Arizona going for Biden could be ‘revenge of John McCain,’ his former adviser says
Arizona went blue this election, and a former adviser to John McCain said the flip could be the late Republican senator’s “revenge.”
The Associated Press called the battleground state, historically a Republican stronghold, for Democratic nominee Joe Biden just before 3 a.m. EST Wednesday — marking the first time Arizona has picked a Democrat for president since 1996, when Bill Clinton defeated Republican nominee Bob Dole.
In 2016, President Donald Trump carried the state with 48.7% of the vote compared to Democrat Hillary Clinton’s 45.1%, according to Ballotpedia.
Going into election night, Biden was “slightly favored” to win Arizona, according to poll analysis site FiveThirtyEight.
Before the AP called the race in Arizona, Mike Murphy — a Republican strategist and adviser to McCain during his 2000 presidential campaign — said on MSNBC he thought Arizona “would flip to Joe Biden.”
“Could be the revenge of Sen. John McCain,” he told MSNBC.
The president had a contentious relationship with the long-time Arizona senator, who died of cancer in 2018. McCain served in the Senate starting in 1987 and won re-election five times, and ran for president twice — winning his party’s nomination in 2008.
He was heavily critical of Trump and often spoke out against his policies.
In 2015, Trump said he didn’t think McCain was a “war hero” and that he likes “people that weren’t captured.”
The former senator was held as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, where he was a “victim of horrendous torture” for years, according to The New York Times.
“To millions of Americans, Mr. McCain was the embodiment of courage: a war hero who came home on crutches, psychologically scarred and broken in body, but not in spirit,” The New York Times wrote in his obituary.
McCain’s family did not invite the president to his funeral after Trump “disparaged” him during his 2016 campaign, the Associated Press reports.
Cindy McCain, his wife, endorsed Biden for president and joined his transition advisory board.
“He supports the troops and knows what it means for someone who has served,” McCain told the AP of Biden. “Not only to love someone who has served, but understands what it means to send a child into combat. We’ve been great friends for many years, but we have a common thread in that we are Blue Star families.”
This story was originally published November 4, 2020 at 8:58 AM with the headline "Arizona going for Biden could be ‘revenge of John McCain,’ his former adviser says."
