But Kelly, who is running for a full term in November, stopped short of directly asking the President to campaign with him ahead of this year’s midterm elections when asked about that by CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”
“I will welcome anybody to come to Arizona, travel around the state at any time. As long as I’m here, if I’m not up in Washington in session, and talk about what Arizona needs,” the senator said.
When pressed by Tapper on whether he’s concerned that Biden may not be the best Democrat to keep Arizona blue in 2024, Kelly replied, “Not at all, Jake.”
Biden in 2020 became the first Democratic presidential nominee to win Arizona since President Bill Clinton did so in 1996.
In his interview, Kelly also criticized some of the Trump-backed Republican nominees on the ballot in Arizona this November for having “dangerous ideas.”
Tapper noted in the interview that Kelly holds the seat of the late Sen. John McCain, “who was a conservative, but he did work across the aisle,” before asking the senator, “What’s happened to the Arizona Republican Party?”
“I think right now that the folks you mentioned have some really dangerous ideas, and they’re not consistent with most Arizonans, even most Republicans in Arizona,” Kelly said.
“I flew my first space flight in 2001 and my last one in 2011,” Kelly said. “That was four flights over a decade, and the deforestation that you see across the planet is evident from space. And if one guy can see changes in our planet from low Earth orbit, we’ve got a problem.”
“We have this climate crisis that is affecting water in the West and these reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, have gotten to what are now historically low levels,” Kelly said. “And the rate of decline is such that we have to do more.”
