4 reasons Martha McSally could lose in 2020

We are now T-minus 17 months before Arizona elects a second senator and if you’re Martha McSally, red flags are flapping all over the place.

A recent poll suggests Mark Kelly could dispatch her political career to the boneyard, giving the appointed senator the distinction of becoming the first Arizona Republican to lose not one but two Senate seats to Democrats.

Apparently, McSally agrees with the poll’s findings because on Monday, Politico reported that she demoted her top campaign consultant, bringing in a new team that will try to recast her as someone who could actually win.

Put another way: recast her as someone moderate Republicans and independents could actually support.

“She clearly felt like it was in her campaign’s interest to send a message to donors and national parties that she wasn’t going to run the same race than she ran two years ago,” Republican consultant Nathan Sproul told me on Tuesday.

Is McSally no longer a Trump fangirl?

That being the 2018 race in which McSally assumed the role of Trump fan girl – a role she has generally continued since snagging the appointment to fill the next two years of the late Sen. John McCain’s term.

Of late, however, McSally has put at least a sliver of daylight between herself and Trump. A really, really small sliver. 

In May, she called for an investigation after the White House ordered the USS John S. McCain “out of sight” during Trump’s visit to Japan – this, after her refusal last year to even utter McCain’s name as she touted a military spending bill named in his honor. Less than a week later, she panned Trump’s plan to impose tariffs on Mexico.

Those moves came just a week or two after the release of an independent poll that showed McSally is facing an uphill battle in 2020.

Why 2020 might be tougher for McSally

“McSally thought she had it hard last time. It is now harder …,” pollster Mike Noble of OH Predictive Insights told me. “There are red flags everywhere.”

Noble’s May poll of 600 likely Arizona voters shows McSally and Kelly deadlocked – McSally 45 percent to Kelly’s 44 percent, with 11 percent undecided. (Margin of error is 4 percent.)

But behind the raw numbers, red flags wave wildly.

Red flag No. 1: Moderates

They’re breaking in a big way, as of now, for Democrats. Fifty two percent of moderates polled said they would vote for a Democrat for Congress, with just 15 percent opting for a Republican and the rest undecided.

Among those who lean conservative, just over half said they would stick with a Republican. Meanwhile, just over three-quarters of those who lean liberal said they’d vote for the Democrat.

Red flag No. 2: Donald Trump

While McSally may adore the president, a sizable number of the voters she needs to win clearly don’t.

Trump’s job approval numbers in Arizona dipped to 49 percent in May, down from 54 percent in October. But among moderates, a whopping 69 percent disapprove of the president, along with 30 percent of those who lean conservative.

Red flag No. 3: Some don't like McSally

The former combat pilot is well known across the state but that's not always a good thing. Forty percent of those polled say they don’t like McSally. Kelly, meanwhile, is disliked by just 20 percent, with 38 percent who haven’t yet formed an opinion.

Red flag No. 4: Maricopa County

Fifty one percent of those polled in all-important Maricopa County have a favorable opinion of McSally compared to 45 percent for the lesser-known Kelly. But in a head-to-head matchup, Maricopa County voters preferred Kelly, 46 percent to 41 percent.

Maricopa is where McSally lost to Democrat Kyrsten Sinema last year. Sinema ran a campaign designed to win over moderates and as a result, Noble said, she snagged 118 precincts whose voters supported Trump in 2016. Of those, 88 were in Maricopa County.

McSally, meanwhile, won just two Hillary Clinton precincts, both of them in Pima County.

In the last decade, only one politician (former state Superintendent Diane Douglas) has won statewide office without winning Maricopa County.

To win, McSally has to win back moderates in Chandler, Gilbert, north Phoenix and northeast Glendale – the Trump voters who sent Sinema (and before her, McCain) to the Senate.

“You put that together, it’s really hard not to draw the conclusion that McSally is not only vulnerable, she’s got an uphill battle in front of her,” Noble said. “Especially with Trump on the ticket.”

Will that Trump tweet hurt or help?

Trump, by the way, tweeted a ringing endorsement of McSally on Tuesday,  a move likely meant to warn off Republicans who are quietly considering a challenge to McSally in next year's GOP primary.

But it isn't likely to help her win those moderate voters she needs to be get to Washington as an elected representative.

Meanwhile, Politico is reporting that McSally demoted longtime campaign consultant Jeff Roe and replaced him with Terry Nelson, who was national political director of George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign.

Various Arizona political strategists tell me the move is aimed at boosting McSally’s image with GOP donors leery of a repeat of 2018, when moderate Republican and independent voters handed Arizona Democrats their first Senate seat in three decades. 

SPROUL:What McSally's race says about 2020

"She needs to gear a message toward winning over those McCain voters," Sproul told me. 

“Her challenge is going to be to have an Arizona independent streak when it comes to national Republican politics but she can’t have so much of an independent streak that people are leery of her on the donor side. She’s got to find that balance, find key issues that demonstrate that Arizona independent streak.”

In other words, she’s got to become …

Kyrsten Sinema?

Reach Roberts at laurie.roberts@arizonarepublic.com.