How Arizona GOP Sen. Martha McSally Plans To Overcome Great Odds In November

She broke a kneecap hiking the highest mountain in Africa and competed in an Ironman triathlon with blood dripping down her face after sustaining an injury. So with her poll numbers being weak, even in historically Republican districts, we can still expect Republican Arizona Sen. Martha McSally will not be dissuaded easily.

President Donald Trump has reportedly told his advisers that he is concerned about her chances in the Nov. 3 special election. Yet she told the Daily Caller she’s giving it all she’s got.

In “Dare to Fly,” McSally recounts her raw experiences such as overcoming rape, sexual assault, sexual harassment, and the loss of family and friends. She hopes the book can teach people how to convert struggles into progress. She calls this system a “misery database.”

“We all have that database of difficult things we have been through,” McSally told the Caller. “Sometimes people tap into it in order to hold themselves back. They dwell on the misery, they can’t sleep at night, it stops moving them forward. I created the term [misery database] and I talk about it in a way that strengthens you, to propel you to be able to push through hard things and do amazing things because you’ve been through hard things before.”

McSally faced setbacks on her path to becoming a fighter pilot from the very beginning of her military career. Her arm was severely injured. She was too short to be a pilot. She was dreaming of a position that didn’t even exist yet for women in the military.

Tragically, McSally faced tremendous hardship as a child. She said the death of her father Bernard McSally nearly broke her.

“Losing my dad at 12, and being very angry at God — the only way a 12-year-old can process it,” said McSally, “[then] being abused by my coach — robbing … me of my innocence while I was a hurting, vulnerable, fatherless kid. I have been to the depths of despair.”

Bernard told her on his deathbed: “Make me proud.”

McSally promised that she would. That moment, she says, is what drives her. She said she was later “able to find the peace of God and the hope of God to help me someday to get out of bed in the morning.”

“In the darkest and most difficult times in my life, I often found my last ounce of strength to persevere while thinking about my dad and his request,” she writes in “Dare to Fly.”

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