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The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The Challengers: Fierce Partisanship in the Land of John McCain
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The Challengers: Fierce Partisanship in the Land of John McCain
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This is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and editors about Politics. It's Thursday, August 30th. Dorothy I'm Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of the New Yorker. Today is the fourth installment of the Challengers, a monthly segment devoted to the 2018 midterm races across the country. We're focusing mostly on candidates who are new to politics as a way of discussing upheavals outside Washington and defining issues that are shaping the futures of the two parties. The death of John McCain last week after serving as a US senator from Arizona for 30 years and came just days before the state's primaries on Tuesday, Republicans elected Representative Martha McSally, a former fighter pilot, to run for Senator Jeff Flake's seat, the Republican governor, Doug Ducey, who is running for re election, will appoint a successor to fill McCain's seat until 2020. McCain was clear about the legacy of bipartisanship he wanted to leave behind, and he offered some pointed words to his party, the president and the country on Tuesday at a press conference at the capitol in Phoenix. McCain's close friend Rick Davis read a statement that the senator wrote shortly before his death.
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We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with tribal rivalries that have sown resentment and hatred and violence in all the corners of the globe. We weaken it when we hide behind walls rather than tear them down, when we doubt the power of our ideals rather than trust them to be the great force for change they have always been.
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Jonathan Blitzer joins me to discuss how those tribal rivalries are playing out in McCain's home state and how Arizona has become one of the pivotal battlegrounds in this year's elections. John, welcome back.
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D
Thanks for having me again.
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B
You're calling today from Phoenix, I believe.
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D
That's right. The heat of Phoenix.
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B
Yeah. How are voters there grappling with the death of McCain?
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D
I think people relate to John McCain here in a way that isn't overtly partisan. And so I think there's broad respect for him. There's a real solemnity to his passing. And of course, it coincides with this very dramatic and hard fought primary race. And so there's kind of an interesting contrast. I think people are very entrenched in the sort of partisan fight right now for various seats. But when John McCain's name comes up, there tends to be be a kind of calm that descends and really a sense that that's a conversation that is outside the realm of politics.
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B
Before we get to the races that we've been witnessing this week, I want to just go back for a moment and be reminded of McCain's role in 2013 as a member of the bipartisan Gang of Eight, which pushed for comprehensive immigration reform. That kind of initiative seems almost incomprehensible now.
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D
I think that's right. And I think in some ways what's happened to Jeff Flake is kind of the best indication of how that effort has gone off the rails. I mean, Jeff Flake was someone who or is someone who didn't quite have the gravitas and the long history obviously, that John McCain did. And so he was a bit more vulnerable to some of the partisan wrangling around that immigration push. And I think that his staying power, I think was pretty severely diminished, beginning maybe with his role in the Gang of Eight, but then of course, extending to his pretty outspoken criticisms of President Trump. McCain, because he had been in office for so long, because he was such a mainstay, because of his military record, had a way of really parlaying that identity into this kind of doggedness on the immigration front. But Arizona has been for Years, even really before Donald Trump arrived on the scene, Arizona has been ground zero for this fight over immigration. On the one hand, the sort of more independent. Take that. Look, we have to make some sort of progress on this intractable policy issue, but on the other, a real sense of far right hysteria over the border being overrun. So you've always seen that national debate play out in extremely intense ways here, locally and on the state level, embodied.
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B
By Joe Arpaio, who was also running in this election. Martha McSally initially embraced the Dreamers legislation, but she was pushed to the right in the course of the primary campaign. Tell us a little bit about how that played out.
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D
She's definitely been pushed to the right over the course of the primary campaign, and that's something we should talk about. But even before that, even as early as January, she was beginning to rebrand herself as someone who could be much harder line on immigration. So as you mentioned, she was someone who initially championed the dreamers, had put her name to a bipartisan bill in the House that was sort of modeled on the DREAM act, which is broadly seen as something sympathetic to the dreamers and a positive piece of legislation giving them a path to citizenship. But over time, she also tried to amass a record of toughness on the border, toughness on immigrants. In January, she signed onto a bill, a far right bill sponsored by Bob Goodlatte, the House Judiciary Committee, that the President really supported, that would have cut legal immigration, it would have increased penalties on the undocumented. She was sure to include herself in that effort because she was beginning to see herself as needing to create this alignment with President Trump. By the time the primaries rolled around, she faced two far right challengers. Joe Arpaih was one of them, obviously, this symbol of the anti immigration movement. And the other was an osteopath named Kelly Ward, who has really fashioned herself as a kind of far right Trumpian Republican insurgent who thinks that John McCain and Jeff Flake are the problem. And so McSally had this balancing act. She eventually withdrew her support, her actual sponsorship from one of these bipartisan efforts to help dreamers, scrubbed any mention of it from her website, and has really been pretty outspoken about built a wall about needing to get tough on the border. And so she has definitely, definitely moved farther and farther to the right and has been doing so, I think, ever since she realized that she was going to make a run at this seat.
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B
And Arpaio was walloped. But then it makes you wonder how the immigration issue played in the primary.
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D
Yeah, I mean, Arpaio, in a funny way, was a real spoiler in this election. Kelly Ward for a time looked like she was gaining on Martha McSally. And what really kept her campaign from heating up was the fact that Joe Arpaio split the far right, Trumpian, anti immigration vote. It's not clear to me in the end that Arpaio and Ward's votes combined would have been enough to overtake McSally, but definitely Arpaio played the role of spoiler. You know, Arpaio is an odd figure in all of this. The mere fact that he's on the ballot obviously is a painful symbol of everything that's come to pass over the last year. I think for the most part, people here in Arizona seem to be sick of him. He's was never thought to have really been mounting a serious run, but the fact that he was still in the mix was really again, just this kind of lasting hangover from some of the ugliest politics around immigration that really have dogged the state for years now. And so one thing people do say to me is there's a sense of fatigue to some degree among voters in.
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B
Arizona, about among voters across the country.
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D
That's true. There's fatigue everywhere. But I think in Arizona there's this sense that we've been dealing with this rabble rousing and nastiness on immigration for over a decade. And so I think there's this sense that are we gonna have another drawn out fight on immigration in the most dramatic and over the top?
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B
The Senate race is going to be fascinating because you now have two women competing against each other, Sinema and McSally. And I wonder how you think McSally's turn to the right is going to play in the general election.
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D
I mean, that's the big question here. McSally is a very strong candidate. An Air Force veteran. She was the first woman to fly a mission in combat back in Desert Storm. She, she represents a pretty moderate district, Congressional district in Tucson. Interestingly, she has ceded so much ground in the center in order to try to appeal to the far right that it's really unclear whether or not she will be able to make it back to the center and appeal to independence by the time the elections come around in November. John McCain's legacy actually affects her in a really interesting way because you'd think that the strength of her candidacy would follow pretty plainly from her similarities to John McCain. Both veterans, both had an independent streak, both have kind of a seriousness about service, but she has pretty studiously avoided backing McCain or even being associated with McCain during the primary race. She was desperate to have Donald Trump's support. Now, of course, she is trying to tack back to the center that coincides with John McCain's death. But she's really ceded a lot of ground to her Democratic opponent, Kyrsten Sinema. And Sinema is someone who has been quick to claim the mantle of John McCain's legacy.
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B
How so? How is she doing that?
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She, first of all, has been lavishing Praise on John McCain, which is understandable. And the language she uses to describe herself and her campaign. She talks about how independent minded she is, how voters in Arizona don't really see themselves as falling into neat categories of Democrats or Republicans. She stresses the fact that she's comfortable straying from her party when she sees it necessary. She wants to put Arizona first. All of this independent talk, very much modeled on John McCain's brand of independence. McSally's main line of attack against Christian Sinema is I'm a patriot and this other woman is a politician. The contrast was meant to be between the gravitas and seriousness of McSally's service and the kind of political waywardness of cinema's ambition and recent rise to prominence. But because McSally has in the last several months gone farther and farther to the right, attempted to associate herself with Donald Trump, she has really lost this strong hand she had.
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B
How is the Trump administration's explosive zero tolerance policy played of the policy of separating children from their parents at the border?
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D
I think that Martha McSally has definitely made a point of not criticizing the president for these aggressive anti immigrant policies. I think Kyrsten Sinema would have, it would seem, an opportunity to do that. But she herself is sort of trying to keep a relatively low profile on an issue like this, like immigration, that is so divisive in Arizona. It's a bit frustrating, I have to say, as someone who follows immigration, to kind of wade into the politics of this in Arizona, because obviously the summer has seen just such absolutely horrific and draconian anti immigrant policies. The zero tolerance stuff, the family separation stuff at the border. And you know, there have been kind of token remarks on that from the candidates. But the strategy certainly on the Democratic side is let's not further inflame sentiments. Everyone knows where we stand. Obviously we'll express our displeasure in sort of simple, straightforward ways. But this is not what we want to be talking about. We want to be talking about health care, we want to be talking about jobs, the economy, kind of the usual litany education.
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B
But you know, all of this does raise the universal Democratic Party conundrum, which is, you know, do you run to the center or run to the left? And maybe we should talk a little bit about the governor's race because you're seeing some of that there too, where Ducey, the current governor, is running for reelection against a very, very progressive insurgent and I believe its first Latino candidate for governor, David Garcia. And you spoke to Garcia, so I'm curious to hear what he has to say about all this.
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D
Yeah, you really see two different interpretations or theories for how the Democrats can take Arizona. You've got the cinema approach, which is the kind of, the more centrist approach, appealing to moderates, independence, et cetera. And then there's David Garcia, an unabashed progressive, someone who is talking most of the time about public education, which is a huge issue here and in many ways might be the defining issue of the November races here. But he is someone whose thinking is there's this vast progressive infrastructure in Arizona that has grown over the last decade in response to all of these anti immigration pushes by state legislators, by Republican governors. And so there's this massive infrastructure formed by grassroots organizations that have done really incredible pathbreaking organizing not just to beat back these anti immigrant measures, but to try to advance a more progressive agenda of their own.
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B
And voter registration efforts, registering, you know.
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D
More than 100,000 voters over the last few years. There is this muscle that has to date not really been used or taken advantage of in big races for statewide office. And David Garcia's approach seems to be to appeal to this base, to get people out, to get people enthusiastic. You know, he's running against a kind of more or less middle of the road, bland Republican incumbent. If he can rally the progressive base in Arizona, you know, who knows what can happen and that maybe he can really catch fire.
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Does he have a remote shot at doing this?
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It'll be an uphill battle for sure. I mean, he's, it looks like he'll be pretty seriously outspent by interests on the doocy side of the race. But I have to say, just having gone to events, having talked to voters on the ground, there is a lot of enthusiasm about his candidacy. There's a forthrightness, plain spokenness to his values that is, that are extremely appealing at a moment when everyone's responses in this sort of high pressure environment have been so carefully calibrated. And I think, you know, I think the big, the sort of big wildcard in the governor's race is education in May there were some 50,000 public school teachers who marched on the Capitol here in Phoenix following days of a strike over teacher pay. This was part of obviously a broader movement across the country. That's an issue that really strengthened David Garcia's hand as a candidate. He declared his candidacy well before that, but education was his priority. It's the thing he wants to talk about the most. And I think there is a chance, interestingly, for him to make real inroads with voters who maybe don't identify as being part of the progressive left in Arizona, but who are responding to what I think everyone can agree on here is pretty grave underfunding of public education. And so there really is a shot for him to make this kind of broad based appeal while also staying true to his progressive credentials.
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B
And so where does he stand? Has he been an outspoken supporter of abolish ice, which some Democrats worry is going to harm the party more than help the party? You know, it's an OK slogan for activists, but not exactly sound policy.
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D
It's a tricky, it's a tricky issue for him. I think one of the things that the interests around Governor Ducey have already seized on is the fact that David Garcia has been pretty outspokenly critical of ICE. The Republican Governors association has already spent $9 million to shore up Doug Ducey's bid, which is interesting because he's going up against this underdog. And one of the big ads that they've run against David Garcia is an ad attacking him for being too extreme on immigration. Garcia's response to that is, look, I'm not going to run away from what I have said and what I think about ice, about immigration enforcement. But he also says, look, this is so emblematic of how politics work in our state. My main issue as a candidate is education. I've been clear about it. I want to talk about education, I want to talk about clean energy, I want to talk about the environment and what's brought to my feet every time. Immigration. This is what he says. With a name like David Garcia, these issues are always going to be brought to my feet. And I think voters are going to see through this kind of obviously racially tinged ad hominem attacks on me when all I want to talk about are broad progressive issues that appeal to a pretty wide swath of the electorate.
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B
So Republicans currently hold the two Senate seats in Arizona, the governorship and a majority of the legislature. You talked about Democratic organizing, voter registration drives, but historically Latino voters have, have not turned out. The primaries aren't particularly representative of what's going to happen in the general election. But is there any chance that this state is beginning to tip toward the blue?
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D
I think it is. Famous last words. I really think it is, but largely because I don't think this is a new phenomenon. When we speculate about Arizona going purple or trending toward more bluish tendencies, we really have to go back pretty much to 2007, when we first saw the arrival of Joe Arpaio, to really track how systematic the immigrants rights community and its organizing has been in terms of working in the state to build up a pretty vast network of people who can get out the vote, who can register voters, who can organize around ballot initiatives. It really it remains to be seen whether or not this movement can actually have a kind of observable and sizable impact on the returns come November. But I think David Garcia's campaign is basically banking on the fact that to date, no one has taken seriously enough just how serious a political force the immigrants rights community and the broad range of progressive interests flowing from it can be. And so I I'm not sure if Arizona is ready to tip, but it certainly seems like an interesting time to gauge whether or not this state is kind of moving to a different kind of identity.
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Thanks so much, John. John Jonathan Blitzer is a New Yorker staff writer and a Regular contributor to newyorker.com this has been the political scene from the New Yorker. You can subscribe by searching for the New Yorker in your podcast app and find more political analysis and commentary on new yorker.com Feel free to rate and review the political scene on Apple Podcasts. This program is produced by Alex Barron and Hannah Wilentz. For New Yorker.com I'm Dorothy Wickenden.
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