Republicans for Harris lean on memory of John McCain in battleground Arizona

Four years after Arizona rejected former President Donald Trump in the presidential election, a group of Republicans supporting Vice President Kamala Harris are hoping to repeat history by evoking the memory of John McCain.

John Giles, the Republican mayor of Mesa, appeared at a press conference Monday to launch a new Republican task force for Harris alongside former Republican state Rep. Robin Shaw. He, like others in the purple state, considers himself a “McCain Republican” and believes his party risks losing elections until it chooses leaders with a different temperament.

Trump famously butted heads with the late senator, in 2015 questioning whether he was a war hero because he was captured during the Vietnam War.

“I don’t know why the Republican Party continues not to learn from its mistakes,” Giles said in an interview with the Washington Examiner. “I continue to be a Republican because I’m holding out hope that after enough failed elections, those running the Arizona Republican Party and the National Republican Party will get thrown out.”

The advisory committee will help the Harris campaign through outreach to current and former GOP voters in the state “who feel marginalized by the MAGA movement.” Other prominent Republicans backing Harris include Scottsdale Mayor Sam Campana, Apache Junction Mayor Douglas Coleman, and Jerome Mayor Jack Dillenberg. Three former aides to the late Sen. McCain are also part of the group: Wes Gullett, Paul Hickman, and Bettina Nava.

The effort, which began with 33 Republicans signing on to the effort on Sunday, has already grown to over 80, according to the Harris campaign. Peggy Neely, the former vice mayor of Phoenix, emphasized her support for Harris comes after Roe v. Wade was struck down by the Supreme Court.

“Today, millions of American women are experiencing an unprecedented erosion of their rights and freedoms, a direct consequence of Donald Trump’s actions,” she wrote in a statement. “Donald Trump’s radical and regressive agenda poses the biggest threat to women’s rights in decades, not just in Arizona, but across the entire country.”

Giles, the mayor of the third-largest city in the battleground state, endorsed Harris in an op-ed for the Arizona Republic last week, urging other Republicans to reject Trump at the ballot box once again. In 2022, he was part of a similar group of Republicans who backed the reelection of Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ).

“I think you know, silence was not an option, because the best interest of my city would not be served well by a second Trump presidency,” Giles explained. 

President Joe Biden became the first Democrat in 25 years to win Arizona in 2020, beating Trump by fewer than 11,000 votes. While a changing demographic may have contributed, many speculate reverence for McCain, a centrist Republican, played a role. Democrats also swept key statewide races, including a U.S. Senate seat in 2022 after voters rejected the election-denying allies of the former president.

“I won’t think twice about jumping party lines to vote for the best candidate – and I think that was the spirit that John McCain brought to public service, putting country first,” Giles said. “We need to work collaboratively with Democrats and occasionally support Democrats when they have better candidates than we do.” 

In the battleground state, independent voters have been known to sway elections. According to Arizona data, 35% of voters are registered as Republican, 29% Democrat, and almost 34% independent. Chuck Coughlin, a longtime Republican consultant and pollster in the state, says Democrats have found the key to success by holding on to their base and attracting a sizable number of both Republican and unaffiliated voters.

“This is how Democrats have won. You know, in ‘18 and ‘20 and ‘22 because the Republican Party’s base is not broad enough. It’s not big enough. And that is, that’s their electoral problem, and it will continue on in this cycle,” Coughlin said.

Coughlin worked on McCain’s campaign in the 1980s and eventually left the GOP when Trump and the party turned against his former boss. He said he is seeing in early internal polling that Harris is already making inroads with Republican voters in the state.

“The Republican Party now is like the Taliban, either you agree with them or you get beheaded. It’s not a very welcoming place,” Coughlin said. “It’s a center-right state, and it’s there for the taking.”

Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake has in the past rejected efforts to court the McCain coalition. During her failed 2022 gubernatorial campaign, she bragged that she “drove a stake through the heart of the McCain machine” and even called for repealing the Affordable Care Act at a campaign event in Scottsdale in 2022, slamming McCain’s decisive vote that kept Republicans from overturning it in 2017.

This time around, she has sought to make amends with Meghan McCain, despite the daughter of the late senator rejecting Lake’s offer to meet one-on-one. Nonetheless, Lake argued she can still attract the political center while staying closely aligned to Trump.

“I honestly believe that the America First agenda is the greatest way for people in the middle,” Lake told Punchbowl News. “Unfortunately, we have to push back against a very corrupt media that’s trying to paint this movement as extremist.”

As for Giles, he said he will be accepting an invitation to attend the Democratic National Convention in Chicago later this month and will be at a Harris campaign rally in Phoenix on Friday. He said his recent endorsements and work with the Harris campaign have not gone over well with parts of the Republican Party in the state, but he believes some are listening and can be swayed.

“I’ve gotten a lot of vile and hateful messages from people I don’t know very well or at all, but I’ve been taken aback by the number of positive responses from Republicans and independents thanking me for voicing their position.”