AZ-SEN: In Supreme Court Fight, McSally Sees a Chance to Reboot Her Senate Campaign
Shortly after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, people close to Senator Martha McSally, the imperiled Arizona Republican, began calling in to offer their advice.
The former fighter pilot already had a flight plan: bombs away.
“Come on, this is why I’m in the Senate,” Ms. McSally told a Republican ally — before quickly sending out a tweet that made her among the first elected Republicans to support President Trump’s plan to push through a Supreme Court nominee before the election.
Her celerity reflected her reality: Ms. McSally (who also expressed her condolences to Justice Ginsburg’s family) badly needed a reboot after months spent trailing her Democratic challenger, Mark Kelly, in the polls and in fund-raising totals, and this was it, in an any-news-is-good-news kind of way.
Now, as Mr. Trump’s pick for the court, Judge Amy Coney Barrett, meets with senators ahead of a confirmation battle this month, the political consequences of that fight have become a plot twist in a race that has largely been going against Ms. McSally.
In the days after Justice Ginsburg’s death, Mr. Kelly and other Democrats saw huge spikes in their online fund-raising, while Ms. McSally and other Republicans saw more modest bumps. But the impact of the Barrett nomination will probably be contingent on the tenor of the televised Judiciary Committee hearings, set to begin Oct. 12, and whether Republicans are seen as unfairly handling the process and whether Democrats are seen as overreaching in fighting Judge Barrett.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/01/us/politics/martha-mcsally-supreme-court.html?referringSource=articleShare
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