The Arizona Senate race is going to be one of the hottest of 2020, but it isn't one that DWT, let alone Blue America, has been active in. Like the Arizona Senate race last cycle, there's just no good choice, just two bad ones. Last time, the theory was that Arizona Democrats needed a Republican-like candidate to win a red seat. And that was confirmed when wretched Blue Dog Kyrsten Sinema, then the single worst Democrat in the House, won the open red state seat. Today, Sinema is the single worst Democrat in the Senate, with a voting record to the right of Joe Manchin's. But that didn't stop Schumer-- it encouraged him-- from clearing the field for former Republican Mark Kelly to run against appointed Senator and cowardly Trumpist Martha McSally... the very same flawed candidate Sinema beat in 2018. McSally had once pretended to be a "moderate." Today she's an all-in Trumpist fanatic. When people call on Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney, Cory Gardner, Lamar Alexander, even Rand Paul and Mike Lee to consider the idea of a fair trial in the Senate, no one ever wastes their breath mentioning Martha McSally, just another sickening version of Marsha Blackburn. But Arizona isn't Tennessee and what works there, may backfire in a demographically changing Arizona.From the perspective of the DC horse race game, Kelly is a great idea and will likely beat McSally and give Arizona two Democratic senators, something no one would have bet on in the last half century. Two Democrats-- but not Democrats from the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. Better than McSally? Sure. More harmful to the party than McSally? Yep. Arizona voters, especially young ones, are going to be very hard pressed to understand the difference between the two parties with Sinema and Kelly as their two highest-ranking elected officials.McSally is getting desperate. She lost to Sinema-- a less popular candidate than Kelly-- 1,191,100 (50.0%) to 1,135,200 (47.6%). She lost her own congressional district (Tucson) and she lost Maricopa County (Phoenix). Both-- and therefor the state-- are trending away from Republicans. She's knows she's going to do even worse against Kelly than she did against Sinema. Last time Sinema outraised her slightly-- $22,197,141 to $21,618,743 with outside spending favoring Sinema. Outside spending also favored Sinema-- $33,915,055 to "just" $28,749,237 for McSally. This cycle, despite the advantages of an incumbent, Kelly is already outraising her-- and by a lot. In a report from KTAR, Kevin Stone revealed that "the challenger outraised the first-term Republican by more than $2 million in the fourth quarter and has amassed a far larger war chest. Kelly’s campaign on Tuesday touted a 2019 fourth quarter total of over $6.2 million, more than 50% higher than McSally’s announced total of around $4 million... The Q4 totals track with the yearly numbers in the race, with Kelly taking in around $20.2 million in 2019 to McSally’s $12 million, according to the campaigns."Desperation is one ways to account for McSally's purposefully and aggressively nasty, boorish and probably racist behavior towards respected CNN reporter Manu Raju Thursday.
Raju: "Sen. McSally, should the Senate consider new evidence as part of the impeachment trial?"McSally: "Manu, you’re a liberal hack. I’m not talking to you."Raju: "You're not going to comment?"McSally: "You’re a liberal hack, buddy."
McSally immediately posted the video her staffer shot on her official twitter page. Simultaneously, she unveiled her new website, "Liberalhack.com," apparently eager to use her time in her Senate office illegally campaigning rather than going over the hundreds of pages of Lev Parnas evidence Raju was asking her about. She quickly sent out a fundraising e-mail bragging about how she owned the liberal media, a popular refrain among the Trump-loving hate-filled, right-wing masses. I'm not saying she personally designed the ugly t-shirt herself, but she was hawking them on her site before Raju had left the Capitol! ($35 for anyone who would contribute to her campaign.)She then booked herself s slot on Laura Ingraham's Republican Party propaganda show to discuss the latest developments in her war against the media. Chuck Todd noted how quickly she was raising money from the interaction-- "so quickly, in fact, that it seemed planned?"So, yes, there's more to it than just McSally's desperation. In an unrelated post on Thursday, we saw Trump uses the media for his own ends-- and how Democratic politicians are unable or unwilling to do the same. Peter Hamby noted in an essay for Vanity Fair that manipulating low-info voters is how Republicans have overtaken Democrats in certain demographics ow consistently voting against their own interests. "Trump," wrote Hamby, "despite his deep personal insecurities and lust for elite validation... has derived much of his political success by ignoring Washington finger-waggers and connecting with the more primal instincts of his supporters, in whatever televised or digital corner of the media he can, with or without the good graces of the national press and savvy insiders. Trump stumbled into understanding something crucial about the electorate, which is this: There are plenty of divisions in our conventional wisdom-- insider versus outsider, progressive versus moderate, young versus old-- but one of the biggest splits in American politics is simply between those who follow politics closely and those who do not." Is McSally as bad as Trump? She's trying. Martha McSally, like Trump, is trying, as Greg Sargent noted in a different context, to create and exploit "a fog machine of disinformation and incoherence." There isn't much more politicians with anti-worker/anti-family platforms like hers can do.The next day we looked at a related essay by Sean Illing forVox about flooding the zone with shit to confuse these same low-info voters, utterly overwhelming the capacity for Trump's low-info supporters to be able to discern what's real and what isn't. Illing wrote that 'Regardless of how clear a case Democrats make, it seems likely that a majority of voters will remain confused and unsure about the details of Trump’s transgressions. No single version of the truth will be accepted. This is a serious problem for our democratic culture. No amount of evidence, on virtually any topic, is likely to move public opinion one way or the other. We can attribute some of this to rank partisanship-- some people simply refuse to acknowledge inconvenient facts about their own side... We live in a media ecosystem that overwhelms people with information.'" McSally may be relatively new to that world, but she's taken to it like an old pro. All authoritarian politicians move rapidly to shutting down alternative sources of information. McSally gets it.
