Martha McSally still hasn’t figured out why she lost last year’s election. Or, at least, she’s not admitting it.

Arizona’s appointed senator on Tuesday chalked up her loss to Democrat Kyrsten Sinema to one major factor: time.

As in, too little of it between the primary election and general elections.

“We didn’t get a chance for (voters) to get to know me, what I’ve done all my life, what I did in the House,” McSally told reporters on Tuesday. “We were very aware of these challenges at the time but we ran out of airspeed and altitude. And we weren’t defined and resilient enough.”

The problem? She changed her story

McSally seems to think that had she just had another few weeks in the general-election race, she wouldn’t hold the distinction of being the first Arizona Republican to lose a U.S. Senate race in 30 years.

That’s wishful thinking.

The problem wasn’t that McSally didn’t have the time to tell her story. It’s that she fundamentally changed her story.

It wasn’t that she wasn’t well enough defined for general-election voters. It’s that she defined herself as Donald Trump’s bestie.

After Jeff Flake bowed out, the congresswoman who represented the state’s most competitive district – a moderate who had kept her distance from Trump – overnight became the president’s most enthusiastic supporter.

Trump did not look good on her

Where she once sponsored a bill offering citizenship to DACA students – the ones she said were brought here “at no fault of her own” – suddenly she opposed that plan.

She asked her colleagues to remove her name from the bill and quietly removed a video of herself calling on Congress to exercise compassion and provide that pathway to citizenship to DACA.

Where she once touted doable solutions to actually fix our immigration system, McSally became joined at the hip with a president more interested in stoking fear and stirring up the base than in solving problems.

Trump, of course, is always going to be Trump. But McSally decided to be Trump, too, and it was a bad look. Meanwhile, Sinema not only embraced the middle. She dumped on her own party, and it was an exceedingly good look.

At least moderate Republican women and independents thought so. Roughly 185,000 voters cast ballots for both Republican Gov. Doug Ducey and Sinema.

Not much has changed for McSally

Given today’s Republican Party, McSally had to take a hard-right lurch to win the primary over the far-right MAGA queen, Kelli Ward.

But McSally continued her embrace of Trump during a general election campaign that should have been all about attracting independents and buttoning up moderate Republican women who saw Trump as a total turnoff.

And in her first year as a senator, nothing much has changed.

She passed up an opportunity to join with six other Republicans and Democrats in voting for the House-passed plan to declare a temporary truce with Trump and end the government shutdown. She supported Trump’s national emergency declaration to bypass Congress in order to get funds to build his border wall.

It should be clear to McSally that a campaign chiefly consisting of kissing up to President Trump may win you a primary, but it'll cost you an election. Or possibly two elections.

Will moderates come around in 2020?

In 2020, moderate Republicans and independents will call this race, as they did in 2018. Democrats, with Mark Kelly as their candidate, are licking their lips at the prospect of snagging a second Senate seat in Arizona.

It’s strange really. Once upon a time, McSally would have been the Democrats' worst nightmare, a moderate Republican who could appeal to voters in the middle, the ones who are sick to death of partisan trench warfare.

But we haven’t seen that McSally in a long while.

Instead, Arizona's appointed senator figures if she just has more time, those moderates and independents will come around and do in 2020 that which they declined to do in 2018.

McSally doesn't need more time for her campaign. She needs less Trump.

Reach Roberts at laurie.roberts@arizonarepublic.com.