On Friday, Republican Sen. Jon Kyl announced that he would resign on Dec. 31, a tenure of just 119 days. Kyl’s departure ahead of the new year was widely anticipated ever since Gov. Doug Ducey appointed him in early September to fill the seat of the late John McCain, though Kyl had at times suggested he might stick for the full two years. Ducey will now appoint a second replacement who will be able to run in the November 2020 special election with two years of incumbency under their belt. Whoever wins that race two years from now will then be up for a full six-year term in 2022.
So who will Ducey choose this time around? Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his allies have reportedly been trying to persuade the governor to appoint outgoing Rep. Martha McSally, who lost this year’s Senate race to Democrat Kyrsten Sinema by a 50-48 margin. However, the Washington Post wrote last month that some members of Ducey’s inner circle had some doubts about this plan, and on Thursday―hours before Kyl made his departure public―the paper reported that, while McSally remains a finalist, Ducey has apparently “lost enthusiasm” about picking her.
Reporter Sean Sullivan wrote back in November that McSally skeptics griped that she didn't do a better job utilizing opposition research about Sinema's past as an anti-war organizer and a member of the Green Party. They also complained that McSally distanced herself too much from McCain, who is utterly despised by Donald Trump but has his fans among swing voters. McSally’s detractors also argued that her decision to run as a Trump loyalist also caused her problems in November.
A few weeks ago, McSally pushed back on the perception that she’d dropped the ball, providing the Post with a copy of a post-election memo in which her strategists blamed her defeat on circumstances largely beyond her control. These included Trump's unpopularity among moderate Republicans; an expensive GOP primary that concluded just over two months before Election Day; and a big spending edge for Sinema and her allies.
However, Sullivan now writes that this memo badly backfired with Ducey, who’s now the only person who gets a vote on whether to send McSally to the Senate. Some national Republicans and members of the governor’s inner circle felt that McSally wasn’t owning up to her own mistakes and was trying to deflect the blame for her loss. Arizona GOP donor Dan Eberhart even told the paper that there was “momentum building for an anybody-but-McSally appointment among the Arizona donor community.”
However, McSally still has her allies. McConnell continues to push for her appointment: The Arizona Republic’s Yvonne Wingett Sanchez writes that GOP donors “spent millions of dollars McSally's election effort and likely want to see that investment pay dividends.” But while these fat cats may be afflicted with a serious case of the sunk cost fallacy, perhaps the best argument for McSally is that there aren’t a lot of obvious alternative candidates who could quickly organize for what will be a competitive 2020 general election campaign. McSally, for all her faults, is a strong fundraiser who has experience running statewide.
Still, she’s far from the only Republican Ducey might appoint. Sullivan writes that one person Ducey is seriously considering is Kirk Adams, who just resigned as his chief of staff. Adams is a former state House speaker who narrowly lost a 2012 primary for Arizona’s 5th District to Matt Salmon, but he has never run statewide.