Martha McSally Claims If Biden and Dems Win, They’ll Vote DC, Puerto Rico in as States: GOP Would ‘Never Get the Senate Back Again’

Senator Martha McSally (R-AZ) warned that, should Joe Biden win the presidential race and the Democrats retake both houses of Congress, they will make D.C. and Puerto Rico new U.S. states, which she baselessly claimed would doom Republicans to being in the minority in the Senate for a generation.

During a wide-ranging interview with NBC News’ Vaughn Hillyard, McSally, who was appointed to the Senate to fill an open seat after losing to Sen. Kyrsten Sinema in 2018, attacked the presumptive Democratic nominee and his party’s alleged “radical Left agenda.” She then claimed that, should the Democrats win back full control of Washington, they would vote to make the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico states, which, she claimed, would make it almost impossible for Republicans to ever regain the majority in the Senate

.@MarthaMcSally asserts this as a repercussion of a Democratic Senate:

“They’re going to make D.C. & Puerto Rico a state & get 4 new Democrat Senators. We’d never get the Senate back again. And look, this is just the implications of this seat, the implications of this vote.” pic.twitter.com/9TImijula7

— Vaughn Hillyard (@VaughnHillyard) August 11, 2020

That claim, however, is challenged by the facts. Puerto Rico has sent both Democratic and Republican delegates to Congress in the past 20 years, making its potential senators anything but a guaranteed lock for Democrats. And, as this electoral analysis of the Senate composition since 1961, even if the U.S. Senate gained a reliable two extra Democratic votes from D.C., that margin would’ve tipped the power balance away from Republicans for a just over four years across those six decades.

Watch the video above, via NBC News.

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