Spaceman, Senator, VP pick? Kamala Harris sizes up Mark Kelly

The rugged border lands around Douglas, Arizona, dip through precipitous canyons and shoot skyward on rocky mountain walls, impossible terrain for a 30-foot steel bollard wall but not for the cartels smuggling people and contraband from Mexico.

Sen. Mark Kelly, an Arizona Democrat under consideration to be Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, knows this expanse well — a fact that even the state’s Republicans acknowledge.

Donald Huish, the Republican mayor of Douglas, recounted a phone call with Kelly two weeks ago, when the two men talked through progress on making the small city an official, expanded port of entry into the United States. The senator has pushed hard for the move, and Huish has embraced it. Both of them see the plan as a way to inject economic stability into the region and possibly defang the coyotes and cartels prowling the passes.

“What gets me about Sen. Kelly is, yes, we’re in touch with staff on the issues, but he personally calls me on a regular basis, and I feel comfortable calling him,” said Huish, who identifies as a strongly conservative Republican. “I’m sure he’s taken some heat from some of his party concerning the border, but he understands it.”

Kelly, 60, is a relative newcomer to politics. But he would bring to the Democratic ticket a resume as remarkable as any political consultant could dream of: He is the working-class son of New Jersey police officers, a Navy pilot who flew 39 combat missions off the USS Midway in Operation Desert Storm, and a NASA astronaut and engineer who collected debris from the Columbia disaster, commanded a shuttle as the United States returned to space and flew the Space Shuttle Endeavour’s final mission.

Oh, and he is married to Gabrielle Giffords, the former Arizona representative whose near-fatal brain injury in a mass shooting made her a symbol against gun violence, in her battleground state and beyond.

All of that could be hugely helpful to Harris as she tries to recapture momentum among working-class voters and keep Arizona, where former President Donald Trump has been gaining an edge, winnable for Democrats.

But Kelly’s special appeal, beyond what other potential running mates from swing states could provide, is his expertise on the technical issues and politics of the U.S.-Mexico border, perhaps Harris’ biggest vulnerability, his backers say.

“That’s why I appreciate Sen. Kelly: He sees the dichotomies, the differences, the challenges that are not all the same on the border,” Huish said.

A Trump supporter, Huish said he was not a fan of Harris’. “Her heart’s in the right place,” he said. “Her policies are in the wrong place.” But if Kelly joined the ticket, he said, it would cause him to “struggle a little bit” with this vote.

Other vice presidential contenders, including Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky and Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina, have made their reputations by winning over Republican voters. Two other governors in the mix, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, hail from states that are perhaps more crucial to Democratic fortunes than Arizona — which, while President Joe Biden carried it narrowly in 2020, was more of a capstone to his victory than a linchpin.

Kelly’s political identity is tied directly to his appeal to Republicans — not just voters but also politicians and personalities — in a state where the Grand Old Party is bitterly divided between old-line Republicans allied with the legacy of Sen. John McCain and a new guard of Trump loyalists who hold their intraparty rivals in contempt.

As a fellow Navy combat pilot, Kelly bonded with McCain well before he entered politics, when he was best known in the state as Giffords’ husband. He was elected to the Senate in 2020, beating Martha McSally, a fellow military pilot appointed to McCain’s seat after his death, and then won a full term in 2022 by defeating a Trump-backed conservative, Blake Masters, by nearly 5 percentage points.

Meghan McCain, a conservative media personality and the senator’s daughter, estimated that about 15% of Arizona Republicans remained in the McCain wing. Kelly has been “not just respectful” to her father’s legacy, she said, but “I’d go so far as deferential.”

“He’s smart, he’s charismatic, he has a vision,” Cindy McCain, McCain’s widow, said in an interview. “You look at his record and who he is as a person. He’s a very lovely man, and of course he brings Arizona.”

With Kelly’s personal history comes a mystique that cannot be manufactured. Paul Fujimura, a former Naval flight officer who flew an A-6 Intruder with Kelly for two years, remembered being asked during the Gulf War to go after an Iraqi patrol boat making a run for it out of Kuwait Harbor. Kelly wanted to attack, but that meant a hard, 135-degree turn at 200 feet above the water, under heavy antiaircraft fire, and bringing another plane that was flying cover with them. At Kelly’s order, they went ahead and sank the boat.

“To order somebody else to go forward and put their life on the line is a heavy, heavy, heavy responsibility,” said Fujimura, a senior official in the Transportation Security Administration who this weekend will take over international programs at the U.S. Naval Academy. “You’ve got to be decisive and you have to commit. It takes courage.”

During Giffords’ first House run, in 2006, women at her campaign events wanted to know if she was really dating an astronaut, and if so, what was he like. As she painstakingly recovered from her brain injury, he was seen in the state as her steadfast supporter, even from space.

His willingness to stand by — and sometimes in the shadow of — a famous political woman has not been lost on Harris’ team, Democrats say. He has ties to the vice president from their time together in the Capitol, where she has served as the tiebreaking president of the Senate. His Senate chief of staff, Jennifer Cox, came from his wife’s sprawling political operation and is on leave to lead the Harris campaign in Arizona.

His standard campaign uniform, a Navy flight jacket and ship cap, is recognizable with blue-collar audiences anywhere; he has been stumping with endangered Senate Democrats across the country. He even has cordial relations with Elon Musk, now an avatar of the right, having served on a safety panel for Musk’s company SpaceX.

And Arizona Democrats are behind him. The state party’s executive board on Wednesday formally endorsed Kelly to be the vice presidential nominee.

“It would be good for Arizona as a border state, and it would be good for our country,” said Raquel Terán, a former chair of the Arizona Democratic Party now running for the House. “He is a coalition builder and he knows how to get things done.”

Kelly, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has his drawbacks. If a Harris-Kelly ticket captured the White House, the Democratic governor of Arizona, Katie Hobbs, would appoint a Democratic replacement for Kelly in the Senate next year, but the seat would be subject to an early special election in 2026, potentially putting it at risk. (Kelly does not face reelection until 2028.)

Daniel Scarpinato, a Republican operative in the state, noted that Kelly was not a barnburner on the stump. In Washington, the senator has often been overshadowed legislatively by Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, the Democrat-turned-independent who helped craft some of Biden’s signature accomplishments, especially the infrastructure law.

Kelly has also not faced the harsh spotlight of a national campaign and has potential political liabilities, like a high-altitude surveillance balloon company he helped found with Chinese venture capital, Scarpinato said.

But like other Republicans, Scarpinato circled back to the border, and Kelly’s deft handling of it, as a huge boon to a Democratic ticket.

John Giles, the Republican mayor of Mesa, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix in critical Maricopa County, agreed.

“He’s a wonky, nerdy guy who has to know the details of how things work,” he said. “He’s not a superficial guy.”

Kelly’s approach to the border embraces barriers like Trump’s wall in some places, though not across the entire frontier. He has also called for an immigration policy that treats migrants with respect and maintains asylum options. Most of all, he has pushed back against politicians (he does not say Republicans) who have swept into Arizona’s borderlands since the George W. Bush administration, held photo opportunities and partisan news conferences, and then returned to Washington only to snuff out legislative solutions and preserve their political talking points.

Local officials say Kelly is attuned to the complexities of the issue and grasps the difference between a smuggler’s haven like Cochise County, which includes Douglas, and a major port of entry like Yuma, Arizona, where migrants cross legally, appeal for asylum and are often released pending their court date.

Douglas’ police chief, Kraig Fullen, remembered when the only border barrier between his city and its southern sister, Agua Prieta, Mexico, was a dilapidated fence. Now, there are immigration officials, surveillance cameras and a towering metal fence the color of rust.

As Mexican criminal organizations have grown more sophisticated, law enforcement officials said, their smuggling operations have, too. Sheriff’s deputies arrest people from across the country, some of them teenagers, who have been lured on social media apps like TikTok to drive migrants through the desert for a few thousand dollars a night.

When the numbers of migrants began to climb to new heights last year, a Catholic church in Douglas transformed itself into a shelter. Volunteers collected donations and helped the newcomers.

“We’re a town of 17,000,” said Huish, the Douglas mayor. “We have zero capabilities of handling even 30 people staying overnight and waiting for transport out.”

Kelly is well aware. After Biden changed the nation’s asylum policies by executive order last month to try to slow the flow of migrants, the senator called Huish to ask if the change was working. But the flow of migrants had already slowed considerably, Huish said.

Now, he was focused on restoring an orderly flow of goods and people through a formal port of entry, complete with major infrastructure improvements that his senator, Kelly, is trying to secure.

If anything, Huish said, he is worried about Trump’s promise of across-the-board tariffs on most imports, including those that would cross at a new Douglas port of entry.

“That could be a problem,” he said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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