“It was an anticlimactic victory for McCain, who was seen at the beginning of the election cycle as the Republican senator most vulnerable to a challenge from the right”.
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Many Democrats and supporters of Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick are angry after the Arizona Republican Party delivered a “wanted” poster with bullet hole imagery to her campaign office Thursday. “But if Hillary Clinton is elected president, Arizona will need a senator who will act as a check – not a rubber stamp – for the White House”. John McCain’s re-election campaign. And that many voters in Arizona who don’t like Trump aren’t keen on Clinton either.
As Talking Points Memo’s Lauren Fox notes, it’s an identical strategy to the one employed by Republican Senate candidates in 1996, when it became clear that Bob Dole was going to lose some GOP voters to a different President Clinton. It looked to The Post’s Jenna Johnson and Karen Tumulty that Ryan might have predicted Clinton would win in a landslide (because only a historic Clinton landslide would be enough to put the GOP House majority in peril).
Finally, in another very closely watched Florida race, GOP Senator Marco Rubio easily trounced challenger Carlos Beruff, who stayed in the primary race even after Rubio decided at the last minute that he would run for reelection – despite repeatedly saying he was done with Congress for good.
Could this work? Maybe.
“There was a time when John McCain would rather lose an election than stoop to certain lows, but today’s John McCain remains silent when his allies are engaging in unsafe, reckless and inflammatory behavior”, Kirkpatrick said. McCain continued to support the controversial nominee throughout his own hard primary, wary of alienating Trump voters.
“Nobody, including the hundreds of reporters who received the press release with the image, linked it to violence until the Kirkpatrick campaign tried to use it as a way to distract the media from Ann Kirkpatrick’s absence from the campaign trail”.
Yet McCain stuck by his support for Trump, at times seemingly through gritted teeth. This time out, fearing for his political life, he’s steadfastly refused to distance himself from Donald Trump during the primary-despite Trump calling him a loser for being captured, among other things.
Despite the tension between the two men, McCain endorsed Trump for President in May.
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Republicans have a 54-46 seat majority in the Senate.
