John McCain's death roils Arizona's rough-and-tumble Republican primary

Arizonans vote today after a bitter battle for the GOP Senate nomination that has highlighted the Donald Trump effect in McCain’s home state

The office of Joe Arpaio is decorated with framed photographs of the former Maricopa county sheriff standing side-by-side with Donald Trump. A smaller-than-life cardboard cutout of the president can be found propped in a corner at campaign events for the former Arizona state senator Kelli Ward. And the congresswoman Martha McSally made sure Arizona voters were aware that the commander-in-chief thinks she’s “terrific”.

For months, the candidates running for the Republican Senate nomination in Arizona competed to prove their fealty to Trump. But in the final days of a rough-and-tumble primary, the contest was roiled by the death of the six-term Arizona senator John McCain, after a yearlong battle with brain cancer.

Trump has been publicly critical of McCain, who he honored in a proclamation on Monday afternoon, two days after the senator’s death. The Republican leaders represented contrasting views of the party’s values and its future. And whichever GOP candidate captures the Senate nomination on Tuesday will be the vanguard of a new state party – one that is far more reflective of the president than the “maverick” who represented Arizona in Washington for 36 years.

“This party is moving away from the establishment elitism that we’ve seen under the rule of Senator McCain and the people who have supported him back towards what it should be, which is a representative Republic,” Ward said at a press conference on Monday.

The event was hastily convened to “set the record straight” about her earlier comments regarding the senator.

In a Saturday Facebook post hours before his death, Ward had suggested that the announcement that McCain was discounting his medical treatment was timed to intentionally distract from her campaign. Amid growing backlash, the 49-year-old osteopathic physician wrote in a tweet on Monday: “Political correctness is like a cancer!”

“I do understand how many could have misconstrued my comments as insensitive and for this I apologize,” she told reporters. But Ward, who unsuccessfully challenged McCain in 2016, blamed the media for twisting her words and insisted the remark was “in no way” directed at the McCain family. She lauded the senator’s “decades of service”.

McSally also faced criticism earlier this month for failing to say McCain’s name when she joined Trump at a signing ceremony in New York for a military spending bill that was named in the Arizona senator’s honor. Trump also avoided calling the legislation by its official name.

McCain’s daughter, Meghan McCain, called the omission “disgraceful”. “I had such higher hopes for the next generation of leadership in my home state,” she said in a Tweet.

When McCain died, McSally tweeted: “John McCain was one of Arizona’s greatest Senators, one of our country’s finest statesmen, and an American hero who risked his life to defend this great nation. He loved this state, and he loved this country.”

The governor, Republican Doug Ducey, will appoint a replacement to fill McCain’s seat. His successor will serve in the seat until 2020, when a special election will be held to fill the rest of his term.

McCain’s death is unlikely to affect the outcome of the Senate primary race, though campaigning was largely suspended this week out of respect for the late senator. But Republicans’ wariness of the war hero’s legacy crystalizes the political transformation that was already well under way in the brutal intra-party battle for the Senate seat held by retiring Arizona senator Jeff Flake.

“I’m not happy about it, but this is the president’s party right now,” Flake, whose withering criticism of Trump alienated conservatives in the state, said on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday. “I think that we’ll be sorry for that in the future, but that’s the case right now.”

The contest for Flake’s seat is set against the backdrop of a rapidly changing electorate in a state where the population is almost one-third Hispanic. Despite Trump’s enduring popularity with Arizona’s Republicans, he only narrowly won the state.

The Republican nominee will have to strike a delicate balance holding on to conservative base voters besotted with the president while still appealing to independent-minded suburban voters and a growing minority population who are wary of Trump’s policies and rhetoric.

The late August primary leaves only a handful of weeks to broadcast that message to voters before general election ballots are sent in the mail.

McSally, the first American female fighter pilot to fly in combat, is the choice of Washington Republicans and the frontrunner in the race.

Since the presidential election, McSally has evolved from Trump critic to ardent supporter. The two-term congresswoman, who represents a Tucson swing district that is evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, has tacked right on immigration and repeatedly declined to criticize the president, even though two years after the election, she won’t say whom she voted for in 2016.

Some Republicans privately fret that McSally went “too far” in her embrace of Trump and worry she will have a hard time broadening her message beyond the conservative slice of primary voters. But operatives here say she had little choice.

“By virtue of where she’s had to go in the primary, McSally has a more difficult row to hoe in terms of defining herself and narrating her campaign to a general electorate,” said Chuck Coughlin, a veteran Republican strategist in the state.

And she would hardly be the first Arizona Republican to walk this tightrope. In 2010, as Tea Party fervor swept the country, McCain fended off conservative attacks on his past support for immigration reform with a campaign ad in which he walked along the border and famously vowed to “complete the danged fence”.

Jennifer Duffy, a senior editor at the non-partisan Cook Political Report, who expects the congresswoman to win the nomination, said her success in November will depend largely on how quickly and successfully she pivots to the general election after Tuesday.

“She can’t start this with her back against the wall,” Duffy said, adding: “For someone like her who represents a swing district in the state, this should be muscle memory.”

Last week McSally turned to the general election with an attack against Democratic congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema, who has taken advantage of a nominal primary challenge to position herself as a moderate willing to work across the aisle.

The campaign ad touts McSally’s military record and accuses Sinema of “denigrating our service”. The video features footage of the Democrat wearing a pink tutu at a protest against the Iraq war in 2003.

It’s the opening salvo in what will be one of the most competitive – and expensive – Senate races of the year.

As of Monday afternoon, 75% of likely voters had already cast their ballots, according to the secretary of state’s office. But until the end, Ward and Arpaio have clung to the president, attacking McSally as soft on immigration and a faux Trump believer.

Arpaio, the immigration hardliner and self-styled “toughest sheriff in America” who Trump pardoned last year after he was convicted of criminal contempt, has struggled to jumpstart a lagging campaign. The presence of the 86-year-old former lawman in the race has mostly served as a spoiler, observers say, pulling conservative votes from Ward and creating a clearer pathway for McSally to clinch the nomination.

A cross-state bus tour on the #ArpaioExpress was largely overshadowed by his bizarre appearance on Sacha Baron Cohen’s undercover TV show, Who is America?, which he said was a “bad mistake”.

Ward also closed her campaign with a bus tour that featured Mike Cernovich, a conspiracy theorist and far-right media personality, as well as the Republican politicians such as congressman Paul Gosar.

McSally’s supporters meanwhile are already looking past her conversion to Trump loyalist.

“Some people, myself included, have been a little frustrated with the ‘hug-the-president’ approach,” said Yasser Sanchez, a Republican immigration lawyer. “But that’s the reality of of winning a GOP primary in Arizona in this current political climate.”

On Tuesday a plaza sign outside of Sanchez’s law office read: to truly honor McCain go vote.