Martha McSally fights for her political life

McSally took a circuitous path to the upper chamber, having lost a bitter race against Sinema, only to be appointed to the Senate weeks later when Jon Kyl, one of McSally’s mentors, stepped aside.

Without much time to settle into her new role, she is already having to prepare for another election in 2020, in a race that she recognizes is “ground zero for the Senate majority and the firewall in the direction of our country.” This is not an overstatement.

Democratic presidential candidates are in a policy bidding war that has involved proposals to socialize health insurance and offer coverage to illegal immigrants, provide free housing, cancel student loans, and hand out monthly $1,000 checks, among other promises. Even if Democrats retake the White House, however, they will not be able to achieve a smidgen of their transformational agenda without control of the Senate. And they won’t win the Senate without beating McSally.

Republicans have 53 Senate seats and a good chance of retaking the Alabama seat they lost in 2017. That means Democrats will probably need to gain four seats and the presidency to win the Senate, which would allow a Democratic vice president to break votes that were tied 50-50. Only two of the seats being contested are in states that President Trump lost in 2016: Maine and Colorado. Of the rest, Arizona was the closest the last time around, with Trump carrying it by just 3.5 points. Any realistic chance Democrats have to take control of the Senate and pass their agenda involves victory there.

With Trump’s approval ratings underwater in the state, Mark Kelly, the former astronaut and husband to former Rep. Gabby Giffords, is seeking the seat as a Democrat and has led in early polls. And although McSally had hoped to avoid a primary, Daniel McCarthy, a cosmetics company founder, is challenging her from the right, complicating her road to reelection.

She insists that carrying this heavy weight into the new year does not faze her because throughout her life she’s had to overcome challenges that have forced her to develop a thick skin and keep things in perspective.

“I lost my dad when I was 12, so it shaped my whole life,” she tells me. She was growing up in Rhode Island in a happy and stable family, she says, and one summer day, at the age of 49, her father started feeling unwell and went upstairs to lie in bed. Her mother took him to the hospital where he was expected to recover. But in the middle of the night, the young McSally was woken up. Her father had sent for her and her four older siblings, sensing he wouldn’t make it.

In her final moments with her father, she mostly spoke about mundane things in life. “But among all the things we talked about when I visited with him, he told me to make him proud,” she recalls.

At the time, it wasn’t clear how the event would affect her life in the long term. She was overcome with crushing grief during her adolescence, a period that is often difficult for children to navigate even under the best of circumstances. Having been born with “a little bit of a rebellious spirit,” she concedes, she acted out.

As she grew older, it became apparent how the memory of her father’s life and too-early death molded her. He had been the first in his family to go to college, and he’d served in the Navy before becoming a lawyer. Her mother, having become a widow with five children, “chose to kind of channel her own grief into action” and went back to work at a public school.

“The whole experience, as I look back, I think really propelled me on a path to want to carry on his legacy and do something meaningful with my life and to make every day a gift,” she says.

McSally’s drive led her to the Air Force Academy and eventually to become a fighter pilot when the cockpit opened up to women. “That was a pretty rough time,” she remembers of the treatment of female pilots. “We were not welcomed. It was pretty hostile.”

In an emotionally stirring testimony this March, McSally revealed during a Senate Armed Services subcommittee hearing on sexual assault in the military that she, too, had been a victim. She explained that she was assaulted by a superior officer but didn’t report it.

“I didn’t trust the system at the time,” she said. “I blamed myself. I was ashamed and confused. And I thought I was strong but felt powerless.”

When she eventually started telling people about her experience, she was “horrified” by how she was interrogated as if she were the perpetrator, and she almost left the military. “Like many victims, I felt like the system was raping me all over again,” she said. “But I didn’t quit.”

McSally’s first encounter with the national spotlight came when she sued Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld seeking to overturn a policy requiring that female service members stationed in Saudi Arabia wear an abaya, or head-to-toe covering. The policy was modified, although the Pentagon claimed the decision was separate from the lawsuit. McSally then successfully lobbied Congress to pass a law that permanently ended the policy.

Over the course of her trailblazing 26-year career in the Air Force, McSally became the first female pilot to serve in combat, enforced the no-fly zone in Iraq, was involved in preparing and executing the early air campaign in Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks, became a squadron commander, and helped lead search-and-rescue operations over both Iraq and Afghanistan. She retired in 2010 as a colonel.

The unique challenges faced as a woman serving in the military, she says, helped her to learn to stay focused amid criticism, which became a useful attribute in politics: “I had to learn as a young officer how to not take things personally, how to have thick skin, how not to stay up all night fixating on how somebody unfairly denigrated you.”

She had to prove that women could fly fighters “just like the guys.” Taking the hostile treatment personally and losing sleep, she says, would just mean making mistakes on the job that would play into the hands of naysayers. As a politician, she says, she doesn’t allow attack ads or what’s said about her on the internet distract her from her message.

McSally got a taste for the Senate when she served as a legislative fellow for Kyl when he represented Arizona, getting the chance to learn more about how national security policy was made on Capitol Hill. This “planted the seed,” convincing her that there were some decent people in Washington. Last year, it was Kyl who came out of retirement temporarily to replace Sen. John McCain after his death. He then left after four months, creating the opening for Gov. Doug Ducey to name McSally to the seat after her election defeat.

As a military officer, McSally was discouraged from political activity for much of her adult life, which kept her from developing a clear unifying ideology. Unlike some politicians who may be comfortable describing themselves as limited government Republicans, constitutionalists, social conservatives, Reaganites, or populists, she pushes back against any label. But she says she does have a general set of values to help guide her.

“I grew up in a Republican family of New England,” she said. “My uncle was actually the Republican mayor of Cranston, Rhode Island and ran for governor. But I grew up with values that I think have formed and shaped me like many of us.”

Among those were support for a strong national defense, freedom, equal opportunity, personal responsibility, and what she termed “limited, but working, appropriate government.” She says, “Where it’s supposed to be working, it should be functional and efficient.”

McSally’s lack of adherence to an overarching philosophy has attracted criticism among conservatives, who take issue with her votes dating back to her career in the House to raise the debt limit and unravel spending limits that were established by the 2011 debt ceiling deal. She has been a member of centrist Republican groups, including the informal Tuesday Group when serving in the House and also as part of the Republican Mainstream Partnership.

“As veterans we’re action oriented,” she says. “I’m here to actually do something, not to bloviate, not to score political points and play the theatrics … Our mindset as veterans generally is, ‘What can we get done? What can we get done in this mission?’ So I take that mindset here. ‘What can we get done on this topic, whatever it is?’ So I think in a lot of ways I’m probably a little too practical for this line of work based on a lot of what I see. But I stay grounded in what’s in the art of the possible.”

Though she voted in favor of the 2017 House bill to repeal parts of Obamacare and replace them, she did not want to go as far as many conservatives in uprooting the law.

As a result of voting for partial repeal, she was hammered in her 2018 Senate campaign for wanting to rip away healthcare for those with preexisting medical ailments. While the 2017 bill itself explicitly kept requirements that insurers cover people with preexisting conditions, it made other changes to Obamacare that critics argued would have ultimately undermined coverage. Ahead of the election, she told Sean Hannity, “I’m getting my ass kicked” for the vote as a result of Democrats misrepresenting what the bill meant for those with preexisting conditions. Exit polls showed that 42% of voters in the Senate race said healthcare was the most important issue — far higher than any other single issue — and McSally lost those voters by 57 points.

Asked about the issue now, she’s careful to steer clear of embracing the word “repeal.” Instead, she is emphasizing the importance of coverage for those with preexisting conditions. “I disagree with the approach that the Affordable Care Act took in order to solve it, but it was a very real problem, and the reality is we’re never going back to where somebody who has a preexisting condition is going to be denied health insurance,” she says. “We’re never going back there.”

McSally says she supports efforts to bring more options to the insurance market, such as association health plans that enable people in similar businesses to band together and purchase coverage as a large group. She draws a distinction between health insurance and healthcare and argues that there are ways to harness technological innovation to improve price transparency and reduce costs.

McSally’s comments demonstrate disagreement among Republicans on healthcare in the post-Obamacare world, as many conservatives continue to advocate full repeal, while centrists, McSally among them, are wary of too much disruption. After running to repeal and replace Obamacare for four straight elections from 2010 to 2016, failing to coalesce around an alternative when they had a chance in 2017, then getting pummeled on preexisting conditions in 2018, Republicans are struggling to find their footing. As Democrats move toward embracing socialized health insurance, Republicans in competitive races are steering clear of sweeping pledges of root and branch repeal of Obamacare or of a large-scale overhaul of the healthcare system.

“The analogy I would use is we’re landing an airliner, not a helicopter, and we need to make sure that we’re not responsible for massive disruptions because we’re philosophically trying to move toward something different,” she says.

McSally was also reluctant to lay out any specific reforms she would support to overhaul entitlements. With annual budget deficits returning to $1 trillion and a longer-term debt crisis threatening the nation’s future, Republicans under Trump have largely abandoned efforts to get spending under control.

“I can’t speak to those longer-term trends because I wasn’t here very long,” she tells me when I ask her about the nation’s fiscal course. “I was serving in the military during a lot of the trends. You guys who are wonks can study those trends. From my view, my perspective is this: It is a math issue, and we need in a bipartisan way to figure out how to get us to a place where we can sustain these important programs like Social Security, Medicare. If you look at the mandatory spending, that’s where the trajectory is for spending. It’s not for discretionary spending, and a lot of what is driving that is the underlying cost of healthcare, in my view.”

McSally concedes that she didn’t come to politics with much of a background in healthcare but says she has now spent years “listening to the thought leaders and studying and reading up” on it. She is much more comfortable in discussing national security matters.

As with domestic issues, McSally doesn’t want to associate her foreign policy views with any particular philosophical framework such as neoconservatism or non-interventionism. But her decades of military service, including an extensive period in the Middle East, shaped her views on how and when America should use force.

She says that when considering security problems, she asks a series of questions: “What are our vital national interests? And what are we trying to achieve? And what elements of power are best used to achieve those?” Those tools could be diplomatic, economic, or, if necessary, military.

McSally was part of the team that worked on early planning for the air assault on Afghanistan, so she’s intimately familiar with the war there.

“Eighteen years later, what was our vital national objective in Afghanistan?” she asks. “Well, we had the Taliban government who were harboring al Qaeda, allowing them to train and prepare and organize so that they could fly airplanes into the Twin Towers and the and Pennsylvania, killing thousands of our people. And isn’t it in our national interest to make sure that never happens again?”

“In the case of Afghanistan, I really think all of the time, there’s been tremendous mission creep,” she says. “I think the objectives have been murky for way too many years, even in my own experience deploying there. Essentially, instead of trying to ensure that they’re not a safe haven for terrorist organizations who are planning to attack America, we try to bring them into being a 21st century liberal democracy … which wasn’t necessarily culturally relevant in many places or sustainable.”

As Trump discusses pulling U.S. forces out and cutting a deal with the Taliban, McSally says we need to refocus on core objectives in the region, including Pakistan, which she notes has been providing a haven for insurgents.

“I think we need to be using our diplomatic and economic national power to be engaging regionally,” she says. “We need to have a counter-terrorism force there, like we do a small presence in other places to ensure that if we see terrorist organizations that are starting to build in strength, that we take whatever action we need to do to protect our interests and protect Americans, and I think we need to hold the Afghan government accountable to provide security and opportunity for their own people.”

Like many Republicans, McSally’s views on Trump have evolved. In October 2016, running for reelection in the House, McSally joined a number of prominent Republicans in condemning him after the release of the Access Hollywood tape in which he boasted of grabbing women. “Trump’s comments are disgusting,” she tweeted. “Joking about sexual assault is unacceptable. I’m appalled.” Yet two years later, ahead of the 2018 Senate election, she appeared on stage with Trump at a campaign rally. In her 2017-2018 term in the House, she voted with Trump nearly 97% of the time and has so far voted with him 91% of the time in the Senate.

In a post-mortem memo published by the Washington Post, McSally campaign officials said of her election defeat that a segment of Arizona Republicans was “outright hostile” to Trump. Moderate Republicans, particularly women, were a hard nut to crack, the memo said, due to McSally’s embrace of Trump and Brett Kavanaugh. Trump has already endorsed her for reelection in 2020.

As with Republican candidates in most competitive seats, the Trump phenomenon is difficult to navigate because he’s still popular among a huge swathe of Republicans, even as he turns off other groups of voters, especially suburban women who are crucial in the populous Maricopa County, which includes the Phoenix area. As former Republican Sen. Jeff Flake showed, becoming an outspoken critic of Trump can erode one’s standing with the party’s voters without making up for it in support among other groups. Like most Republicans, McSally has learned to make her peace with Trump, trying to emphasize areas of agreement.

Trump began his presidency relatively popular in Arizona, but now more Arizonans oppose him (50%) than support him (46%), according to Morning Consult. That’s a net swing of 24 points from the start of his presidency, when he had a 55% approval rating in the state and just 35% disapproval. An August survey from Predictive Insights found McSally trailing her likely Democratic opponent, Kelly, by 5 points.

She’ll have to fend off a primary challenge from the conservative McCarthy first. She’ll have more things going for her in the primary this time, including Trump’s endorsement, as well as the backing of one of her 2018 primary opponents, Kelli Ward, who is now chairing the state Republican Party. But at a minimum, it’s an additional headache that will make it harder to focus immediately on Kelly.

Looking ahead to the race, she says that having more time to campaign than she did in 2018 will help, as will having the chance to use her time in office to prove she can be an effective senator.

“Yes, I realize 2020 is important,” she says. “Yes, I realize we’re probably ground zero for the Senate majority and the firewall in the direction of our country. I think the best thing that I can do right now is be a good senator.

“My view is this could be the last two years of my life, and I don’t mean that in a morbid way. But having lost my dad, I try to hold everything as a gift. So, what can I do to be a good senator? We were all over the place. I’ve done [in the] first 90 days a 15-county tour. We’re tirelessly out around the state. We’re listening to people, and I’m getting legislative things passed. Even in this crazy environment, we’ve still had a lot of big wins so far in land exchanges, the drought contingency plan, the annual defense bill, and we’ve got a lot more that we can get done.” She also notes under the radar issues, such as bringing federal judges to Yuma and Flagstaff so litigants won’t have to take long treks to have their cases heard. “It doesn’t end up on the evening news, but it really impacts those communities.”

Ultimately, though, she expects the 2020 race will end up becoming nationalized as a campaign about staying the course or lurching toward socialism.

“[Democrats] are veering so far left that what they are talking about right now is out of touch with mainstream Arizonans, out of touch with moderate, independent, and moderate Republican Arizonans,” McSally says. “I am a suburban college-educated woman. I mean, that’s my constituency. These are my people.”

She says, “We’ll have a big fight in front of us, I think, nationally, as to what direction the country wants to go in. Is it a referendum on socialism, or is this a referendum on freedom?”

She continues, “I think if we are running on a ticket about the direction of the country, whether we want to kind of keep it going in this direction, unrolling regulations, lowering taxes, securing the borders, supporting our military, disrupting some things which I think that need to be disrupted. Or, we’re talking about the government takeover of healthcare and open borders and the Green Bad Deal and all the crazy stuff that they’re advocating on the Left.”

If this is the fight, she says, “Bring it on.”

Philip Klein is the executive editor of the Washington Examiner.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story was modified to correct the town in which Martha McSally’s uncle served as mayor and to add details on her fight to change the Pentagon’s policy on wearing of body covering in Saudi Arabia.