Just a few weeks ago, Senate candidates Martha McSally and Mark Kelly were gearing up for a battle royale over prescription drug prices, health care, and gun safety as they raced towards the Nov. 3 election.

Their schedules were packed with fundraisers and voter meet-and-greets. Their teams were building out content for TV and digital ads.

With the coronavirus upending everyday life, the race for the seat once held by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is suspended in time.

The last significant moment in the race for the seat dates to late February when President Donald Trump headlined a massive campaign rally near downtown Phoenix to shore up Republican support for him and for McSally, whose fortunes are tied to his.

At that rally, both Trump and McSally attacked Kelly.

“The race is sort of frozen in time," said Andy Barr, a Democratic political consultant who is not affiliated with the Kelly campaign. "It makes resources even more important because field events and all that other stuff are just not going to happen for the foreseeable future. There will be no rallies. There will be no voter contact.”

At a time when most candidates’ fundraising has fallen off a cliff, he said, Kelly’s financial advantage is more important now ever.

“It’s just going to shrink the time that McSally would have had to close the gap both with resources and with voters," Barr said. "Everyone’s going to effectively lose three months of this campaign cycle.”

McSally is among a handful of GOP senators who Democrats hope to oust in their effort to claim the Senate majority.

The Cook Political Report, which analyzes Senate races around the nation, rates the race a toss-up. On Thursday, the website Sabato’s Crystal Ball, reclassified Arizona’s special election to “leans Democratic” from “toss-up” status.

The website, a nonpartisan project of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, attributed the move to recent polling on the race, Kelly’s fundraising advantage, McSally’s 2018 loss to Democrat Kyrsten Sinema, and her struggle to translate her background as a retired Air Force colonel and former combat pilot, to her Senate candidacy.

“She has spent much of her time as a Senate appointee trying to consolidate support on the right, a task she apparently has not yet accomplished given that Trump appears to be doing better in the state than she is,” the website said in announcing the race’s changed rating.

Polls released before the pandemic suggest the contest was competitive: McSally and Kelly were either locked in a dead heat or McSally was trailing him. One poll suggests more voters disapproved of the job McSally was doing in the Senate than approve of it.

Chad Heywood, a Republican political consultant, said the moment is likely advantageous for incumbents, including McSally.

They have real-time access to information on the pandemic, resources and access to the levers of government.

But, “it basically freezes your fundraising,” Heywood said. “You’re in a situation where you probably don’t want to ask for money anymore. People’s net worth is going down, their discretionary income has gone down, they’re freezing their expenditures.”

The Senate race has transformed from a marquee match-up to COVID-19 information-sharing effort.

“You can’t really overtly campaign on anything because what people care about is how you’re handling the immediate impact of all of this,” Heywood said.

Until recently, McSally was appealing nearly every day for campaign cash in an effort to keep pace with Kelly in a contest that could cost upward of $100 million in spending from all those interested in its outcome.

Today, she's not even asking for money. Instead, McSally is raising money for 15 days for The Salvation Army of Arizona; her campaign staff is volunteering at the non-profit; and she is donating her April Senate paycheck to help those affected by the pandemic.

“For now, I am sending every ounce of my energy making sure that I am helping Arizonans,” McSally said during an interview Thursday. “With every moment I have, with every capability I have, with everything I can do as a person, as a senator and as a candidate, this is an unprecedented, unprecedented challenge that has just caused so much suffering for so many people in Arizona and I’m doing everything I can.”

The campaign, she said, “will come later.”

As a senator, McSally has voted for the coronavirus emergency relief packages. These days, McSally is talking nearly round-the-clock with local officials, industry groups and business owners about how to access the relief funds. And she has fielded dozens of questions during three tele-town halls with constituents focusing on the pandemic.

McSally said her position as a senator affords her the ability to help Arizonans in a meaningful way.

“Those who are not in a position to do that are on the sidelines,” she said.

Kelly, a retired NASA astronaut, is still fundraising for his campaign and has an ad up on TV focusing on the cost of prescription drugs.

Starting on March 21, he directed his campaign to begin using its donor list to raise money for the Arizona Food Bank Network. The campaign has raised nearly $20,000 so far and is continuing its fundraising efforts for the food bank, said Jacob Peters, Kelly’s spokesman.

Kelly’s voter organizing team starts every call to volunteers and voters by asking them how they are doing amid the pandemic.

They direct them to the state’s 2-1-1 hotline if they need help. They encourage those who are able to volunteer to do so at their local food bank and have reached thousands of Arizonans over the past couple of weeks.

While McSally was on Capitol Hill voting for Congress’ recent $2 trillion coronavirus emergency relief package, Kelly was talking to local mayors, front-line health care workers and small business owners about their concerns.

Eli Schneider, owner of Bentley’s House of Coffee & Tea in Tucson, which Kelly and his wife frequent, said Kelly checks in with him regularly.

Schneider has applied for financial assistance under the federal relief package and his 12 employees have filed for unemployment.

“It was just nice to be able to feel like someone was on your side,” Schneider said.

Kelly took the worries he was hearing, and amplified them in media interviews.

These days, he has pivoted away from his biographical stump speech to connecting virtually with families that are hunkered down at home. On Wednesday, Kelly and his twin brother, retired astronaut Scott Kelly,donning their NASA flight jackets, launched a weekly story time on Instagram Live to entertain kids and ask them to do their part to stop the spread of the virus.

He likened today’s stay-at-home situation to a space mission.

“You’re part of a crew — a team. And your family right now is ... part of this team,” Kelly said. “And when you’re a crew member or a team member, everybody’s got to do their part. And I know for some of you this might not feel exactly like a space mission, but you could compare it to one, and you could think of yourself as one of the crew members.”

For the kids at home, Kelly said, part of their role is to do their chores, do their school work, work together as a family and listen to their parents.

“That’s what we’re all doing right now: we’re trying to accomplish a mission together, either as a family, as a state, as a country, as a community, to get through something that might be a little challenging, but is also really important.”

Have news to share about Arizona's U.S. senators or national politics? Reach the reporter on Twitter and Facebook. Contact her at yvonne.wingett@arizonarepublic.com and 602-444-4712.

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