Go maverick

Why McCain refuses to go maverick on Trump

'It’s baffling to me that he continues to support Trump in spite of the horrible racist, sexist, discriminating things that Trump said,' his Democratic rival says.

By Burgess Everett

John McCain has held his tongue for more than a year as Donald Trump dubbed him a loser and “not a war hero.” Trump accused the Vietnam War POW of failing to help veterans and hesitated to endorse the five-term senator’s reelection.

The stinging personal criticism has both parties speculating that McCain will finally blow his top once he dispatches his conservative challenger in a primary election on Tuesday.

Don’t count on it.

No matter the magnitude of his victory against Republican Kelli Ward — and McCain is favored to win easily — McCain (R-Ariz.) made clear last week that there will be no general election turn against his party’s bombastic nominee.

“No. There’s no reason to do that,” McCain said in an interview at his campaign headquarters here. “They all know me. Everybody in Arizona really knows me unless they just moved in.”

McCain’s decision to continue supporting Trump is not without risk, given his decades-old reputation of bucking party orthodoxy as the Senate’s resident "maverick." The central thesis of Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick’s (D-Ariz.) campaign is that McCain is afraid to stand up to Trump’s personal invective, tough talk on immigration and isolationist foreign policy — and therefore is no longer standing up for an increasingly diverse Arizona.

Twisting the knife in deeper, Kirkpatrick openly admits she used to vote for McCain. Now she's giving him the only real Democratic challenge of his 30-plus years in politics.

“The fact that he continues to support Donald Trump in spite of the fact that Trump insulted him, in spite of the fact that Trump insulted a Gold Star family, shows that he’s changed. There was a day that he would have stood up for that family, would have stood up for himself,” Kirkpatrick said in an interview.

“It’s baffling to me that he continues to support Trump in spite of the horrible racist, sexist, discriminating things that Trump said,” she added.

McCain has adopted a strategy apart from the “Never Trump” movement or even those like fellow Arizona GOP Sen. Jeff Flake, who frequently lambastes Trump. The two-time presidential hopeful is betting that he’s such a defined entity, with near-universal name ID, that most voters will treat his race as entirely separate from the suddenly competitive presidential campaign in Arizona.

So far, it’s working.

A recent CNN poll showed McCain hanging on to more than two-thirds of Trump voters and grabbing 28 percent of Hillary Clinton supporters, giving him a 13-point lead over Kirkpatrick in the general election. He crushed Ward in the same survey, 55 percent to 29 percent, though McCain, trying to lower expectations, said he expects to win in a manner that is “not great.”

Ward is drawing less than a third of Trump voters in the primary, compared with 50 percent for McCain, though she says the poll oversampled urban voters and understated her support in the state.

McCain readily admits that Arizona voters are a restless lot.

“There’s a lot of disgruntled people here,” McCain said.

Unsaid is the fact that many of those people are fans of Trump. McCain has called out the New Yorker on occasion, criticizing his targeting of Gold Star family Khizr and Ghazala Khan and racially based attacks on federal Judge Gonzalo Curiel. But otherwise, McCain has held back as he navigates Arizona's always rocky primary process.

Though conventional wisdom holds that trashing Trump and tacking to the center after his primary would be McCain’s smoothest path to victory in the general election, it could also look opportunistic after he's stuck by Trump through so much controversy.

“He’s John McCain. He’s not going to shift what he’s saying,” said longtime adviser Charlie Black. “He’s said all he needs to say about Trump.”

McCain is plainly unenthusiastic about discussing Trump, after repeating dozens of times he will support the GOP nominee. He’s bristled at reporters for bringing up Trump at news conferences on unrelated topics and responded tersely to questions about him.

“I’m running my own campaign, and I just don’t really want to keep talking about Trump,” he said in a typical retort in June. “I just don’t.”

In Scottsdale last week, McCain again emphasized that his “most severe disagreement” with Trump was over the Khan family, before reiterating that he backs his party standard-bearer.

His middle-ground positioning is drawing flak from both sides. Ward says McCain is pretending to support Trump until the calendar turns to Aug. 31 and Kirkpatrick is his only remaining foe.

“He’s pandering to the Republican electorate to try to get votes he probably would never get if he comes out and denounces Trump in the primary,” Ward said in an interview at a dimly lit chophouse here. “He is much more aligned with Hillary Clinton than he is with Donald Trump.”

Despite McCain’s insistence that he won’t flip his script on Trump, Ward said “it’s more than possible” that he turns on the Republican nominee. Such a move would be earth-shaking: Underdog incumbent GOP Sen. Mark Kirk of Illinois is the only Senate Republican up for reelection so far to withdraw support for Trump.

Even some of McCain’s supporters say it may be time for McCain to cement his status as an independent voice for Arizona and tear into a Republican nominee who has treated him so harshly.

John Doyle, the independent mayor of the heavily Democratic town of Nogales on the Mexico border, suggested that McCain, whom he supports, should get "a little bit in [Trump's] face."

But "do it in a nice political way," Doyle added.

But Republican and Democratic strategists say McCain can't afford to antagonize Trump's voters.

“He’s going to still need these people in the general,” said a GOP national strategist. “It’s like this awkward dance.”

The best way to finish that dance, McCain supporters say, is to allow voters to decide that Trump’s comments on McCain are out of bounds on their own merits, without explicit direction from McCain.

“His 'no comment' speaks louder than repudiating," said Margaret Leichtfuss, executive director of Scottsdale Leadership, a nonprofit civic organization. She's an independent who says she is likely to split her ticket between Clinton and McCain. “People draw their own conclusions when they see this behavior.”

Despite a brand built on needling his colleagues regardless of party affiliation, McCain is not explicitly campaigning to be a check on a President Clinton or Trump. Over two days on the campaign trail last week, McCain mostly aimed his vitriol at President Barack Obama, particularly on Obamacare and the president’s leadership "from behind." He singled out Clinton for what he called her role in the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, and criticized Trump for attacking the Khans, but only after being prompted by voters.

Flake, by contrast, told voters at one appearance that he doesn’t think Trump deserves to win the presidency based on the kind of campaign he's running. It was the kind of remark that many have come to expect from McCain.

Flake is “saying all the things that John McCain wishes he could say if he wasn't in a tough primary,” Ward insisted.

Yet McCain and his allies say that unless Trump levels a new attack that crosses the line in McCain’s mind, the Arizona senator is unlikely to join Flake as an all-out Trump critic. And Flake, despite his own strong feelings, said it’s an understandable position for his senior colleague to take.

“Sen. McCain has been the Republican nominee, and he knows what it’s like, and so I wouldn’t pretend to try to tell him how to do it. So he’s expressed concern about some of Donald Trump’s statements and I’ll leave it at that,” Flake said. “He’s been criticized directly by Donald Trump, so I don’t want to suggest what he’s thinking. I admire him whatever he does.”