“Vote for me if you hate voting!”
“A vote for me is a vote to disenfranchise your fellow Americans!”
“Vote McSally, because God knows no one else will!”
Coming to a yard sign near you. PROBABLY.
Arizona senator Martha McSally, who lost the race to replace Sen. Jeff Flake in 2016 and was then appointed to fill out Sen. John McCain’s term, is about as popular as psoriasis with her own constituents. She’s trailing Gabby Giffords’ astronaut husband Mark Kelly in every poll, and so Senator Flopsweat is trying out some new material.
You just have to vote for her, see, because otherwise the 4 million (mostly black and brown) Americans who live in the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico will be granted the right to federal representation. And we can’t have that, can we?
In an absolutely bonkers interview with NBC’s Vaughn Hillyard, McSally arglebargled some nonsense about Biden in an attempt to smear Kelly, saying that Arizonans “don’t want free healthcare for all illegals, which is, uh, the, uh, what Biden and the, you know, the platform is that they’re talking about.” (Factcheck: Nope.)
Then she went on to warn darkly of the dangers of awarding her fellow Americans congressional representation.
They’re going to make D.C. and Puerto Rico a state and get four new Democrat senators. We’d never get the senate back again. And look, this is just the implications of this seat, the implications of this vote. It’s not just about whether you like astronauts or fighter pilots.
Arizonans may despise McSally and the way she’s attached herself leechlike to an unpopular president, but her bet seems to be that they’d rather elect someone they hate than allow Puerto Ricans and residents of the nation’s capital to elect anyone at all.
With more than three million residents, Puerto Rico’s population exceeds that of twenty states. D.C. has more people than Vermont or Wyoming. But proud American Martha McSally is running on a platform of explicitly disenfranchising those U.S. citizen because they don’t vote for her party, and maintaining GOP control of the senate is more important than the right to vote.
Or, as Arkansas senator Tom Cotton put it, D.C. can’t be a state because it doesn’t have any miners.
Wyoming is smaller than Washington by population, but it has three times as many workers in mining, logging and construction, and 10 times as many workers in manufacturing. In other words, Wyoming is a well-rounded working-class state. A new state of Washington would not be.
Someone check on the family dog!
Of course, the Republican party could always try to expand its appeal to the largely Hispanic and Black voters in D.C. and Puerto Rico. But since McSally is making taxation without representation an explicit part of her campaign platform, that’s seems pretty bloody unlikely.
Elizabeth Dye (@5DollarFeminist) lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.