Rep. Paul Gosar on Tuesday spurned Rep. Martha McSally, his colleague in Arizona’s Republican congressional delegation, when he endorsed Kelli Ward for Senate in his state’s GOP primary election.
“In my time working with Martha, I found her, though likable personally, to be very inconsistent politically. None of us can count on Martha keeping a campaign promise as she will fall for whatever the D.C. elite tells her to do at the time. I have seen that firsthand,” Gosar said in a press release issued by the Ward campaign.
McSally is the choice of Republican insiders in Washington and Arizona and the best positioned to defeat presumptive Democratic nominee Rep. Kyrsten Sinema in November. The midterm elections are shaping up as a backlash against President Trump, and Arizona, though a red state, isn’t the slam dunk for Republicans that others are.
But first, McSally has to navigate a Republican primary in a state where the conservative base prefers provocateurs like Trump. Ward fits that mold better than McSally.
McSally is battle-hardened from her House campaigns in a swing district tough for Republicans to hold. Until recently she governed as a pragmatist, but has since moved to burnish her conservative credentials to hold off Ward. The McSally campaign, in a statement emailed to the Washington Examiner, sought to clarify the congresswoman’s voting record — and took a shot at Gosar in the process.
“Rep Gosar is a good man who cares about his constituents, but the facts are the facts. The fact is Congresswoman McSally votes with the President 97 percent of the time while Congressman Gosar only votes with the President 77 percent of the time. If he voted with the President as much as Martha, we could accomplish even more for Arizonans,” McSally campaign spokesman Torunn Sinclair said.
This story has been updated to include a comment from the McSally campaign.
