MESA, Ariz. ― If Donald Trump loses Arizona next month, he can probably thank, yet again, his own insults and disparagement of state icon John McCain over the past decade.
The longtime U.S. senator and onetime Republican presidential nominee, who died of brain cancer six years ago, retains a loyal following of old-line Republican voters, many of whom flipped to support President Joe Biden four years ago, making him the first Democrat to win the state since Bill Clinton in 1996.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign appears to believe she has a good chance of repeating Biden’s victory. Harris; her husband, Doug Emhoff; running mate Tim Walz; and first lady Jill Biden are swarming the state, where early voting began Wednesday.
And unlike 2016 and 2020, when Democratic nominees Hillary Clinton and Biden attracted Republican support more or less organically, the 2024 Democratic effort has an organized operation specifically to persuade Republicans in Arizona, particularly fans of McCain, to affirmatively vote for Harris.
“There’s nothing more conservative than putting country over party,” Emhoff told several dozen Republicans for Harris volunteers who were gathered Tuesday afternoon ahead of an evening of phone banking, using the phrase McCain himself used as Harris’ campaign seeks GOP votes across the country.
“Our democracy, our Constitution, our rule of law, our very way of life, our economic future, our freedoms. This is all on the line, and you all recognize that. And it’s not enough to just say you’re not going to support Donald Trump. That’s not good enough,” Emhoff said.
Introducing Emhoff in the single-story home in a new subdivision of the sprawling suburb was the mayor of Mesa, John Giles, who this summer was among a half dozen Republicans, including former Trump White House staffers, to appear in prime time at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Hours earlier in his City Hall office overlooking the site where Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance was scheduled to appear the following day, Giles acknowledged that although a number of Republican voters might be persuaded not to vote in the presidential race at all, it was considerably more difficult to get them to actively vote for Harris.
“Part of my message in participating in the campaign is to persuade people not to reach that conclusion,” Giles said. “There’s a reluctance to then finish the job. If you don’t want him to be president, it’s not enough to not vote for him. You have to vote for Harris, and Harris is an acceptable alternative.”
The Trump campaign did not respond to HuffPost queries, although it did appear to respond to Harris’ blitz of the state by scheduling appearances for both Vance and Trump, who is holding a rally Sunday in Prescott.
Public polling shows Trump enjoying a slim lead of a few percentage points in the state.
At her news conference earlier in the week, Trump acolyte, fellow election denier and GOP Senate nominee Kari Lake disputed that Harris’ appeal ― amplified by the likes of Giles, former Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake and McCain’s son Jimmy McCain, who have all also endorsed Harris ― was resonating with Arizona Republicans.
“I don’t think it’s resonating. I think this is not true. I mean, you see a few people who are saying they are Republicans supporting Kamala Harris, but then if you look at their voting record, they’ve been with Joe Biden. They’re still calling themselves a Republican, but they really haven’t voted Republican for a number of years,” she said. “So I just don’t believe that narrative. And I’m looking at data showing that President Trump’s doing really well with Republicans. As am I.”
Nine Years Of Insults
Trump’s displeasure with McCain began at the start of his first presidential run when he declared that undocumented immigrants from Mexico were “rapists” and “drug dealers.” McCain, who had long championed a more compassionate immigration policy, denounced the remark, and Trump lashed out by accusing McCain, a former Navy pilot who spent nearly six years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, of having abandoned veterans.
The accusation, like many lobbed by Trump, had no basis in reality.
Weeks later, at an Iowa gathering of evangelical voters, Trump rejected the notion that McCain was a “war hero” by dint of his Vietnam service record. “He’s not a war hero,” said Trump, who dodged that war by claiming he had bone spurs. “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”
Though the insult angered veterans across the country, it cut even more deeply in Arizona.
“If Trump loses Arizona, it will be because of McCain Republicans,” said Frank Luntz, the Republican messaging consultant who as moderator of that 2015 Iowa event had elicited Trump’s response.
In the November 2016 election, McCain won his sixth six-year term by 13 percentage points while Trump defeated Clinton by only 3½ points. McCain had received 107,000 more votes than had Trump.
Trump’s unhappiness with McCain continued as president. McCain criticized Trump’s “Muslim ban” and, later that year, the president’s public praise of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. The following year, when Trump pushed a repeal of predecessor Barack Obama’s legacy health care law despite having no workable replacement at the ready, McCain returned to the Senate following his terminal brain cancer diagnosis and cast the deciding vote that killed the legislation.
Trump took McCain’s no vote as a personal rebuke, repeatedly criticizing him, even after McCain’s death on Aug. 25, 2018.
While the rest of official Washington mourned McCain, Trump went golfing at his club in northern Virginia. Two weeks earlier, at a bill signing in Fort Drum, New York, of the annual defense bill, he refused to use the legislation’s full name, even though Congress had gone out its way to title it the John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act.
Later, Trump complained that he was getting criticized for his treatment of McCain. “I gave him the kind of funeral he wanted, which as president I had to approve,” Trump said, falsely, during a 2019 visit to a tank factory in Ohio. “I don’t care about this, I didn’t get a thank you. That’s OK. We sent him on the way. But I wasn’t a fan of John McCain.”
In fact, the Defense Department had not required Trump’s approval for the use of a military plane to transport McCain’s body to Washington.
“Too many Republicans in Arizona consider themselves McCain Republicans and resented how insulting Trump was around McCain’s death,” Luntz said.
Even today, as he runs for president, Trump has continued to attack McCain for having voted against the repeal of Obamacare, as the health care law is known. In Iowa in January, Trump even mocked the injuries McCain received in Vietnam ― some from torture at the hands of his captors ― that prevented him from raising his arms over his head.
“John McCain, for some reason, couldn’t get his arm up that day, remember?” Trump said, and then mimicked the thumbs-down signal McCain had given to vote against the repeal bill back in 2017.
Revenge From The Grave
In the dining room of a fellow Republican for Harris member on Tuesday, volunteers Julie Spilsbury, Rachel Albertsen and Annie Lewis are gathered around the dining table. Each has been given a list of names of registered Republicans whom the campaign believes could be persuaded to vote for Harris next month, preferably early or by mail.
Spilsbury, Albertsen and Lewis’ job is to do that persuading.
“I plugged my nose and voted for Trump in 2016. I could not vote for him in 2020,” said Spilsbury, who is 47 and a City Council member in Mesa. “It was hard. That’s the first time I voted Democrat.”
She said many of those she calls have a similar fear of breaking from the Republican tribe and tell her they are not willing to post a yard sign or speak out publicly but agree with her and will cast a ballot for Harris, even though they ― like Spilsbury ― disagree with the Democratic nominee on many of her policies.
“I think our country can get over bad policy, and it can’t get over bad character,” Spilsbury said.
That the support of these “McCain Republicans” could be determinative in November has the history of 2020 on its side.
Former McCain aides Wes Gullett and Bettina Nava said that Biden had clearly benefited from the deep dislike many Arizona Republicans continue to feel toward Trump.
In the legislative district where McCain lived for years, in the northern suburbs of Phoenix, Democrat Christine Marsh eked out a 497-vote win over Republican incumbent Kate McGee on Nov. 3, 2020. Those same voters favored Biden by 14,766 votes over Trump, who at the time was president. That margin was nearly 1½ times the size of Biden’s 10,457-vote victory statewide.
Gullett warned that Harris had two major challenges that Biden had not faced: She is a woman, and she is from California. Misogyny remains real, he said, as does the distrust many Arizonans feel toward their neighbors to the west.
“If Kamala Harris was from Denver, she’d be winning by 5 points,” he said.
On the other hand, Trump’s attempted coup leading up to and on Jan. 6, 2021, and his subsequent demand that the Constitution be terminated and that he be reinstalled into office deeply offend a great many conservative Republicans.
“The Constitution, and the idea that anybody would say that they were going to suspend the Constitution, is a fundamental deal breaker for a lot of people,” he said.
Nava said Harris also has the advantage of anger over the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade, which has galvanized women across the state, including many Republican women, into preferring Harris and other Democrats. “In the Republican women’s circles that I’m in, that has been critically important,” she said
Giles said he cannot predict whether Harris can replicate Biden’s win and is not willing to try.
“I don’t have a prediction. I mean, I do,” he said. “My prediction is that we’re going to work really hard to get out the vote. The people that are registered are the people that are registered. And the campaign that wins in Arizona will be the one that gets out the vote. And so we just need to energize people.”
