November 12, 2018

Kyrsten Sinema Just Officially Beat Martha McSally to Be Arizona’s Next Senator

This is the second Democratic pick up in the Senate.

Matt York/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

On Monday night, Democratic Rep. Kyrsten Sinema officially defeated Republican Rep. Martha McSally to be Arizona’s next senator. The campaign to replace retiring Republican Sen. Jeff Flake proved incredibly tight and put the country on edge over the past week; on election night, McSally had the lead and it looked like she might win, but a week of continued counting ultimately gave Sinema the edge. She will be the state’s first female senator, and her win marks a significant victory for Democrats in a battleground state that President Donald Trump narrowly won two years ago. 

McSally, a former fighter pilot, called Sinema to concede the race on Monday, thanking supporters in a video on Twitter. 

Notably, since Election Day, McSally has not followed the lead of other Republicans in Arizona and across the country who have been making allegations of voter fraud, as the party has seen its leads shrink or as races have been forced into recounts. As Politico reported, “Top officials with the White House and Republican National Committee, who’ve been prodding the McSally campaign to amp up its efforts, have expressed frustration that the Arizona congresswoman hasn’t tried to drive a message that there’s something amiss with the vote count.” McSally’s lack of participation didn’t stop President Trump from alleging fraud: 

Throughout the campaign, both candidates appeared uncomfortable with their place in their respective parties. McSally had rejected Trump in the final weeks of the 2016 election, though she has embraced his platform over the past two years. (It was McSally who told her colleagues during the push to repeal the Affordable Care Act to get the “fucking thing” done.) But she refused to ever say who she had voted for for president.

Sinema, for her part, moved hard to the center from her early days as a progressive firebrand in the state legislature. This year, she declined to endorse the Democratic nominee for governor, David Garcia, and in the closing days of the race, backed Trump’s decision to move 5,000 troops to the southern border.

For such a marquee race, it was waged, in the end, with smoke and mirrors. McSally declined to say she’d make abortion a litmus test for Supreme Court nominees, and Sinema waited until the last minute to say she’d vote against Brett Kavanaugh. McSally and her allies tarred Sinema—in the face of all evidence to the contrary—as a socialist radical and hammered the Democrat’s opposition to the war in Iraq. When Sinema hammered McSally over her vote to roll back protections for people with pre-existing conditions, McSally simply lied and said she never did.

Arizona proved a winnable race for Democrats, and they’ll get another chance soon enough to try to solidify their gains; the special election for the seat formerly held by John McCain is coming up in 2020.

Listen to our reporters explain the on-going tussle over every vote in key battleground states, on this week’s episode of the Mother Jones Podcast:

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate