Martha McSally Is More Moderate Than You Might Think
The newly appointed Arizona Senator ran in the midterms as a candidate who aligned with Trump on every issue. That didn't work out too well for her, and now that she's in the Senate, she will most likely be less lovey-dovey to the President.
Republican Martha McSally ran an unsuccessful Senate campaign against Democrat Kyrsten Sinema, who branded herself as a moderate. McSally, on the other hand, closely aligned herself with President Trump, which might have been one of the reasons that she lost in a once safe, Republican state. Luckily for her, she was still appointed to the Senate at the end of 2018, succeeding Jon Kyl, and filling John McCain's term. McSally was pretty moderate when she was in the House, she was even a critic of the President, and did not always agree with his policies and tactics. The district she represented in Arizona is pretty purple, which might be the cause of her being so moderate when she was in the House.
After taking McCain's seat, we could see the more moderate side of her again. In a rating done by FiveThirtyEight, her and McCain both got the same conservative rating, a +0.4. 12% of Republican fall into this category including McCain and McSally. In McSally's memo as to why she lost the Senate race, she said the President is not that popular among Arizona Republicans. Closely aligning herself with the President hurt her chances to win the open seat. Back in 2016, Trump won with 48% of the vote in Arizona. In 2018, McSally also got 48.1% of the vote, but Sinema got 49.7%, beating her by 1.6 points. Trump and McSally both got the same percentage of votes, but this time instead of the Republican being the victor, they were the loser.
After learning from her mistakes in the campaign, McSally will probably brand herself as the moderate from her House days. But with a state that is more conservative than her old congressional district, we could also see her shift to the right again. McSally has to run in a special election in 2020, and then again in 2022, so she will have to appeal to several voters, again and again. We shall wait and see what she does in the future, and how she votes in the Senate.
