Cindy McCain, Widow Of GOP Sen. John McCain, Endorses Joe Biden

Cindy McCain, widow of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), has officially endorsed Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden for president. 

“My husband John lived by a code: country first,” she wrote Tuesday on Twitter. “We are Republicans, yes, but Americans foremost.” 

Biden, she added, is the only candidate in the presidential race who “stands up for our values as a nation.”

Though McCain’s statement represents the first time she’s explicitly endorsed the former vice president, she has gone to bat for Biden before. 

During the Democratic National Convention, McCain was featured in a clip that celebrated Biden’s friendship with her late husband, who died in 2018 of brain cancer.

“They would just sit and joke,” McCain said in the video of the two men, who developed a close friendship after meeting in the 1970s, when Biden was a young senator and John McCain served as his military aide during an overseas trip. 

“It was like a comedy show, sometimes, to watch the two of them,” Cindy McCain said at the DNC.

Like her husband, who’d been described as a “critic in chief” of the Trump administration, Cindy McCain has been similarly vocal in her criticism of President Donald Trump. The couple’s daughter, Meghan McCain, has also been an outspoken critic of the president, who has often expressed his dislike for the late senator, once exclaiming that he didn’t consider the former Vietnam prisoner of war a hero. 

“I feel like right now the president doesn’t have my back, he doesn’t take a stand on things that are really important and we have a time of crisis,” Cindy McCain told the Arizona Republic this week of her decision to back Biden. “I’m worried that this could go further than it should. My point in getting on board with Joe is that he’s proven — he’s been there. I’ve known him for 40 years. I know his character and his leadership and his honor and his integrity and those things are very important to me.”

Trump responded to Cindy McCain’s endorsement by trashing her late husband and Biden.