The rugged borderlands around Douglas, Arizona, cut through steep canyons and soar over rocky mountainsides. It’s terrain impossible for a 30-foot steel pole wall, but not for the drug cartels that smuggle people and contraband out of Mexico.
Sen. Mark Kelly, an Arizona Democrat who is being considered as Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate, knows the magnitude of the challenge all too well — a fact that even the state’s Republicans acknowledge.
Donald Huish, the Republican mayor of Douglas, recounted a phone conversation with Kelly two weeks ago, when the two men discussed progress toward turning the small city into an official, expanded gateway to the United States. The senator has pushed hard for the move, and Huish has embraced it. Both see the plan as a way to bring economic stability to the region and potentially disarm the coyotes and cartels that prowl the passes.
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“What strikes me about Senator Kelly is that yes, we do have staff contact on the issues, but he personally calls me regularly and I feel comfortable calling him,” said Huish, who identifies as a staunchly conservative Republican. “I’m sure he’s taken some heat from some of his party members across the aisle, but he gets it.”
Kelly, a relative newcomer to politics, would bring to the Democratic nomination a resume as remarkable as any political consultant could imagine: He is the son of a working-class New Jersey police officer, a Navy pilot who flew 39 combat missions from the USS Midway during Operation Desert Storm, and a NASA astronaut and engineer who recovered debris from the Columbia disaster, commanded a shuttle when the United States returned to space and flew the final mission of the Space Shuttle Endeavour.
Oh, and he’s married to Gabrielle Giffords, the former Arizona Rep. who suffered a near-fatal brain injury in a mass shooting and has become a symbol against gun violence in her pivotal state and beyond.
All of that could be enormously helpful for Harris as she tries to regain momentum among working-class voters and Arizona, where former President Donald Trump has gained a lead that Democrats can win.
But Kelly’s special appeal, beyond what other potential running mates from swing states might offer, is his expertise on technical issues and the politics of the U.S.-Mexico border. That, his supporters say, may be Harris’s greatest vulnerability.
“That’s why I appreciate Senator Kelly: he sees the dichotomies, the differences, the challenges that are not all the same at the border,” Huish said.
Huish, a Trump supporter, said he was not a fan of Harris. “Her heart is in the right place,” he said. “Her policies are in the wrong place.” But if Kelly were to join the ticket, he said, it would give him “a little bit of a hard time” with this vote.
Other vice presidential candidates, including Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky and Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina, have built their reputations on winning over Republican voters. Two other governors in the mix, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, come from states that may be even more important to the Democratic fortunes than Arizona — which, though narrowly won by President Joe Biden in 2020, was more a capstone to his victory than a linchpin.
Kelly’s political identity is directly tied to his appeal to Republicans — not just voters, but politicians and personalities — in a state where the Grand Old Party is bitterly divided among longtime Republicans tied to the legacy of Sen. John McCain and a new guard of Trump loyalists who disdain their rivals within the party.
A fellow Navy fighter pilot, Kelly had a bond with McCain long before he entered politics, when he was best known in the state as Giffords’ husband. He was elected to the Senate in 2020, defeating Martha McSally, a fellow military pilot who was appointed to McCain’s post after McCain’s death, and then won a full term in 2022, defeating a Trump-backed conservative, Blake Masters, by nearly 5 percentage points.
Meghan McCain, a conservative media personality and the senator’s daughter, estimated that about 15% of Arizona Republicans remained in the McCain wing. Kelly has been “not just respectful” of her father’s legacy, she said, but “I would go as far as reverent.”
“He’s smart, he’s charismatic, he’s got a vision,” Cindy McCain, McCain’s widow, said in an interview. “You look at his track record and who he is as a person. He’s a very nice man, and of course he’s going to bring Arizona.”
With Kelly’s personal history comes a mystique that cannot be fabricated. Paul Fujimura, a former Navy aviator who flew with Kelly in an A-6 Intruder for two years, recalled being called upon during the Gulf War to chase an Iraqi patrol boat that was running out of Kuwait Harbor. Kelly wanted to attack, but that meant making a hard 135-degree turn 200 feet above the water, under heavy anti-aircraft fire, and taking on another plane flying cover. On Kelly’s orders, they went ahead and sank the boat.
“Ordering someone else to go ahead and risk their life is a heavy, heavy, heavy responsibility,” said Fujimura, a senior Transportation Security Administration official who will take over the U.S. Naval Academy’s international programs this weekend. “You have to be determined and you have to commit. It takes courage.”
During Giffords’ first campaign for the House of Representatives in 2006, women at her campaign events wanted to know if she was really dating an astronaut and, if so, what he was like. As she struggled to recover from her brain injury, he was seen around the state as her steadfast supporter, even from space.
His willingness to stand beside — and sometimes in the shadow of — a famous political wife is not lost on Harris’ team, Democrats say. He has ties to the vice president from their time together at the Capitol, where she was the decisive president of the Senate. His Senate chief of staff, Jennifer Cox, came from his wife’s sprawling political operation and is on leave to run Harris’ Arizona campaign.
His standard campaign uniform of Navy flight jacket and ship’s cap is recognizable to blue-collar audiences everywhere; he’s campaigned with beleaguered Senate Democrats across the country. He even has cordial relations with Elon Musk, now an avatar of the right, having served on a security panel for Musk’s SpaceX company.
And Arizona Democrats are backing him. The state party board formally endorsed Kelly as its vice presidential nominee on Wednesday.
“It would be good for Arizona as a border state, and it would be good for our country,” said Raquel Terán, a former chair of the Arizona Democratic Party who is now running for the House of Representatives. “He’s a coalition builder, and he knows how to get things done.”
Kelly, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has his drawbacks. If a Harris-Kelly ticket were to win the White House, Arizona Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs would appoint a Democratic replacement for Kelly to the Senate next year, but the seat would be subject to an early special election in 2026, potentially putting it at risk. (Kelly won’t run for re-election until 2028.)
Daniel Scarpinato, a Republican operative in the state, noted that Kelly was no barnburner on the stump. In Washington, the senator has often been overshadowed by Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, the Democrat-turned-independent who helped craft some of Biden’s signature achievements, most notably the infrastructure bill.
Kelly also hasn’t had to deal with the glare of a national campaign and faces potential political risks, such as the company he founded with Chinese venture capital to make altitude-monitoring balloons, Scarpinato said.
But like other Republicans, Scarpinato went back to the border and Kelly’s deft handling of it was a huge boon for the Democratic slate.
John Giles, the Republican mayor of Mesa, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix in critical Maricopa County, agreed.
“He’s a weird, nerdy guy who has to know the details of how things work,” he said. “He’s not a shallow guy.”
Kelly’s approach to the border includes barriers like Trump’s wall in some places, but not across the boarder. He has also called for an immigration policy that treats migrants with respect and preserves asylum options. Above all, he has railed against politicians (he doesn’t say Republicans) who have invaded Arizona’s borderlands since the George W. Bush administration, holding photo ops and partisan press conferences, then returning to Washington only to dampen legislative fixes and maintain their political talking points.
Local officials say Kelly understands the complexities of the issue and the difference between a smuggler’s haven like Cochise County, which includes Douglas, and a major port of entry like Yuma, Arizona, where migrants cross legally, seek asylum and are often released pending trial.
Douglas Police Chief Kraig Fullen recalled that the only border barrier between his city and its southern sister, Agua Prieta, Mexico, was a dilapidated fence. Now there are immigration officers, surveillance cameras and a towering metal fence the color of rust.
As Mexico’s criminal organizations have grown more sophisticated, law enforcement officials said, so have their smuggling operations. Sheriffs are arresting people from across the country, some of them teenagers, who have been lured through social media apps like TikTok to drive migrants across the desert for a few thousand dollars a night.
As the number of migrants began to reach new heights last year, a Catholic church in Douglas transformed itself into a shelter, with volunteers collecting donations and helping the new arrivals.
“We are a city of 17,000 people,” said Huish, the mayor of Douglas. “We have zero capacity to handle even 30 people staying overnight and waiting for transportation.”
Kelly is well aware of this. After Biden changed the country’s asylum policy last month through an executive order to slow the flow of migrants, the senator called Huish to ask whether the change was working. But the flow of migrants had already slowed significantly, Huish said.
Now he is focused on restoring an orderly flow of goods and people through an official port of entry, complete with major infrastructure improvements that his senator, Kelly, is trying to secure.
Huish, he said, is more concerned about Trump’s promise of blanket tariffs on most imports, including those crossing the border through a new port in Douglas.
“That could be a problem,” he said.
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