Establishment Republicans are scrambling to find a candidate to replace Sen. Jeff Flake and wage a primary challenge against Kelli Ward, a former state senator who aligns herself with President Donald Trump.
WASHINGTON — Sen. Jeff Flake’s decision to abandon his 2018 re-election campaign in Arizona has thrown open the Senate race there, exposing deep fissures not only on the Republican side where a nationalist insurgency is gunning for the party establishment but also among Democrats contending with a rising left.
Establishment Democrats have high hopes for Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., a centrist who recently dined in the Blue Room of the White House with President Donald Trump, teaches a bipartisan spin class in the House gym and has broken ranks with her own party on key votes. She was one of only seven House Democrats, for example, who voted to create a select committee to investigate the 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya.
But those impulses toward bipartisanship have soured Arizona progressives against the candidacy of an openly bisexual woman who would seem to fit the liberal mold.
“There are issues, murmurs within grass-roots groups and the progressive community, the environmental community and others, including immigration advocates,” said Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., a co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, who is withholding his endorsement of her.
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Establishment Republicans, meanwhile, are scrambling to find a candidate to replace Flake and wage a primary challenge against Kelli Ward, a former state senator who aligns herself with Trump. Ward, derided by critics as a fringe candidate and a conspiracy theorist, was beaten badly by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., in a 2016 primary, and party leaders fear she would lose to Sinema in the general election.
“It definitely opens up the Senate for potentially a full spectrum of conservatives to win — or potentially lose the seat entirely,” said Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz. “The possibilities are almost endless.”
Mike Noble, a Republican pollster, called it “bedlam out here in Arizona.”
“Everyone’s phones are blowing up,” he said. “This is essentially a free-for-all.”
For Democrats to narrow the Republican hold on the Senate, they will have to take aim at two Republican seats, Flake’s and Sen. Dean Heller’s in Nevada. No other Republican up for re-election next year comes from a generally competitive state.
But while they have talked a big game in Arizona, hoping for a demographic and political shift, so far Democrats have little to show for their efforts. The party does not hold a single statewide office. In 2012, the last time the state had an open Senate seat, Democrats recruited Richard Carmona, a tough-talking Vietnam War hero and former surgeon general in the administration of President George W. Bush. Despite Carmona’s conservative credentials, Flake won the seat, 49 percent to 46 percent.
Next year could be different. The challenge for Republican Party officials will be to find a candidate who is aligned closely enough with Trump to appeal to his populist wing of the party — and to beat Ward in a primary dominated by the hard right — but not so closely that he or she would lose to Sinema.
The party needs “an acceptable ‘not Kelli’ choice who can surf the policy divides that are besieging our party right now,” said Chuck Coughlin, a Republican strategist in Arizona. He and other strategists say they have been inundated with text messages and phone calls since Flake’s surprise decision to leave the race.
Flake, who lost support with Trump supporters in Arizona after publishing a book, “Conscience of a Conservative,” that took aim at the president, announced his retirement Tuesday with a blistering indictment of Trump and the Republicans who embrace him.
But while he framed his decision as a matter of principle, polling in the state showed just how difficult it would be for an anti-Trump Republican to win an Arizona primary. One recent poll showed Flake with an 18 percent approval rating, and a survey in August by Arizona High Ground, Coughlin’s firm, found Flake trailing both Ward and Sinema.
Ward has the backing of Stephen Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, who has vowed to wage war on establishment Republicans, chief among them Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader. Ed Rollins, a veteran strategist who is co-chairman of Great America, a Trump-aligned political-action committee, recently signed on as her campaign manager.
And Robert Mercer, the deep-pocketed New York investor who helped finance Trump’s campaign, has donated $300,000 to Ward’s political-action committee this year, according to Federal Election Commission records.
But Steven Law, chief executive of the Senate Leadership Fund, a political-action committee aligned with McConnell, vowed that Bannon and his allies would be the losers.
“Sen. Flake’s decision to exit the race gives everyone a chance — the White House and Republicans in Arizona — to work together to find a strong candidate who can hold this seat,” Law said in an email. “That’s not going to be Kelli Ward.”
Whoever wins the Republican primary will almost certainly face Sinema, who is pitching herself to voters as a consensus builder with a compelling life story: She was homeless as a child, and her family lived for a time in an abandoned gas station.