For several months, there has been some debate surrounding whether Sen. John McCain would seek re-election to his sixth term in the Senate. Dispute having previously made comments that he might not seek re-election, many people expected him to launch a reelection bid, especially once he started fundraising for re-election more than a year ago.
Finally on Tuesday, McCain ended the suspense and formally announced that he’ll be seeking a sixth term in the Senate. Historically McCain has been very popular within the state, winning the 2010 U.S. Senate race with almost 60 percent of the vote, but not all Republicans in Arizona seem particularly excited about his candidacy for a sixth term. Back in January at the biannual reorganization meeting for Arizona’s Republican Party McCain spoke, but was greeted by boos by many people within the crowd.
The general argument against McCain seems to be that he hasn’t been conservative enough during his recent time in Washington, which has spawned discussion of replacing him with someone that won’t compromise on conservative values. There’s a logical conclusion that one of the state’s representatives in Congress could be picked to run against McCain, but at the moment the potential challenger this is getting the most traction is state Sen. Kelli Ward, R-Lake Havasu City.
Sen. Ward was in the news quite a bit during this legislative session for some of the bills that she was proposing, including a bill and amendment to change gun regulations in the state. Notably, Senate Bill 1460, would have ended the state’s ban on sawed-off shotguns as well as silencers. Combined with some of the other bills that she sponsored this session, she’s clearly established herself as a more conservative alternative to McCain, but saying that she faces a steep climb to her party’s nomination.
In the era of “dark-money” it’s clear that having large war-chest is more important than ever and despite losing the support of some of his party, McCain has consistently shown himself to be incredibly powerful when it comes to raising money. In his 2010 senatorial campaign, he spent a whopping $22,981,806. For a non-incumbent candidate to go up against that kind of political machine in a primary will be all but impossible baring some unforeseen occurrence. As news broke of McCain’s announcement of his re-election bid, it was reported on Twitter that his campaign had raised $1.6 million in the first quarter of 2015 and already had amassed a total of $3.6 million in cash on hand.
Assuming the reports are confirmed when the campaign submits its finance reports, he would already have more cash available than was raised by all but two of Arizona’s statewide 2014 campaigns. It’s unclear what Democrat, if any, will challenge McCain in the general election, but it seems that McCain’s path, at least through the Republican primary, will be pretty easy.
One day McCain’s dominance of Arizona politics will end, but he still seems popular enough across much of the state and has incredible amounts money flowing to him to squash almost any candidate that tried to challenge him.
