Arizona GOP Goes to War with Itself

by Pa Rock
Former Arizonan

Just a few short years ago the Republican Party had a fairly tight grip on Arizona politics.  That is no longer the case.  

Not only did Republican Donald Trump lose Arizona in the 2020 presidential election, over the past two election cycles the  GOP has lost both US Senate seats from Arizona, and three election cycles ago the state party's most controversial officeholder, Joe Arpaio, the long-term sheriff of Maricopa County, finally went down to electoral defeat.

It's been a hard few years for the Republican Party faithful in Arizona - and some believe that the bad situation that the GOP finds itself may have just gotten even worse.

Yesterday the state Republican Party met at a church in Phoenix to reorganize.  The current party chair, a former state senator named Kelli Ward, had ingratiated herself to Donald Trump by challenging the state's voting results in a legal proceeding that was ultimately thrown out of court.   In spite of the evidence that her party was literally falling apart, Ward was seeking to be elected to another term as the party chair.  As a central part of her bid to get re-elected, she played a recorded audio message from Donald Trump in which he said of Ward, "I give her my complete and total endorsement."  After two rounds of voting, Ward was re-elected to the party chairmanship by just three points.

But the re-election of Kelli Ward to head the state party was just the second tier news to come out of the meeting.  The big news was that the state party used the occasion to censure three very prominent state Republicans.   They officially tried to shame a former US Senator, the widow of a former US Senator and GOP presidential candidate, and the current Governor of Arizona.

The notion of censuring popular members of the party was not new to the Arizona GOP.  The party had censured Senator John McCain in 2014 over his alleged "liberal record."  This time the party tried to officially shame former Senator Jeff Flake who had been openly critical of Donald Trump and had even endorsed Joe Biden in the 2020 election.  The party also censured Cindy McCain, John's widow, because she, too, had been associated with several "leftist" causes and, like Flake, she had also endorsed Joe Biden in the presidential race.

But then the state GOP went after Doug Ducey, the party's own sitting governor of the state.  The party hierarchy was angry with Ducey over his imposition of emergency rules regarding the COVID-19 that was surging across Arizona.  They claimed that Ducey's emergency orders to contain the virus violated the Constitution and amounted to the governor enacting "dictatorial powers."

None of the three targets of the current Arizona GOP censuring spree seemed overly concerned, and Cindy McCain, a Phoenix native who chairs one of the largest Anheuser-Busch distributorships in the United States, leveled her sights on the state party and fired back:

"It is a high honor to be included in a group of Arizonans who have served our state and our nation so well . . . and who, like my late husband John, have been censured by the AZGOP.  I'll wear this as a badge of honor."

Hear that, Kelli?  No Bud for you!