CHARLOTTE, North Carolina — Kelli Ward dug into her old never-Trump nemesis Jeff Flake for endorsing Joe Biden over President Trump and offered an optimistic picture of the president’s chances of winning the hotly contested 11 Electoral College votes in Arizona.
“Jeff Flake is in no man’s land. His predicament today is a direct result of his own grandstanding and virtue signaling — actions that alienated him from anyone and everyone who believes in Republican values, and that resulted in his failure to run for reelection after a single term in the Senate due to a lack of support,” Ward, chairwoman of the Arizona Republican Party, said Monday. “Flake has done this to himself, allowing anger, jealousy, and a deep-seated personal vendetta against President Trump to poison his relationship with Republicans.”
“It’s clear now to any reasonable observer that Flake has turned his back on Arizonans and Republicans nationwide in his vain pursuit of political gain,” Ward added.
Flake, who left office last year after declining to run for a second term in 2018, is one of more than two dozen former Republican members of Congress who endorsed Biden rather than Trump on Monday, the first day of the 2020 Republican National Convention.
“Indifference to the truth or to the careful stewardship of the institutions of American liberty is not conservative. Disregard for the separation of powers — the centerpiece of our constitutional system — is not conservative. Governing by tweet is not conservative,” the former Arizona senator said in a statement.
Fresh off Republican delegates voting to renominate Trump to lead their presidential ticket in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Monday, Ward gave an impassioned defense of Trump in an interview with the Washington Examiner.
“He makes promises that he keeps, that he’s not a typical politician who tells you one thing on the campaign trail and stab you in the back from the political office,” Ward said of the president, making an implied dig at politicians such as Flake.
Ward, a former Arizona state senator and family practice doctor, announced in 2016 that she would try to defeat Flake in the Republican Senate primary after failing to win a primary challenge against Sen. John McCain that year.
She led Flake by double digits in early primary polls and took credit for pushing him to decline to seek another term in 2018, though Ward eventually lost that primary to now-Sen. Martha McSally.
McSally lost the 2018 general election to Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who was appointed to the late McCain’s vacant seat and now faces a tough 2020 reelection bid against Democrat Mark Kelly. But despite McSally having a war chest half the size of Kelly’s, as of July 15, Ward is projecting confidence about that race.
“Sen. McSally is on the road every single day, working hard, meeting with constituents, and she is going to stay in the United States Senate, without a doubt,” Ward said.
Ward railed against the Democratic agenda and presentation of the party in last week’s virtual convention.
“They didn’t talk about their efforts to dismantle the police and weed out the atrocities that are happening in places like Portland and Seattle, Minneapolis, Chicago, New York, across the board and these Democrat-run, you know, hellholes that they have become,” she said. “They haven’t been too shy about saying, ‘Yes, we’re going to give so-called free healthcare to every person who comes here illegally.’ But they don’t stress the fact that American taxpayers will actually [be] footing the bill for that.”
Arizona is a top target for the Biden campaign, too. Campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon has said that she is “bullish” about the Democratic presidential nominee’s chances of winning the state.
Recent polls show that the presidential race is very close, with the RealClearPolitics average of Arizona polls showing Biden with a 2-point edge on Trump.
Ward said that the biggest challenge for Trump, though, does not come from the Democrats. Rather, it is “the lies from the media and the Big Tech censorship of Republicans and conservatives across the board.”
“He’s got the momentum, he’s got the enthusiasm. He not only has the base, but he also has a whole new crowd of people that will be voting Republican because of the leadership he’s shown,” Ward said of Trump.
The state party says it’s on pace to reach 4 million voter contacts this week, and Ward said that it has dozens of staff members on the ground and is working to train volunteer poll watchers or poll workers.
“We’ve got new Latino voters, new black voters, new Asian American voters, new women voters, new suburban moms. They are flocking to Donald Trump,” Ward said. “They see what these Democrats have done to cities and suburbs, and even some rural areas across our country, and they don’t want that.”
