The 2020 Arizona Senate election: Restoring democracy
SRISHTI KHEMKA: All eyes were set on Arizona: a swing state in 2020, the Republican stronghold was up for grabs for the first time in 25 years. While Arizona was critical for the presidential election, the Arizona senate race had deeper implications for the future of American politics. It was more than a hope for restoring a Democratic majority in the Senate. It was a matter of restoring democracy.
After Senator John McCain passed away in 2018, Republican Arizona Governor Doug Ducey appointed former Senator John Kyl, who served as an Arizona senator from 1995 before vacating after 2012, as a replacement for Senator McCain until resigning at the end of 2018. Following Senator Kyl’s resignation, Arizona Governor Doug Ducey was once again left to find a replacement. Ducey appointed Martha McSally, a former U.S. Representative for Arizona’s second district. GOP leaders such as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and President Trump supported this appointment, as they viewed McSally as a rising star in the Republican party. When appointing McSally to the Senate, Governor Doug Ducey said that he was “going to respect the will of the voters.”
However, just a couple of months before her appointment, McSally had lost the Arizona 2018 Senate election to Senator Kyrsten Sinema. While supporters of McSally’s appointment noted that she had only lost by a small margin of 2.4%, or less than 60,000 votes, the fact of the matter was that she lost the Senate election. Arizona voters indicated a preference for Senator Kyrsten Sinema in the Senate election. The appointment of Martha McSally severely undermined the will of the Arizona citizenry and the single-member plurality electoral system that the United States has chosen to implement. Doing so undermined electoral system’s legitimacy, as a single-member plurality dictates that whichever candidate receives a greater number of votes than its counterpart should be elected. Whether the United States should move to an electoral system with proportional representation to reflect the 47.6% of voters that voted for Martha McSally in the Senate election is another discussion.Still, as long as the United States continues to have a single-member plurality system, its spirit and principles should be respected for the sake of maintaining the integrity of the system that is in place. Undermining its integrity can be destabilizing and cause civil unrest, as we have recently seen in these past few weeks following the presidential election.
Despite her former post as a representative, support from the GOP leaders, and her marginal loss, McSally should never have been appointed to replace John McCain. Not only was she a candidate that a majority of voters had collectively chosen to not elect, but she had a significant voice in many important senate decisions during her time as senator. One recent example is the recent appointment of Amy Coney Barrett that was heavily contested and passed with a small margin in Senate votes. McSall’ys support of Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination in this case almost seems illegitimate considering the nature of McSally’s appointment in the first place.
The most recent 2020 election restored the spirit of democracy and the United States’s chosen single- member plurality system. Senator McSally once again lost the Senate election to her Democratic opponent Mark Kelly, who won 51.2% of the vote compared to McSally’s 48.8%. Once again, despite the close margin in this election, the Arizona citizenry made the marked decision not to elect McSally to represent the state as Senator. This election only proves what critics of McSally’s appointment said in the first place: that Governor Doucey should never appointed Martha McSally.
Srishti Khemka is a sophomore in the School of Foreign Service.