by Revolver News Staff at Revolver News
Between the House, Senate, and assorted gubernatorial races, there are nearly 500 major offices up for grabs in the 2022 mid-term elections. And out of those nearly 500 races, the Senate race unfolding in Arizona is by far the most important. It isn’t just crucial that the GOP win this seat and with it an overall Senate majority. It is crucial that the right candidate win the seat, in order to further the long-term transformation of the GOP into an America First political party.
Right now, though, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is trying to sabotage this transformation by urging Governor Doug Ducey to enter the race, and the only obstacle to his plans is Ducey’s wife.
According to a source close to both Ducey and McConnell, Angela Ducey is eager to be out of the political spotlight, and has become irate with McConnell’s constant pleas for her husband to enter the race. Besides the usual difficulties that come with being a politician’s spouse, the past year has been particularly rough for Angela as her husband has been savaged from the right for his role in certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in the state.
But apparently, McConnell thinks nothing of putting the hurt on the Ducey marriage for the sake of sticking a metaphorical thumb in Donald Trump’s eye.
McConnell’s motivation is simple: He doesn’t like Donald Trump, and doesn’t like the direction Trump has taken the Republican Party. But he also can’t oppose Trump openly, and is instead stuck trying to wait out the president while elevating candidates who are loyal to the old GOP rather than the new one. For McConnell, Ducey is an enticing pawn in this proxy war.
The stakes are high. With the Senate split 50/50 between Republicans and Democrats, the Grand Canyon State offers the most likely opportunity for the GOP to pick up a seat and, with it, take control of the chamber. That means more than just offering a symbolic rebuke to the Biden Administration. It means the opportunity to hold up extremist nominees to the federal courts, or even the Supreme Court. It means blocking the installation of ideologues like Gigi Sohn onto crucial regulatory bodies like the FCC. It means blocking President Biden’s plan to eliminate the filibuster in order to rewrite election laws in all fifty states. In turn, it means blocking more ambitious Democratic plans like packing the Supreme Court, admitting D.C. and Puerto Rico as states, abolishing the Electoral College, and giving amnesty to the two million illegal immigrants who swamped the border last year, plus the ten or twenty or thirty million other illegal immigrants already squatting in this country.
But the Arizona Senate race matters for even more reasons. A newly-released Quinnipiac poll shows President Biden mired at a miserable 33 percent approval rating, with just 28 percent support among Latinos. If numbers like this even remotely hold up over the next three years, then no amount of ballot harvesting and late-night pauses will save Democrats from a 2024 wipeout. The Republican president holding office after that wipeout could very well be Donald Trump once again, or an anointed successor running on the same platform.
In 2017, President Trump’s America-first promises were badly undermined not by Democrats, but by two Arizona senators from his own party: John McCain and Jeff Flake. If a second Trump term or another America First presidency is going to succeed, then having new faces in the Senate who will understand and defend the president’s platform, instead of undermining it, is critical.
Above all, the Arizona race is a test:…
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