MESA, Ariz. — If Donald Trump loses Arizona next month, he can probably thank yet again his own insults and disdain of state icon John McCain over the past decade.
The former U.S. senator and former Republican presidential candidate, who died of brain cancer six years ago, has a loyal following of old-school Republican voters, many of whom supported President Joe Biden four years ago, making him the first Democrat to win. the state since Bill Clinton in 1996.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign appears to believe it has a good chance of repeating Biden’s victory. Harris; her husband, Doug Emhoff; running mate Tim Walz; and first lady Jill Biden are swarming the state, where early voting began Wednesday.
And unlike in 2016 and 2020, when Democratic nominees Hillary Clinton and Biden more or less organically received Republican support, the 2024 Democratic effort has an organized operation specifically designed to rally Arizona Republicans, and especially McCain’s fans, to convince them to vote favorably for Harris.
“There’s nothing more conservative than putting country before party,” Emhoff told several dozen Republicans for Harris volunteers gathered Tuesday afternoon ahead of an evening of phone banking, using the phrase McCain himself used when Harris’ campaign in the entire country sought votes for the Republican Party.
“Our democracy, our constitution, our rule of law, our way of life, our economic future, our freedoms. This is all at stake, and you all recognize that. And it’s not enough to just say you’re not going to support Donald Trump. That is not good enough,” said Emhoff.
Mesa Mayor John Giles introduced Emhoff at the one-story home in a new subdivision of the sprawling suburb, which was part of a half-dozen Republicans this summer, including former Trump White House staffers, speaking in prime time appeared in the Democratic Party. National Convention in Chicago.
Hours earlier, in his office at City Hall, overlooking where Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance would appear the next day, Giles acknowledged that while some Republican voters might be convinced not to vote at all in the presidential race, it is significantly more difficult to get them to actively vote for Harris.
“Part of my message in joining the campaign is to convince people not to come to that conclusion,” Giles said. “There is a reluctance to then finish the job. If you don’t want him to be president, it’s not enough not to vote for him. You should vote for Harris, and Harris is an acceptable alternative.”
The Trump campaign did not respond to questions from HuffPost, although it did appear to respond to Harris’ blitz of the state by scheduling appearances for both Vance and Trump, who is holding a rally in Prescott on Sunday.
Public opinion polls show Trump enjoying a slim lead of a few percentage points in the state.
At her press conference earlier this week, Trump acolyte, fellow election denier and Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake disputed that Harris’s appeal — boosted by the likes of Giles, former Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake and McCain’s son Jimmy McCain, all of whom also endorsed Harris – resonated with Arizona Republicans.
“I don’t think it resonates. I don’t think this is true. I mean, you see some people who say they’re Republicans who support Kamala Harris, but if you look at their voting record, they’ve been with Joe Biden. They still call themselves Republicans, but they haven’t voted Republican in several years,” she said. “So I just don’t believe that story. And I look at data that shows President Trump is doing very well with Republicans. Just like me.”
Nine years of insults
Trump’s displeasure with McCain began early in his first presidential election campaign, when he declared that undocumented immigrants from Mexico were “rapists” and “drug dealers.” McCain, who has long advocated a more compassionate immigration policy, denounced the comment, and Trump lashed out by accusing McCain, a former Navy pilot who spent nearly six years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, of abandoning veterans.
The accusation, like many made by Trump, had no basis in reality.
Weeks later, at a rally of evangelical voters in Iowa, Trump rejected the idea that McCain was a “war hero” based on his record in Vietnam. “He’s not a war hero,” said Trump, who dodged the war by claiming he had bone spurs. “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who haven’t been captured.”
While the insult angered veterans across the country, it hit even more deeply in Arizona.
“If Trump loses Arizona, it will be because of McCain’s Republicans,” said Frank Luntz, the Republican messaging consultant who had provoked Trump’s response as moderator of that 2015 event in Iowa.
In the November 2016 election, McCain won his sixth six-year term by 13 percentage points, while Trump defeated Clinton by just 3½ points. McCain had received 107,000 more votes than Trump.
Trump’s dissatisfaction with McCain continued as president. McCain criticized Trump’s “Muslim ban” and, later that year, the president’s public praise for Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. The following year, when Trump pushed through a repeal of predecessor Barack Obama’s old health care law despite no viable replacement in place, McCain returned to the Senate after his diagnosis with terminal brain cancer and cast the tie-breaking vote that killed the legislation .
Trump took McCain’s no vote as a personal rebuke and repeatedly criticized him, even after McCain’s death on August 25, 2018.
While the rest of official Washington mourned McCain, Trump went golfing at his club in northern Virginia. Two weeks earlier, at the signing of the annual defense bill at Fort Drum, New York, he declined to use the full name of the legislation, even though Congress had gone out of its way to call it the John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act . .
Trump later complained that he was criticized for his treatment of McCain. “I gave him the kind of funeral he wanted, and as president I had to approve that,” Trump falsely said during a visit to a tank plant in Ohio in 2019. “I don’t care, I didn’t get a thank you. That’s okay. We sent him on his way. But I wasn’t a fan of John McCain.”
In fact, the Defense Department did not need Trump’s approval to use a military aircraft to transport McCain’s body to Washington.
“Too many Arizona Republicans consider themselves McCain Republicans and were outraged by Trump’s insult surrounding McCain’s death,” Luntz said.
Even today, as he runs for president, Trump has continued to attack McCain for voting against the repeal of Obamacare, as the health care law is known. In January in Iowa, Trump even mocked the injuries McCain suffered in Vietnam — some from torture by his captors — that left him unable to raise his arms above his head.
“John McCain couldn’t get his arm up that day for some reason, remember?” Trump said, then imitated the thumbs-down signal given by McCain in 2017 to vote against the repeal bill.
Revenge from the grave
In the dining room of a fellow Republican for Harris member, volunteers Julie Spilsbury, Rachel Albertsen and Annie Lewis sit around the dining table on Tuesday. Each has been given a list of names of registered Republicans who the campaign believes can be persuaded to vote for Harris next month, preferably early or by mail.
It is the job of Spilsbury, Albertsen and Lewis to convince that.
“I plugged my nose and voted for Trump in 2016. I couldn’t vote for him in 2020,” said Spilsbury, 47, a city council member in Mesa. “It was difficult. That’s the first time I voted Democrat.”
She said many of those she calls have a similar fear of breaking away from the Republican tribe and tell her they are unwilling to put up a yard sign or speak out publicly, but agree with her and on Harris will vote even if they like Spilsbury – disagree with the Democratic candidate on many of her policies.
“I think our country can overcome bad policy, but we can’t overcome bad character either,” Spilsbury said.
That the support of these “McCain Republicans” could be decisive in November has the history of 2020 on its side.
Former McCain aides Wes Gullett and Bettina Nava said Biden had clearly benefited from the deep antipathy many Arizona Republicans still feel toward Trump.
In the legislative district where McCain lived for many years, in the northern suburbs of Phoenix, Democrat Christine Marsh secured a 497-vote victory over Republican incumbent Kate McGee on November 3, 2020. Those same voters favored Biden by 14,766 votes over Trump, who was president at the time. That margin was nearly one and a half times as large as Biden’s victory of 10,457 votes statewide.
Gullett warned that Harris had two major challenges that Biden had not faced: she is a woman and she is from California. Misogyny remains real, he said, as does the distrust many Arizonans feel toward their neighbors to the west.
“If Kamala Harris came from Denver, she would win by five points,” he said.
On the other hand, Trump’s attempted coup leading up to and on January 6, 2021, and his subsequent demands that the Constitution be terminated and that he be reinstated have deeply offended a large number of conservative Republicans.
“The Constitution, and the idea that anyone would say they would suspend the Constitution, is a fundamental deal breaker for a lot of people,” he said.
Nava said Harris also has the benefit of anger over the 2022 Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, which has led women across the state, including many Republican women, to favor Harris and other Democrats. “In the Republican women’s circles that I’m in, that’s been critical,” she said
Giles said he can’t predict whether Harris can replicate Biden’s victory and he doesn’t want to try.
“I have no prediction. I mean, I do,” he said. “My prediction is that we will work very hard to get the vote. The people who are registered are the people who are registered. And the campaign that wins in Arizona will be the one that makes it to the ballot. And so we just have to give people energy.”
