Pilot and protester locked in dogfight to take key state

One served in Iraq, one demonstrated against it. Now the two women are Senate rivals in Arizona.

Martha McSally fought in Iraq and Afghanistan and was the first woman to fly a combat mission for the US Air Force. Picture: AP

The fighter pilot turned politician looked her audience of prospective donors in the eye and fired her best shot.

Martha McSally told Jewish Repub­licans at a synagogue in Scottsdale, Arizona, that their conservative state was the new frontline in the battle to hold the Senate and protect President Donal­d Trump’s pro-Israel agenda. “If there’s any chance to flip the Senate it goes through ­Arizona,” she said. “I am literally the firewall.”

The parties and the pollsters agree, even though the state has elected only Republican senators, including the late John McCain, for the past 30 years and has backed just one Democrat in presidential elections since 1948.

The battle for the seat vacated by the retiring Republican senator and Trump critic Jeff Flake is attract­ing national attention for more than just its strategic importance. At a polarising time in US politics, the race between two women with extraordinary personal stories also offers a rare test of whether a knife-edge contest can still be won predominantly by trying to appeal across party lines.

Martha McSally as the US Air Force’s highest-ranking female fighter pilot in 1993

The fast-talking McSally, 52, fought in Iraq and Afghanistan and was the first woman to fly a combat mission for the US Air Force. Although she avoided en­dorsi­ng Mr Trump for president, she has now strongly embraced his program to appeal to his base.

At the synagogue, dressed in Republican red, she characterised her Democratic rival, Kyrsten Sinema, as “extreme, radical and out of touch”. A few days before, in their sole live debate, Ms McSally accused her of supporting treason in a 2003 radio interview in relation to the Taliban.

In contrast Ms Sinema, 42, typic­ally wears purple, not Democratic blue, and is chasing independent voters and Republicans turned off by Mr Trump. Her campaig­n literature emphasises her independence, not her party affiliation, and she has been rigorously civil, pleasant and non-­partisan throughout, says Chuck Coughlin, a veteran Arizona Republi­can consultant who called her “the Alexa candidate”, after the Amazon electronic helper that is polite but lacking in humanity.

The first openly bisexual ­member of congress and first to list her religion as “none”, Ms Sinema grew up in poverty and lived for three years in a derelict petrol station as a child. Her polit­ic­al career began with the Green Party. She led street protests against the Iraq War, then became a progressive “bomb thrower” in Arizona’s capital, Phoenix, in her first elected position as a Democrat.

Kyrsten Sinema is the first openly bisexual member of congress and the first to list her religion as ‘none’. Picture: AP

Yet after winning election to the House of Representatives in 2012 she reinvented herself as a moderate cross-party deal-broker with a voting record to match. It is an outlook that earned her the endorseme­nt of the state’s largest newspaper, The Arizona Republic, which had not backed a Democrat for the Senate this century.

As the Democrats try to engineer a net gain of two Senate seats to swing the chamber, Arizona — a long-term target because of its rapidly growing number of liberal young and Hispanic people — is one of only four Republican-held seats rated as a “toss-up” by the political site The Cook Report. Ms Sinema leads 50 to 44, according to an NBC News/Marist poll, but that shrinks to three points when the Green candidate is included, within the margin of error.

In the car park of a Mexican restaurant, two friends with different affiliations but a shared sense of confusion compared thoughts. “There’s a lot of divisiveness,” said Albert, 58, a lifelong Democrat. “With all the ads out there it’s really tough to tell what the truth is.”

“Arizona is in play,” said Jay, 57, a moderate Republican whose distaste for Trump led him to vote Libertarian in 2016. “McSally is not as radical as Trump but she’s jumped on that train and I don’t like it. Kyrsten Sinema has moved to the middle which is really hard for me because I’m a middle guy.” He had not made up his mind but offered a hint. “Usually, if I can’t decide, I vote Republican,” he said.

The Times