Would you rather eat, or help me stay in the Senate?
That’s the question that Arizona Republican Martha McSally posed to her supporters.
Polls show McSally trailing in her hotly contested race with Democrat Mark Kelly — a former astronaut who is the husband of former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords — and she wants to make sure cash comes in to her campaign coffers.
“We’re doing our part to catch up, you know, to get our message out,” McSally told supporters in a recording obtained by KPHO TV. “But it takes resources. So, anybody can give, I’m not ashamed to ask, to invest. If you can give a dollar, five dollars, if you can fast a meal and give what that would be.”
McSally, 54, is in the Senate despite losing her only race for that body.
In 2018, McSally, who served two terms in the House of Representatives, lost a close race to Kyrsten Sinema.
But a little more than a month after the election, she found a new path to the Senate.
When John Kyl, who had been appointed to fill the seat of the late John McCain, resigned, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey appointed McSally to the seat, and she was sworn in 2019, just after Sinema.
The special election with Kelly will determine who fills out the last two years of the term started by McCain.
A new poll last week, conducted by Phoenix-based firm OH Predictive Insights, showed Kelly garnering 48 percent of the vote to McSally’s 43 percent.
McSally is among the most vulnerable GOP Senate incumbents facing reelection this year, and virtually every recent public poll shows her trailing Kelly in the race to defend her seat.
One survey released last week by the left-leaning Data for Progress showed Kelly with a 10-point advantage over McSally.