What kind of senator does Arizona want? Both of its seats in Congress’s upper chamber have turned over this year. One was held by Jeff Flake, an anti-Trump Republican whose approval ratings nose-dived as Donald Trump rose to power. Flake was no apostate—despite criticizing Trump’s behavior in office, he voted with the President more than eighty per cent of the time—but within months of Trump taking office he decided not to seek reëlection in 2018. Arizona didn’t want a sort-of-anti-Trump Republican senator.

The race to replace Flake pitted two of the state’s congressional representatives against each other. The Democratic nominee, Kyrsten Sinema, was a slick centrist from Phoenix who carefully put distance between herself and the rest of her party. The Republican, Martha McSally, a former Air Force fighter pilot, had not supported Trump in 2016, but she eventually came around, embracing the President during her primary battle against several full-throttle conservative challengers. On Election Day, Sinema beat McSally by two and a half points, becoming the first Democrat to win a Senate seat in Arizona since the nineteen-eighties. In a post-election memo obtained by the Washington Post, McSally’s campaign strategists blamed her loss in part on the fact that a “significant” number of Arizona Republicans, particularly women, are “hostile to the President.” Arizona didn’t want a sort-of-pro-Trump Republican senator, either.

In late August, John McCain, Arizona’s senior senator, died. McCain, too, had his battles with Trump. Last year, the former Republican Presidential nominee provided a crucial vote blocking the repeal of Obamacare—one of Trump’s biggest policy goals. His funeral, on September 1st, was a conscious gathering of what might be called the Establishment Resistance. To fill McCain’s seat, Arizona’s governor, Doug Ducey, initially appointed Jon Kyl, a former senator. But Kyl made it clear that he wouldn’t stay in the job long, and that he had no interest in running to keep the seat in 2020. McSally was mentioned as Kyl’s probable successor from the moment she conceded to Sinema. She was the preferred pick of the Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell. And yet Ducey, a cautious politician fresh off an easy reëlection victory, appeared to waver. There was talk of unhappiness with McSally among Arizona donors. She had to contend with the stigma of defeat.

On Friday, McSally met with McCain’s widow, Cindy, to apologize “for her lack of public praise for the senator on a defense bill named in his honor,” according to the Post—a move that seemed more like a calculated political chore than a genuine gesture. The same day, Kyl announced that he would resign at the end of the month. “You can see the dilemma he was in,” Grant Woods, a former Arizona attorney general and McCain aide, told me on Tuesday, speaking of Ducey. “He was getting major pressure from Washington. And yet he knew what was going on, on the ground here.”

On Tuesday, Ducey named McSally to the job. McConnell got who he wanted. But did Arizona? McSally’s still a few days from being sworn in, but in the state the talk turned immediately to whether she’d be able to hold the seat. In 2016, Trump himself won Arizona by just 3.6 points. McSally has already been rejected by voters once. Several names have been floated for possible Democratic challengers. The congressman Ruben Gallego is one. Mark Kelly, the astronaut and husband of the former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, is another. And so is Woods, who recently switched parties, and who endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Sinema in her race against McSally. “We have a long history in this state of people who were authentic,” Woods said, citing Mo Udall, Barry Goldwater, and McCain. (He declined to tell me if he had made a decision about running.) McSally, Woods said, had shown herself to be a “flexible” politician, willing to do what was needed in the moment. “The question,” Woods argued, “will be whether she can reshape that image during her next year in the Senate.”