to Trump and the issues. Andy Biggs, even more of a Trump loyalist than McSally, won with 59 percent of the vote. David Schweikert and Debbie Lesko were thought to be facing very good Democratic challengers. Both won with more than 55 percent of the vote.

So, Trump was a factor, but an insufficient explanation for McSally’s woefully poor performance in Maricopa County. In the exit poll, only 28 percent of Arizonans described their vote in the U.S. Senate race as an expression of opposition to Trump. Forty-four percent said that Trump was not a factor in their decision.

The first strategic mistake the McSally campaign made was in not investing enough in telling her story, independent of any criticism of Sinema.

McSally was the nation’s first female fighter pilot to see combat. As a member of Congress, she established herself as a workhorse, not a show horse.

This story was partially told, but primarily in ads contrasting her to Sinema. McSally’s first general-election ad told the following message: Our country was attacked. I went to fight. Sinema went to protest in a pink tutu.

What was memorable about the ad wasn’t that McSally went to fight. It was the pink tutu.

McSally was relatively unknown in Maricopa County. When the campaign reached the liar-liar phase, McSally had not established a strong enough political persona here to give her some resiliency against attacks.

In this campaign, Sinema gave her personal narrative of a homeless girl made good much stronger roots than McSally’s narrative of the fighter pilot bringing the good fight to Congress.

The second strategic mistake was running exclusively against the old Sinema, rather than also running against the new Sinema.

Sinema has a past as a radical liberal activist. That was a target-rich record that wasn’t going to be ignored.

But Sinema has a more-recent record as a moderate and constructive member of Congress. McSally did run one ad contrasting their votes on the Trump tax cut. But mostly she ignored the new Sinema.

McSally needed a strong element in the campaign that said: If you believe in the new Sinema, I’m still preferable for the following reasons. That case wasn’t made.

Saying that McSally’s strategic mistakes cost her an election she could have won isn’t to take away from the superb button-down campaign Sinema ran. She had a message and she hammered it home relentlessly and effectively.

There was, however, a sadness to the Sinema campaign. She has been a refreshing political figure, practicing a cheerful politics with an effervescent political persona.

That Sinema was locked in a closet for this campaign, as she became robotic, mouthing memorized pabulum. No risks of her saying something as delightful as parodying herself as a “Prada Socialist.”

Here’s a hope that the effervescent Sinema returns in the U.S. Senate. Our politics could badly use a cheerful practitioner these days.