The heavyweight political fight between Republican U.S. Sen. Martha McSally and Democratic challenger Mark Kelly is expected to be one of the most intense and expensive contests in the nation this year.
The two candidates have already combined to raise almost $71.6 million, roughly $28 million more than any other race in Arizona history, and they are on pace to easily set a new state record for spending as well.
First, though, McSally must fend off a primary challenge from Phoenix-area businessman Daniel McCarthy, who is trying to appeal to Republicans who don’t think Arizona’s junior senator is conservative enough.
So far, the two candidates in the Aug. 4 Republican primary are behaving as you might expect them to. The upstart McCarthy has publicly challenged McSally to a debate and accused her of ducking him. Meanwhile, the heavily favored incumbent has scarcely acknowledged that her challenger exists.
In a July 9 Arizona Republic story, McCarthy called McSally’s unwillingness to debate him “disgraceful, distasteful and frankly presumptuous.” The McSally camp responded by not responding at all to the Republic’s request for comment.
“She’s really in general election mode,” said University of Arizona political science professor Barbara Norrander.
A spokeswoman for the McSally campaign said she was not available for an interview for this story.
McCarthy could not be reached. Email, text and phone messages left for him through his campaign website and the phone number he provided to the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office were not returned.
According to his campaign website, the 35-year-old McCarthy and his wife, Elexsis, are “serial entrepreneurs” and free-market capitalists best known for their real estate business and popular cosmetic removal product, The Original MakeUp Eraser.
McCarthy was born and raised in upstate New York and moved to Arizona after high school.
Among his key issues, he says he firmly supports President Trump’s border wall and efforts to restrict travel to the U.S. from a host of majority-Muslim countries.
McCarthy wants to eliminate the federal Department of Education and see abortion outlawed.
He’s also big into gun rights and opposes efforts to regulate guns, including so-called “red flag laws” that allow authorities to temporarily confiscate firearms from people deemed dangerous. On some of McCarthy’s “Demand Daniel” campaign signs, the L at the end of his first name has been replaced with a semiautomatic handgun.
That could make things interesting this fall should McCarthy pull a massive upset on Aug. 4.
Two leading gun control groups, Moms Demand Action and Everytown for Gun Safety, have endorsed Kelly and announced plans to target McSally as part of a roughly $60 million campaign to elect what they call “gun-sense candidates” nationwide.
The winner in November will serve until January 2023, completing the remainder of Sen. John McCain’s final term.
Norrander said it is not surprising that McCarthy is framing himself as a more conservative option to McSally, despite her strong allegiance to Trump in recent years.
Within the GOP, “any candidate who would be challenging her would be running from the right,” Norrander said.
During McSally’s 2018 bid for Arizona’s other Senate seat, she had to fight off two hardline Republicans, Kelli Ward and Joe Arpaio, before losing to Democrat Kyrsten Sinema in the general election.
A month later, Gov. Doug Ducey appointed McSally to fill the vacancy left by McCain’s death.
Her Senate committee appointments now include Armed Services, Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, Energy and Natural Resources, Indian Affairs, and the Special Committee on Aging.
McSally, 54, is a graduate of the Air Force Academy, the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and the U.S. Air War College. She served two terms in the House of Representatives from Arizona’s 2nd District before making her first Senate run.
The retired Air Force colonel and first woman to fly a fighter jet and command a squadron in combat has her primary opponent seriously outgunned when it comes to campaign funding.
According to her latest report to the Federal Election Commission, McSally has already raised over $28 million and spent over $18 million, leaving her with close to $11 million in available cash.
By contrast, McCarthy is running a much smaller, mostly self-funded campaign. Of the just over $380,000 he had raised as of June 30, all but about $56,000 came from him.
As of the end of last month, FEC records showed the McCarthy campaign with less than $24,000 cash on hand.
Norrander said the fact that the makeup cloth mogul is paying for so much of his campaign himself could be a sign that he’s struggling to connect with voters.
“Raising money kind of proves that a candidate has a lot of support out there,” she said.
Norrander expects McSally to easily make it past McCarthy. The only real question is what her margin of victory will be.
As for whether the primary contest will help or hurt McSally’s chances in November, Norrander expects any impact either way to be small.
“She will be able to claim victory, but I don’t know how many people will be paying attention,” Norrander said of the primary. “It will be a two-day story, that’s about it, and a lot of it will probably be about how long it takes to count the vote.”
