When Mark Kelly ran for Senate in 2020, he didn’t emphasize the issue that had long been at the core of his political identity.
He didn’t need to. There are few in Arizona who are unfamiliar with the story of Kelly’s wife, the former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot in the head and nearly killed in a Tucson parking lot in 2011.
That tragedy turned Kelly, a former Navy pilot and accomplished astronaut, into a nationally prominent gun violence activist. But his successful 2020 campaign was laser-focused on a small set of issues: health care, the economy, climate change, and money in politics. His approach to gun issues, several Democrats say, was simple: his background would speak for itself.
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Now, with Kelly campaigning to earn a full six-year term in the Senate in this fall’s midterms, that playbook has the potential to change. The mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas, and Buffalo, New York, have put gun violence at the top of the country’s political agenda for the first time in years.
That presents an opportunity for Kelly, according to Arizona Democrats. The senator has a singular background and authority on the issue, and Arizona has a growing population of voters who are exasperated with the cycle of inaction in Washington following each gun violence tragedy.
The day after the Uvalde shooting, Kelly was blunt in speaking to those fears and frustrations. “It’s fucking nuts,” he told reporters in Washington, “not to do anything about this.”
The senator is on record having supported gun control measures that opinion polls typically find are broadly supported in the public—things like universal background checks and closing loopholes for domestic abusers to buy guns.
The leading Republican candidates in the race, competing against each other ahead of an August primary, offer a stark contrast.
Each is a strident opponent of any gun restrictions and some have proudly toted firearms in campaign ads. One of them, businessman Jim Lamon, released an ad in February showing himself dressed up as a cowboy, shooting at a stand-in for Kelly, seemingly designed to draw outrage and, more importantly, attention.
The November Senate race in Arizona will be one of the hardest-fought races anywhere in the country, and it could determine which party controls the chamber next year. Leaning into the contrast between Kelly and his GOP opponent could behoove Democrats, said Chris Herstam, a former state legislator and Arizona politics commentator.
The recent tragedies have pushed the need for gun reforms “toward the top of the list of issues here in Arizona,” Herstam said. “Frankly, that is good news for Democrats who were rightfully concerned that suburban, college-educated women were not going to show up in sufficient numbers to benefit Democratic candidates.”
In the eyes of Democrats like Herstam, few, if any, politicians could make such a case better than Kelly. “I think he’s actually in a stronger position,” he said.
Other Democrats believe it’s not as simple. Chase Hardin was political director for Kelly’s 2020 bid, and before that, was a top political aide at Giffords, the gun violence prevention group that the couple founded together after Gabby was shot.
Although the Uvalde and Buffalo tragedies are dominating the conversation right now, Hardin said Kelly’s approach to the issue in the 2022 campaign will likely be the same as it was two years ago. “In terms of what he’s talking about and how it affects his race, if I’d make a wager,” he said, “I’d bet it hasn’t changed all that much.”
Even so, Kelly’s built-in association and history with the issue could take on a new meaning in an election where gun violence could be high on voters’ agenda.
"Sen. Kelly understood from the beginning that his advocacy on gun violence was always going to be front and center, whether it was smart politics to talk about it or not,” Hardin said. “He was never not going to be the gun violence prevention candidate.”
In response to questions about how much Kelly plans to elevate the issue in the race, campaign spokesperson Sarah Guggenheimer said he “shares the enormous frustration that Arizonans have with a Washington that again and again fails to act in the wake of horrific mass shootings and daily gun violence,” adding that Kelly supports steps to “make our children safer from gun violence.”
But, nodding to the issue that will dominate this campaign, Guggenheimer also said Kelly “can do more than one thing at a time and he’s continuing his work to lower costs and get our economy back on track.”
Arizona is far from the only battleground state where key races could be reshaped by the gun debate. Republicans, largely, have either stuck to the “thoughts and prayers” boilerplate or doubled down on opposition to any gun restrictions.
On the Democratic side, a number of candidates have stridently embraced gun reforms in the wake of Buffalo and Uvalde, even in the toughest states.
In Pennsylvania, the Democratic nominee for Senate, John Fetterman, tweeted that “Democrats need to be ruthless + united NOW” and do away with the chamber’s 60-vote threshold in order to pass “common sense gun control.” (Fetterman will face Mehmet Oz or David McCormick, both of whom have faced criticism for their campaign ads featuring themselves touting firearms.)
In Ohio, Nan Whaley, the Democratic nominee for governor, was the mayor of Dayton during that city’s deadly mass shooting in 2019. Since the Uvalde massacre, Whaley has taken to social media and TV to repeatedly attack GOP Gov. Mike DeWine for failing to do more to stop gun violence.
Others have been more circumspect. Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA)—considered along with Kelly to be among the Senate’s most vulnerable Democrats—has not made any similar calls for action to his one million followers on Twitter.
The Arizona race, however, could be the clearest test case for gun politics in this midterm election year. If Kelly’s present-day f-bombs, and his past as a vocal gun control advocate, aren’t a drag on him in this state, his success could buttress Democratic conventional wisdom that this is a winning issue for them—and perhaps spur more Democrats in office to work harder to pass reforms.
Molly Murphy, president of the Democratic polling firm Impact Insights, told The Daily Beast that, for most Democratic candidates, gun violence is a smart issue to center in a campaign.
“I don’t think there’s any liability to leaning in on this and using it as an opportunity to contrast with Republicans, who oppose reforms that most Americans support," she said.
But, Murphy added, it’s unclear whether this issue will have staying power up until the election—and whether a failure to pass any gun safety measures in Congress will complicate the debate.
“I’m worried it’ll be an issue we’re leading on, but that Republicans are shutting down, and voters will blame both parties,” Murphy said.
Arizona is an increasingly purple state, home to an increasingly vocal population of liberals who expect real progress from their two Democratic senators.
Progressives have been pleased with Kelly on this key issue, said Parris Wallace, the Arizona organizing director with the left-wing Working Families Party.
“We know he’s going to take action to protect our rights, our children and our families,” said Wallace. “Knowing that Arizona has a long history of keeping guns in hands, and in as many hands as possible, I’d hope that this issue would be a motivation for both voters and elected officials.”
Indeed, Arizona arguably has the most permissive gun culture of any battleground state. Giffords, the gun safety organization Kelly co-founded, ranked Arizona 42nd in its 2021 scorecard of state gun laws, behind Alaska and Texas. The magazine Guns & Ammo named Arizona the country’s most gun-friendly state.
Kelly began his gun violence activism well before Arizona started to elect Democrats like himself and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema. He and Giffords founded Americans For Responsible Solutions in 2013 to advocate for gun policy reforms and to support candidates who would pass them.
Almost always alongside his wife, Kelly was a frequent appearance at rallies and press conferences demanding action after mass shootings. After a gunman killed 50 people at a festival in Las Vegas in 2017, Kelly stood outside the U.S. Capitol and challenged his future colleagues to pass gun restrictions: “If you’re a member of Congress and you fundamentally believe laws don’t work, you should quit,” he said.
When Kelly launched his campaign to challenge then-Sen. Martha McSally, a Republican, in 2019, his political team hadn’t forgotten those comments. But Hardin, his former strategist, said they didn’t really want to.
“It was an early question about how to handle gun violence issues, and how he was going to talk about that when the campaign was getting off the ground,” Hardin said. But the strategist quickly realized that the reality was that “the NRA and the gun lobby are going to be lobbying these attacks on Sen. Kelly regardless of whether he talks about the issue.”
During the campaign, Kelly ended up striking a balance. He invoked his personal connection to gun violence to make strong calls for action, while leaning on his record as a military man and gun owner to signal that he wasn’t a radical.
That balance was on clearest display during a debate between Kelly and McSally, in which she repeatedly accused him of being a “political operative” for a group that bankrolls “extreme, left-wing candidates.”
Conspicuously, McSally declined to name the group when pressed by the moderator. Kelly obliged—and his response went viral on social media.
“The issue of gun violence is personal for Gabby and me, and I'll never forget what she went through for that year and a half,” he said. “So we formed an organization to try to make communities, and help communities, become safer from gun violence."
While he took the time to note he is a gun owner—“our rights and traditions are so important,” he said—Kelly closed with a statement that has, unfortunately once again, taken on a new relevance in the last week: “We can never let a bunch of kids in the classroom get killed and think there is nothing we can do about it.”
The exchange demonstrated that attacking Kelly on this issue is “a trap for Republicans,” according to a former aide to an outside organization that worked to boost Kelly in 2002.
On the way to his 2.4 percentage point win over McSally, Kelly did sustain more attacks on his gun record—and the NRA ended up spending nearly $500,000 on digital ads and other communication regarding the issue.
The Daily Beast reached out to three of Kelly’s likeliest GOP opponents—Jim Lamon, Attorney General Mark Brnovich, and venture capitalist Blake Masters—to ask about their views on gun reforms and whether they intend to make it a key issue in their case against Kelly.
In a statement, Masters responded, arguing that Kelly wants to “radically” restrict firearms rights. “He’s out of step with Arizona,” he said, “and I’m not going to let him get away with it."
The prospect of those attacks flying until November doesn’t seem to deter Kelly from vocally supporting a possible compromise gun reform bill that could emerge from a divided Senate. Bipartisan talks are continuing this week, spearheaded in part by his home-state colleague, Sinema.
To Kelly’s allies, his 2020 win solidified the fact that even a Democrat with a long record of gun activism could win in a purple state without running away from that record.
“He could easily make a calculation where he tries to triangulate and figure out what’s going to get him re-elected,” Hardin said. “And he’s declined to do so.”
