If Ducey is smart he won't nominate McSally. That'll be a smack in the face to voters, but then again, so is appointing someone for 2 years that the people have no say in so...
who else could he appoint besides her and Kimberly Yee
AZ GOP bench is absolutely garbage. And the voters didn't say no to Mcsally but more yes for Sinema.
Garbage bench? LMAO. I will remind Atlas that AZ is still a pink state, McSally just ran as a 2004 neocon and wasted all the opportunities afforded her to attack Sinema.
Garbage bench might be a bit strong, but it is a surprisingly weak one. Ducey won’t run b/c Hobbs would become Governor, McSally would likely be sunk by the optics of appointing her, Kimberly Yee hasn’t even been sworn in as Treasurer yet which means the optics would be horrible with her too, and while Brnovich has been talked up a lot, his electoral track record is decidedly meh (a narrow win in the 2014 wave and a 51-48 win in 2018 against an underfunded, weak C-lister in a race that pretty much everyone had written off as Safe R).
IIRC Salmon is generally regarded in Arizona as a right-wing firebrand to the point that he’d likely struggle a bit statewide these days in a way he didn’t back in 2002 (although he lost then too), plus he’s got has-been written all over him. The GOP congressional delegation isn’t too impressive either. Biggs and Schweikert are both way to the right of the state and at least one of them (forget which) has some scandals that were bad enough to trigger an ethics investigation by the Republican-controlled House. Lesko seems like an underperformer, just got elected to the House, and IIRC has some ethics issues of her own, but I could be misremembering. As for Paul Gosar...well...lol, you might as well run Ward since Gosar’s at that level.
The smart play for AZ Republicans would have been to act like McSally was the frontrunner and then have McSally make a big feel-good show of taking herself out of consideration b/c of how important it is to respect the will of the voters and that she hopes to have another chance in the future to continue fighting for Arizona. Maybe throw in some hokey nonsense like “if I’m blessed with such a chance in the future, I promise that will be reporting for duty just like when I fought overseas to protect the freedoms we hold dear” or whatever. Ducey could then nominate a buddy of his as a placeholder like Kirk Adams with the understanding they won’t seek re-election and then McSally could have run in 2020 with decent optics. She blew that though by being too obvious about how badly she wanted the appointment, so I don’t see many great options for the Republicans here. Their best bet is probably still Brnovich, but [two years before the election] it looks the Democrats should be able to beat him on paper if they run Greg Stanton (all things being equal).
Side note: I go back and forth on Gallego. I like him, but I worry he may have a few cycles left to wait before he can win statewide in AZ against a generic Republican and the more I think about it, the more I think he’d have an especially hard time in a Senate race. I think Gallego and the AZDP might both be better off if Stanton runs for Senate in 2020 and then Gallego runs for Governor in 2022 [if we pickup the Senate seat and it’s not looking like a GOP wave] and/or runs for Senate in 2026 [if Republicans hold the Senate seat in 2020].
