Why Arizona’s Mark Kelly could end up being Kamala Harris’s response to JD Vance

A first-term senator from Arizona, on paper, sounds like a perfect foil against a junior senator from Ohio, at least as running mates go.

With Kamala Harris ascending to the rank of presumptive Democratic nominee and nobody in her party apparently willing to challenge her for the nomination now that Joe Biden has dropped out of the race, all eyes have turned to Harris’s selection of a potential running mate ahead of her party’s convention, which kicks off August 19.

Reporting of her selection process has consumed much of the last two weeks. According to various outlets, the first female, Black vice president is looking at a list of (for lack of a better term) white guys as she seeks “balance” on the 2024 ticket and, importantly, an ally who can deliver a major swing state for her side. Essentially, she’s looking for a better option than her rival Donald Trump picked — a celebrity senator from a state he is virtually guaranteed to win, whose unfavorables have climbed since his nomination and whose past comments have forced his campaign on the defensive as they are unearthed by the press.

Enter Mark Kelly. The astronaut-turned-senator is reportedly on the shortlist of running mate finalists, along with a few others like Minnesota’s Tim Walz and Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro. Kelly hails from an important swing state — Arizona in his case, which was one of the Biden campaign’s surprise pickups in 2020. A win in that state would be an important step in preventing Donald Trump from reaching 270 electoral votes, and a member of the state’s congressional delegation on the ticket could theoretically boost Harris’s profile.

But Kelly’s importance on this factor is where his usefulness, at least in terms of pure Electoral College gamesmanship, may be greater than his competitors. The little swing-state polling from the post-Biden period presently available indicates that she trails Trump by five points — her greatest registered swing-state deficit — in Kelly’s. The addition of the Arizona senator, then, could be a boon for Harris in the state where she needs it most of all.

At the same time, Kelly’s greatest strength in terms of his resume for serving as running mate is also his greatest weakness. Because Arizona is such a purple state, a special election called to replace him could end up with the seat falling back into Republican hands. His absence from the Senate for campaign events could also complicate the whip count for Democrats, who hold a 51-vote majority in the upper chamber.

Still, the Arizona senator has taken strides within the past week to ensure his brand is in top condition and 100 per cent in-line with Harris’s. That has meant a somewhat awkward evolution of support for the union-boosting PRO Act, which he now claims he would have supported on “day 1” despite being long credited with being one of the main obstacles to the bill’s passage in 2021.

“Both my parents are police officers, my grandfather was a New York City firefighter,” Kelly said. “My mother was and after she was injured, on the job apprehending a criminal, it was the union that helped her get her benefits.”

Kelly’s unorthodox path to the Senate represents a journey and life story that many Americans could find compelling were the Harris campaign to make it a focus of messaging. The junior senator is a former astronaut who logged 54 days in space and was on the second mission flown by NASA following the destruction of the space shuttle Columbia upon re-entry in 2003. He and his twin brother Scott Kelly were the face of the agency’s “twin study” which examined the effects of space travel on the human body in comparison to the passage of time on Earth, a study accomplished with simultaneous examination of the two men while one brother, Scott, was in space.

His political life is just as gripping as his career in NASA. He entered elected political life following the harrowing assassination attempt against his wife, Gabby Giffords, a former congresswoman, during one of her own constituent events in an Arizona congressional district. The shooting led to her and Kelly becoming a major advocate for controlling gun violence.

Kelly was elected to the Arizona Senate seat he now holds in 2020, when a special election was called to nominate a successor to John McCain. The legendary Republican senator died in office after a storied career which culminated in his own presidential run and causing a political earthquake in 2017 when he broke with his party’s ranks to save the legislative namesake of his onetime main rival, Barack Obama.

Since he came to the Senate, Kelly has been a more consistent vote for Democrats and the Biden administration than his counterpart, Senator Kyrsten Sinema, who quit the Democratic Party to become an independent. He voted enthusiastically for the American Rescue Plan Act, the administration’s Covid-19 relief package, as well as the bipartisan infrastructure bill and the Inflation Reduction Act. Sinema, facing a Democratic challenger (as well as a GOP candidate), bowed out of the race earlier this year.

At the same time, he has criticized the Biden administration’s for its inaction at the US-Mexico border, which could cause some difficulties given that the Biden administration made Harris the point person to address the root causes of migration at the US-Mexico border. Harris was put in charge of addressing the root issues behind migration by the president, making it an issue around which Republicans plan to center their attacks.

Kelly has hewed closer to Democratic orthodoxy when it comes to defending reproductive rights, writing in an op-ed for People Magazine with Giffords about how they planned to have a child through in vitro fertilization at a time when it has come under threat from Republicans.

Arizona’s junior senator has also carried on the support for Ukraine which McCain was known for, an issue on which he sharply contrasts with his potential rival for the vice presidency. By contrast, Vance has opposed offering more aid to Ukraine in its war against Russian aggression.

Earlier this month when NATO held its summit in Washington, Kelly criticized Trump saying that if countries did not spend two percent of their GDP, he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want.”

“If you just listen to what Donald Trump has said and continues to say about not only Nato, but about other alliances, he is a danger to national security,” Kelly told The Independent at the time.