As Arizona Moves Towards The Center, The State Republican Party-- Rightly Blamed For The Pandemic-- Moves Further And Further Right

On Saturday, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey gave Arizona a present: 3,740 new cases of COVID-19 (and, a bonus: another 144 COVID-deaths, the highest of any state reported on Saturday). Yesterday, Governor Ducey added another 1,973 new cases and today another 1,813, bringing the state total to 163,827. That's 22,508 cases per million Arizonans. Using that metric-- cases per million residents-- Arizona is doing worse than any country in Europe. In fact the only countries in the world doing worse than Arizona are Qatar, a nation filled with slaves, and French Guiana, a sparely-populated, swampy prison colony. Of the half dozen U.S. states with numbers anything like Arizona's two, New York and New Jersey, have the pandemic under control-- at least for now. The other 4 are in deep trouble with drastically worsening numbers:

• Louisiana- 23,644 cases per million Louisianans
• New York- 22,642 cases per million New Yorkers
• Arizona- 22,508 cases per million Arizonans
• New Jersey- 20,913 cases per million Jerseyites
• Florida- 20,149 cases per million Floridians
• Mississippi- 17,794 cases per million Mississippians

Ducey believes in Trump, not science and he was very consistent in following his beliefs when it came tp confronting the pandemic, which explains why Arizona is worse-hit than almost anywhere else on Planet Earth. Sure, there are worse elements in the Arizona politisphere than Doug Ducey... but she isn't going to win an election to anything... except to lead the GOP. I'm talking about a mentally deranged former state Senator, Kelli Ward, who primaried John McCain and was defeated with 39% of the vote, primaried Jeff Flake/Martha McSally and lost again, this time with 28%. A fringe extremist, she then ran for the Republican Party chair and won it, in a 3-way race, with 51.7%. The state is changing drastically but Arizona Republicans still love their fringe extremists. And, yes, she is much, much crazier than Doug Ducey.

In her much-read piece for The Atlantic over the weekend, How To Lose A Swing State, Elaine Godfrey reported that pretty much everything has gone wrong for the GOP in Arizona since Ducey and Ward have risen to prominence and that "One might think that, in its moment of peril, the Arizona GOP would attempt to win over moderates. Yet the person charged with shepherding the party to victory in this most crucial moment is the state GOP chairperson Kelli Ward, a pro-Trump zealot with a soft spot for conspiracy theories... Just as polls show Arizonans-- especially those in the suburbs-- souring on Trump, the state party has veered sharply to the right." Not the state; the state party.

During her time as a state senator representing parts of the ultra-red La Paz and Mohave Counties in northwest Arizona, Ward paid a visit to Cliven Bundy’s Nevada ranch in solidarity with the rancher’s standoff against the Bureau of Land Management; suggested that the Affordable Care Act was part of a broader plot to push rural Americans into urban areas; and entertained constituent concerns about the chemtrail conspiracy theory, the idea that the government is using airplanes to poison American citizens. In 2016, during her Tea Party–style challenge to McCain, Ward defended Trump’s attacks on the senator’s experience as a prisoner of war. Later, in a primary bid against McSally, Ward made national headlines for suggesting that the McCain family had deliberately timed an announcement about the senator’s brain cancer to damage her campaign. (She lost both primary elections-- badly.)





But as Republicans nationwide began to embrace Trumpism, Ward moved from the fringes of the party to its center. She was elected the state party’s chair in 2019, and has since used her perch primarily to help wage the president’s wars. Most recently, Ward, who is a family physician with a master’s degree in public health, made headlines for encouraging protesters planning to demonstrate against local stay-at-home orders to dress like health-care workers. She and her husband, Mike, an ER doctor, appear regularly on Facebook Live to discuss “fake news” and the tyranny of mask laws, while sipping coffee out of bright-red Trump mugs. In the past month alone, Ward has tweeted warnings about the threat of “antifa,” compared the New York Times to the devil, and shared multiple videos of Black teenagers fighting and looting stores.

But now that Arizona’s political sands are shifting, Ward’s leadership is damaging the Republican cause, her critics in the party told me. As presidential candidates, Republicans McCain and Mitt Romney each won the state by nine percentage points; Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016 by just four points. For the past few months, Biden has been leading the president in the polls here, and unaffiliated Arizona voters, who typically swing right, are overwhelmingly supportive of Kelly in his race against Trump-endorsed McSally, according to Mike Noble, the chief of research at OH Predictive Insights, an Arizona-based nonpartisan research firm.

This is partly because of the state’s changing demographics: The Latino population, which makes up part of the Democrats’ base in Arizona, has grown, and more left-leaning young people are settling in red states. But the most important shift has been the leftward movement of suburban voters. Maricopa County, which covers the Phoenix area and accounts for 60 percent of all votes cast in the state, has been rapidly trending away from Republicans in the past few years. Barack Obama lost here by 11 points in 2012, but four years later, Trump defeated Clinton by just three points. In 2018, Sinema won Maricopa County 51 to 47 percent.

Perhaps unaware that Sinema, former chair of the Blue Dog caucus, was the single most right-wing Democrat in the House-- and is currently the Senate Dem with the most Republican-like voting record-- Godfrey referred to her win as part of a "leftward shift." There is a Demographic shift in Arizona-- more Latinos-- and there is the Trump factor, but hardly a leftward shift. Sinema has nothing to do with the left-- and neither does Biden; both are creatures of the right, although Sinema is, perhaps more so than even Ward, certifiably insane and not wedded to any ideology at all. Godfrey continued that no one wins "a statewide race in Arizona without keeping a tight grip on affluent Republicans, GOP women, and the unaffiliated voters who make up roughly one-third of the electorate, said the Arizona-based Republican strategist Chuck Coughlin-- and those are the exact voters whom the president and his ilk have alienated. 'Trump has changed everything,' Grant Woods, the former Arizona attorney general, told me. Woods was a lifelong Republican who once served as McCain’s chief of staff, but after Trump’s election, Woods reregistered as a Democrat. He’s observed a growing gap between Republican voters and their elected officials in the party and believes that gap has been stretched further by people like Ward. If Republicans 'want to double and triple down on Trumpism, then she’s perfect,' Woods said. But 'she is exactly the wrong person to be the party chairman for the Republicans if they want to have a future in the state of Arizona.' ... Jeff Flake, the former Arizona senator who retired in 2019, echoed Woods’s concerns. It’s 'tremendously damaging,' for moderates and independents to see 'virtually every Republican officeholder on stage with the president laughing at his jokes, looking at their shoes while he demeans their colleagues,' he told me. And attracting interest in the local party is difficult when the only issues discussed at precinct meetings are 'the deep state or immigration or the latest conspiracy theory.'"

The coronavirus pandemic has made a bad situation much worse for Republicans. Voters in poll after poll have been unimpressed by Trump’s handling of the crisis, and Republicans in Arizona have faced similar scrutiny: Cases of the virus surged after Governor Doug Ducey took early action to reopen the state in mid-May. In June, Arizona had the highest infection rate in the country. This spike in cases corresponded with a 13 percent increase in Arizonans reporting that the state was going in the wrong direction, according to OH Predictive Insights. Yet all the while, Ward, like Trump, has been encouraging opposition to stay-at-home orders, and dismissing mask wearing as “virtue signaling” on her daily live-stream. This has been a major turnoff to an important part of the Republican electorate, Flake said. “Suburban women and Millennials have been walking away from the party for a while. In many ways, they’re in a dead sprint now.”





Some on the right, however, dispute moderates’ diagnosis of their party’s problems. These Republicans-- best described as pro-Trump populists-- believe that the state GOP has not embraced the president enough. Steve Slaton, who runs a store in Show Low selling Trump-themed merchandise, feels that Ward, in her capacity as chairperson, has been too supportive of McSally in the primary, giving her an unfair advantage over Daniel McCarthy, her more populist opponent. Ward “got sucked into the whole McCainite-controlled party apparatus,” Slaton told me. Jennifer Esposito, a former state-committee member from Mohave County, campaigned for Ward back in 2019. “We thought as chairman she would be willing to go against the establishment,” Esposito said. “She appears now to be a sellout.”

Ward’s job, in other words, has in some ways become an impossible one. It’s unclear, at this point, whether there is anything she can do differently to change her party’s trajectory. It’s possible-- even likely-- that, come November, Arizona will turn blue. That sort of change has happened before. In 2000, Republicans controlled the Virginia state government; they held both of the state’s Senate seats, and they’d just given its electoral votes to a Republican presidential candidate. But Democrats made huge gains in the suburbs, the state GOP moved to the right instead of moderating, and by 2019, Democrats had turned the tables completely. “Unless something big changes between now and the middle of October,” this will happen in Arizona too, said Larry Sabato, the director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.

If it does, Woods, the former attorney general and lifelong Republican, told me he’ll be relieved. “I want ’em all to go,” he said. “I hope the Republican party regroups and starts over.”

Remember When Arizona Used To Be The Reddest State In America? Trump Has Changed That

Arizona Governor Doug Ducey has done a bad job for his state in confronting the pandemic and the chickens are starting to come home to roost. Ducey chose to listen to Trump instead of the medical professionals and Arizona is headed for a tough Wave II. Yesterday there were 396 new cases reported, bringing the total caseload to 14,566 (704 deaths). The state crossed the 2,000 cases per million line, a bad omen for a state rushing willy-nilly to re-open.

Yesterday Arizona's premier polling firm, OH Predictive Insights, headquartered in Phoenix, released a new survey that is devastating for the ArizonaRepublican Party. Headline" Arizona Visit Does Nothing to Boost Trump Fortunes in Arizona. Overall, Señor Trumpanzee is trailing Biden by 7 points.

"Trump," they wrote, "visited a Honeywell factory in early May. However, the president is stuck at 43 percent for the third OHPI poll in a row. Conversely, Former Vice President Biden continues to hover near the 50 percent level for the third straight poll. 'President Trump is going to have to do a lot more than parachute into Arizona to boost his sagging numbers,' said OHPI Chief of Research, Mike Noble. 'With six months to go until Election Day, Trump is going to have to invest heavily in Arizona to pull out a victory in The Grand Canyon State.'"

Although the margin between the two candidates shrunk by two points since April’s AZPOP poll of the race, the share of supporters who say they support Trump remains unchanged at 43 percent. The narrowing of the race comes from Joe Biden falling from 52 percent support in April to 50 percent in May.

Looking at the electorate in terms of economic status, Donald Trump is performing best among middle-income voters. He is statistically tied with Joe Biden among those making between $50k and $99k per year, while Biden leads by double digits among voters who make less than $50k or more than $99k.

The split among white voters of different levels of educational attainment that has been seen nationally shows itself in Arizona, too. Trump finds strength in white, non-college educated voters-- although there are signs his support among this group may not be as strong as it was when he won them in 2016. He is leading Joe Biden among non-college educated white voters by 6 points but trailing by 11 among whites who have a college degree.

Another key constituency who will play a role in deciding the winner of the 2020 election are the voters who have unfavorable views of both candidates. As it stands now, 44 percent of Arizona likely voters have favorable views of President Trump and 51 percent view Joe Biden favorably. On the other hand, 53 percent of voters view Trump unfavorably and 45 percent say the same of Joe Biden.

While the overall number of voters who have unfavorable views of both candidates is small (about 6 percent of the sample), the gap in their support is striking. More than six in ten (63%) of these voters say they would vote for Joe Biden, whereas only 6 percent say they would vote for Donald Trump.

The all-important lesser of two evils vote

"As this election heats up and negative ads from both sides pour into Arizona, the share of voters who dislike both candidates is sure to rise," says OHPI data analyst Jacob Joss, "Who they end up supporting will be a determining factor come November."

And that ain't all, folks. The Arizona Republic is the biggest newspaper in the state and they had equally bad news for Ducey-appointed Senator Martha McSally, as she continues her slide towards political oblivion. Laurie Roberts: "The latest tracking poll shows Republican Sen. Martha McSally losing ground to Democrat Mark Kelly but that's not what should have her reaching for the Maalox."

From the Republican uh-oh department: Arizona Sen. Martha McSally is sliding in the polls, dropping four percentage points in a month.

McSally now trails Democrat Mark Kelly by 13 points, according to the latest tracking poll by OH Predictive Insights.

While the April poll of 600 likely voters favored Kelly 51% to McSally’s 42%, in May it’s now 51%-38%.

The poll shows independents breaking more than 2-1 for Kelly.

“McSally is doing terribly,” pollster Mike Noble told me on Monday. “There’s no way to find a bright spot on that one.”

And that’s not even the bad news for McSally.

The bad news comes from Maricopa County, where Republicans rule.

At least, they did rule, until Democrat Kyrsten Sinema defeated McSally there in 2018-- stealing 88 mostly-suburban precincts that normally would go to the Republican nominee.

McSally's declining support lies within the 4 percent margin of error in the May tracking poll, a blend of live and automated calls made between May 9 to May 11. But her Maricopa County numbers are a disaster.

In May 2019, this same tracking poll showed Kelly up over McSally, 46%-41%, among likely voters in Maricopa County.

In May 2020, Kelly has climbed to 54% in Maricopa County while McSally has dropped to 36%.

Just think about that for a moment. Kelly has gone from a five-point advantage in Maricopa County to an 18-point cruise.

That’s a stunner when you consider that Maricopa County in recent years always has gone for Republicans (well, except for now-ex-state Superintendent Diane Douglas and McSally).

More stunning still: the fact that the state's most populous county is the one place that McSally must win if she wants to hang onto that Senate seat yet she has done nothing to appeal to the independents and moderate Republican voters who likely will decide this race.

"Maricopa County is the key for Republicans winning," Noble said. "It's the key to Trump’s re-election but it’s also key for the Senate seat. Maricopa County is where the battle is at and right now it’s not going well for McSally."

I’ve never understood McSally’s strategy-- why she decided to become a Donald Trump pocket pal when it was obvious she lost in 2018 because she campaigned as a Donald Trump pocket pal.

Now she’s facing a campaign that will be solely a referendum on Trump.

Of course, the four-point drop in McSally’s numbers over the last month could be attributable to the campaign ads that are pummeling her.





The Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump conservative super PAC run in part by George Conway, began running attack ads against McSally two days before this poll went into the field. Democratic groups have been beating her up on the airwaves since last fall.

Whose approval rating, by the way, now stands at 45% in Arizona, according to the poll.

Republicans, meanwhile, have been mostly silent on the campaign front. The Senate Leadership Fund, run by allies of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, plans to spend $9.2  million to try to boost McSally but not until the fall.

Meanwhile, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, faced with possible loss of the Senate, recently pushed the panic button, announcing plans to move ahead in June with a $5.7 million ad campaign to try to save the appointed senator who now trails by double digits.

Me? I'm wondering what took them so long.

Kyl, Kavanaugh And The Slaveholder Religion

Politically, Arizona may be headed in a good direction... but it may be a very long time before it gets there. Democrats in the state-- guided by Chuck Schumer-- picked the single most conservative Trump-supporting Democrat in Congress, as their Senate nominee, Kyrsten Sinema, head of the Blue Dog Caucus. But the Republicans in Arizona are worse; all of them. And that includes Trump-hating Jeff Flake, who was originally elected to the Senate because he was the most conservative Arizona congressman.

Governor Doug Ducey is mandated to pick a Republican for John McCain's seat because McCain was a Republican. He's not mandated to pick someone like McCain though. He's appointing lobbyist-turned-senator-turned-lobbyist Jon Kyl, who will only commit to staying on for a few months because he's eager to enhance his lobbyist clout as a senator again before going back to his lobbyist career. As wretched and horrible as Kyl is-- and, believe me, he is--Ducey could have picked someone even worse: Kelli Ward, Joe Arpaio, Paul Gosar, Matt Salmon, John Shadegg... all of whom were banging on his door and all of whom are even further right than Kyl.

Complicating Ducey's decision had to have been that Kirk Adams, the Arizona House's former speaker and now Ducey's chief of staff, wants to run for the Senate seat in 2020 and if Kyl resigns before 2020, there will be huge pressure on Ducey to appoint Martha McSally-- likely to lose to Sinema in November. That will end Adams' hopes to win that seat. A whole other scenario would be that Ducey simply appoints himself to the Senate after the November election-- whether he wins or loses to Democrat David Garcia.

Kyl's first vote is likely to be on confirming Brett Kavanaugh-- an obvious conflict of interest, since he has been Kavanaugh's "sherpa" for the confirmation process. Obviously Ducey wasn't looking for a maverick, just someone to vote to confirm Kavanaugh and kill Obamacare. And a bonus in case anything comes up for Kyl's lobbying clients, Merck, Northrop Grumman, PHARMA, Raytheon and Walmart.

Miss the NY Times OpEd from Monday, The Evangelical Case Against Judge Kavanaugh? Rev Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, a Baptist minister in Durham, N.C. and author of Reconstructing the Gospel: Finding Freedom From Slaveholder Religion, wrote that his faith compels him "to challenge the way reactionary conservatives have hijacked our faith to serve their narrow interests.

Conservative evangelicals were at the White House last week for an event the Rev. Robert Jeffress described as “a half state dinner and a half campaign rally.” Evangelicals like Mr. Jeffress are ebullient as the Senate prepares to confirm Judge Brett Kavanaugh next week, praising President Trump as “the most pro-life, pro-religious liberty, pro-conservative judiciary president of any president in history... [E]vangelicals who toe the line that the religious right has laid out for decades lift their hands in prayer to thank God for a conservative majority on the Supreme Court that now seems just weeks away."

As an evangelical who cut my teeth in politics during the heyday of the Moral Majority movement in the 1980s, I know the enthusiasm many conservatives feel at the prospect of culture war victories at the Supreme Court. But I join many other faith leaders to oppose Judge Kavanaugh not in spite of our faith commitments, but because of them. As we read the Bible alongside Judge Kavanaugh’s record, we find his nomination a threat to the Christian ethic we are called to preach and pursue in public life.

Leading the evangelical challenge to an extreme conservative majority on the Supreme Court, a group of evangelical women has issued a “call to pause,” asking fellow believers to step back from the rhetoric of “life” to examine how decisions before the court would impact the vulnerable people we claim to care about, even the unborn. “The way to reduce abortion is not through escalating culture wars but by reducing poverty,” they argue, noting studies that show abortion rates at an all-time low, though they remain highest among poor women who lack access to health care.

Lisa Sharon Harper, an African-American evangelical who has been a principal organizer of the “call to pause,” notes that a “right to life” is about more than abortion. “Majority conservative rulings have already whittled back civil rights protections, leaving this generation’s children as vulnerable to a new Jim Crow as my great-grandparents, who fled for their lives from the terror of the Jim Crow South.”

For many nonwhite evangelicals, the life issues that matter most are voting rights, living wages, environmental protection, access to health care and public education. The experience of many of those evangelicals illuminates how life issues have been narrowly defined by conservative evangelicals over the last 40 years.

Following the civil rights movement in the South, many white evangelicals felt threatened by political and cultural changes that challenged their assumptions about the natural order of the world. Leaning on the logic of slaveholder religion-- which, as the historian H. Shelton Smith showed, justified human bondage by arguing that white control of society was in keeping with God’s design-- religious conservatives rallied the faithful for moral resistance to the “unnatural” expansion of 14th Amendment protections to women and minorities. Since the Brown v. Board of Education decision overturned the doctrine of “separate but equal” in 1954, Southern preachers like Jerry Falwell had preached against liberal “activist judges.” But the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision offered Mr. Falwell’s Moral Majority a rallying cry that appeared selfless: defense of the unborn.

Despite an incredible investment in outreach to them, a vast majority of African-American evangelicals never got on board with the conservative rhetoric of the culture wars. Many black evangelicals understood that a reactionary movement against “activist judges” wasn’t rooted in godly concern for unborn children but in a fear of change, even if they, too, valued every child as a person created in God’s image. Across the Sunbelt and the Rust Belt, African-American evangelicals-- who represent as much as three-fourths of the black population-- leaned Democratic.

The enthusiasm of older white men who still control mainly white evangelical organizations like the Family Research Council and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association that thrived on the culture wars should give all Americans pause, especially as we pay attention to what Judge Kavanaugh himself has said. In a lecture to the American Enterprise Institute last year, he celebrated the legacy of Chief Justice William Rehnquist by noting how Chief Justice Rehnquist had led the Supreme Court’s turn “away from its 1960s Warren court approach, where the court in some cases had seemed to be simply enshrining its policy views into the Constitution, or so the critics charged.”

...Whether we have any experience in reading the law, evangelicals are familiar with Judge Kavanaugh’s way of reading authoritative texts. This is precisely how fundamentalists read Scripture in the early 20th century, when evolutionary science challenged their reading of Genesis and social science confronted narrow corporate interests during the Gilded Age. Fundamentalism taught reactionary religious voices to dig in their heels and claim final authority about what the text “actually says.” But evangelicals should know better: Our movement in America was founded in an attempt to maintain a commitment to Jesus and the Bible while rejecting reactionary extremism.

As proponents of “Christian nationalism” continue to be the most consistent base of support for President Trump, my evangelical faith compels me to challenge the way reactionary conservatives have hijacked our faith to serve their narrow interests. With Judge Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, their 40-year effort to overturn expansions of 14th Amendment protections by the Warren court may be in reach. This will not necessarily save unborn children, but it will make life more difficult for minorities, workers, poor people and the L.G.B.T.Q. community.

When Jesus said, “I have come that they might have life, and have it more abundantly” in John 10:10, he wasn’t thinking about a victory for those who have used religion to fight back against the gains of the civil rights movement. Jesus was inviting all of us to work together for the vision at the heart of that movement-- a beloved community where all people created in God’s image can thrive.

Señor Trumpanzee Is Still-- And Will Forever Be-- Battling John McCain

The President of the United States by Nancy Ohanian

Remember way back on Saturday when Schumer suggested re-naming the Russell Senate Office Building for John McCain? Jeff Flake (R-AZ) is going to co-sponsor the bill with him. Now, many grassroots Democrats aren't as excited about the prospect as Senate Democrats. But, apparently, it will be Trump ass-kissers among Senate Republicans who will prevent it from ever happening. Among those opposing this bipartisan move are unreconstructed Confederates Richard Shelby (R-AL), John Kennedy (R-LA), Bill Cassidy (R-LA), and David Perdue (R-GA). Mitch McConnell doesn't seem to dig it either. The funny thing about Richard Russell is that he was a Democrat, but a conservative one and a particularly rabid racist pig. Democrats are happy to erase his name from the building but racist Republicans, of course, revere him. After all, he held the civil rights movement back for decades, both in Georgia and nationally.

I haven't heard Lindsay Graham waffle on the McCain-as-hero narrative yet. But just wait. Trump either has pictures of the closeted South Carolina Republican or... Lindsay wants a position in the rapidly changing Trumpanzee cabinet. So anything is possible. But what about that Johnny Isakson guy! Who'a'thunk the first Republican to offer to give Trump a whippin' would be a Georgia senator! Johnny: "I don’t know what’s going to be said in the next few days about John McCain... but anybody who in any way tarnishes the reputation of John McCain deserves a whipping, because most of the ones who would do the wrong thing about John McCain didn’t have the guts to do the right thing when it was their turn."

Not that Trump doesn't have his Senate defenders on the fringe right in his battle with McCain's corpse. Oklahoma sociopath Jim Inhofe-- of snowball-proves-there's-no-global-warming fame-- CNN that McCain is "partially to blame" for the controversy over Señor Trumpanzee’s raising and then re-lowering White House flags: "Well, you know, frankly, I think that John McCain is partially to blame for that because he is very outspoken. He disagreed with the president in certain areas and wasn’t too courteous about it."

At least Trump's got just re-nominated Arizona Governor Doug Ducey in his camp in the Trumps v McCain war. Yesterday six (yes, 6!) Politico reporters worked on a piece asserting that Ducey will bow to Trump's will in deciding with whom to replace McCain. Ducey will have a tough reelection battle in November against progressive former Department of Education official David Garcia and he needs to balance the concerns of Trump's crackpot backers with normal people. Trump has vetoed McCain's own request that Ducey replace him for the remainder of his term with his wife, Cindy. The 6 reported that for Señor T "the decision offers an opportunity to blot out McCain’s most dramatic legislative move in the Trump era: casting the deciding vote against Obamacare repeal, and dooming the administration’s first big legislative initiative."

Will Trump force Ducey to appoint one of his allies, either of yesterday's Senate primary losers, Joe Arpaio or Kelli Ward or Trump crony Jeff DeWit, all 3 from the neo-fascist wing of the GOP?

[O]ne new candidate whose name has increasingly come up could help the governor in his own reelection fight and satisfy the pro-Trump wing of the party while honoring the memory of the six-term senator: Maj. Gen. Michael McGuire, a career military pilot who also serves as adjutant general for the state.

McGuire, also the director of the Arizona Department of Emergency and Military Affairs, has not been listed among the usual cast of potential successors since McCain fell ill last year. But his name began surfacing in interviews with more than a dozen politicians and consultants.

“John’s fairly highly regarded here in Arizona. Maybe not among the partisan base, but amongst the broader electorate and the community,” Arizona Republican strategist Chuck Coughlin said of the late senator’s legacy as a military man. “I think he would probably respect the family legacy there and the service,” he added of Ducey’s choice.

“But beyond that, I think he’ll just pick a conservative Republican who’s well regarded and likely to run and hold the seat.”

Other names being bandied about in Phoenix are former Senator John Kyl, former Rep. John Shadegg, who always wanted to be a senator but who left Congressafter being exposed in a sex scandal with another congressman's wife; Barbara Barrett, a former ambassador to Finland; Kirk Adams, Ducey’s chief of staff and a former state lawmaker; Karrin Taylor Robson, a wealthy developer; state Treasurer Eileen Klein; Rep. Paul Gosar; and Matt Salmon, another former congressman.

Jake Sherman and his team connected this week's dots and came to the conclusion that "In reality, Trump has already made this story about him. His silence-- and flip-flopping on the flag-- has kept Washington (and particularly the media) on edge. Any other president would’ve just lowered the flag to half-staff for the week, issued an effusive statement and moved on. Trump is making plain what we already knew: He never much liked McCain, and he’s not really concerned what anyone thinks about his behavior. Trump seems fully confident that his supporters haven’t cared for McCain in any way since 2008-- when they concluded his constituency was mostly reporters and middle-of-the-road Republicans. In some ways, Trump’s candidacy and presidency are a direct response to the candidacies of McCain and Mitt Romney... [E]veryone recognizes that Trump-- a supremely transactional figure for whom truth and everything else is infinitely flexible and subordinate always to self-interest-- is the more authentic representative of the age."

McCain's Parting Shot: "We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with rivalries that have sown resentment and hatred and violence in all the corners of the globe. We weaken it when we hide behind walls rather than tear them down, when we doubt the power of our ideals rather than trust them to be the great force for change they have always been... Do not despair of our present difficulties, we believe always in the promise and greatness of America because nothing is inevitable here. Americans never quit, we never surrender, we never hide from history, we make history. Farewell fellow Americans. God bless you and god bless America.