Southwest rises as 2018 Senate battleground

By Alexander Burns, New York Times News Service

Saturday, Aug. 19, 2017 | 2 a.m.

PHOENIX — The tweet landed without warning or elaboration, just days before a presidential visit to Arizona: In the early hours of Thursday, President Donald Trump, not for the first time, savaged Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., calling him “toxic” and “WEAK,” hailing Flake’s primary challenger and drawing fierce pushback from fellow Republicans.

By tiptoeing to the edge of endorsing Kelli Ward, a far-right former state senator, over an incumbent Republican, Trump further roiled a state and region badly shaken by his campaign and its aftermath.

Well before Trump’s rise, a pair of Western states — Arizona and Nevada — foreshadowed some of the consuming clashes of his presidency, over the definition of conservatism and the struggle for power between diverse, booming cities and far-flung rural precincts.

But both states have emerged anew this year as a defining battleground for both parties, in no small part because of Trump’s thirst for vengeance against Republicans who have crossed him. In Nevada, Sen. Dean Heller, who made a great show of denouncing an early effort by Republicans to repeal the federal health care law, drew a primary contest last week from Danny Tarkanian, a frequent political candidate who has branded himself a cheerleader for the White House.

In Arizona, which Trump plans to visit Tuesday, there is Flake, who shunned Trump in 2016 and recently published a book denouncing his political worldview, alongside a fellow Republican, Sen. John McCain, a biting critic of the president who cast the deciding vote to block repeal of the Affordable Care Act.

McCain swiftly went to his colleague’s defense Thursday after Trump’s tweet. Calling Flake a “principled legislator,” McCain said in a tweet: “Our state needs his leadership now more than ever.”

Scott Smith, a Republican former mayor of Mesa, a conservative Phoenix suburb of half a million people, said the political environment was unusually chaotic because of Flake’s clash with the president and a lack of clear leadership to organize Democrats.

“I haven’t seen this type of unsettled waters, certainly in my adult lifetime,” Smith, 61, said.

The political stakes across the Southwest are vast for Democrats, too, with the Republican tumult potentially giving them a rare chance to pick up seats in the Senate. The West looms large for Democrats at every level: More than a dozen House seats are at stake across the broader region, including seats in Texas and California, along with a handful of governorships. Republicans hold a slim majority in the Senate, with 52 seats, but the 2018 political map is tilted heavily in their favor.

Forced to defend 10 Senate seats in states Trump won, Democrats have settled on Heller and Flake as their best opportunities to go on offense, with Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas a long-shot third target. They have rallied behind Rep. Jacky Rosen of Nevada as an opponent for Heller, and Rep. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona is likely to challenge Flake, according to three Democrats briefed on her plans.

Both Flake and Heller ultimately voted for unpopular health care legislation ― Heller bending after a public working-over by the president ― and Democratic-leaning groups have already battered them with about $8 million in advertising on the issue.

Harry Reid, the former Democratic leader in the Senate, said the growing prominence of these states in 2018 portended a longer-term shift. For all the concern about Midwestern states that shifted toward Trump, it is the Sun Belt and interior West that are expected to gain population, House seats and electoral votes over the coming decades.

“The power has shifted in our country, west of the Mississippi,” Reid said in an interview. “It started a couple of cycles ago, but now it’s in full force.”

But Reid said it would take intensive financial investment and political organizing by Democrats to capture new states, like Arizona or Texas, where Rep. Beto O’Rourke, a Democrat, is mounting a challenge to Cruz. Reid said he had brought his chief political lieutenant, Rebecca Lambe, to address Senate Democrats last winter to describe Nevada as a model for winning over a once-red state.

If the Nevada race has taken shape faster, the Senate race in Arizona may express the Southwest’s political churn most fully: Flake’s candidacy embodies the Republican Party’s identity crisis, with the rift between traditional, leave-us-alone conservatives and Trump-style nationalists on vivid display. That division predates Trump’s ascent, emerging from battles over immigration that have convulsed the border region.

Republicans outnumber Democrats in the state, and though Democrats have come close in several major elections — including Flake’s first Senate bid, in 2012, and the presidential vote last year — they have persistently fallen short. No Arizona Democrat has won a Senate seat since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Flake, 54, who has embarked on a blitz of television appearances over the last few weeks to promote his book, “Conscience of a Conservative,” declined through a spokesman to be interviewed. Casting himself as an earnest, small-government ideologue in the mold of former Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, Flake has continued to chide Trump.

Trump has indicated to associates for months that he is open to opposing Flake’s renomination in the primary race. Robert Mercer, a billionaire investor supportive of Trump, has donated $300,000 to a group supporting Ward.

Flake is likely to have well-funded allies of his own. Steven Law, who heads the Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC backed by the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said Flake and Heller were high priorities for the group.

But it is not just the hard right that Flake has alienated in Arizona. Republicans skeptical of Trump say the senator has not done enough to challenge the president on matters of policymaking. Grant Woods, a former state attorney general who is close to McCain, said he had been dismayed by Flake’s stance on health care.

“I was disappointed in his vote,” said Woods, a Republican. “I don’t appreciate a down-the-line vote with Donald Trump.”