Meghan McCain ‘furious’ with Turning Point’s Tyler Bowyer for pointing finger at her family after GOP losses

Meghan McCain said Monday she is “furious” after a Turning Point Action leader accused her family of playing a role in Republicans getting trounced in Arizona’s midterm election.

“I am not in any way responsible for the cataclysmic bloodbath that just happened in Arizona,” McCain told KTAR News 92.3 FM’s Outspoken with Bruce & Gaydos.

McCain, the daughter of longtime U.S. Sen. John McCain, who died in 2018, spoke a day after getting into a social media dispute with Tyler Bowyer, chief operating officer of Turning Point Action. TPA is the political arm of Turning Point USA, the conservative activist group co-founded by the late Charlie Kirk.

“My family’s really angry, and I’m really angry because … I feel like it is so not the legacy that I think Charlie Kirk would want,” McCain said.

The quarrel started after Bowyer responded to a post on X by political commentator S.E. Cupp that suggested the “Arizona GOP should maybe give McCain Republicans again.”

Interestingly enough the McCains picked Martha McSally twice and she lost both our Senate Seats

But I guess @secupp is too brain dead to use Grok or maybe she’s just a liar

Another interesting tidbit— a poll was done in AZ-01 this year, a large one, asking who was most… https://t.co/uQipsYVWq9

— Tyler Bowyer (@tylerbowyer) November 7, 2026

“Interestingly enough the McCains picked Martha McSally twice and she lost both our Senate Seats. But I guess @secupp is too brain dead to use Grok or maybe she’s just a liar,” Bowyer wrote.

McSally won the Republican nomination for Senate in 2018 but was defeated by then-Democrat Kyrsten Sinema. She was then appointed by then-Gov. Doug Ducey to fill John McCain’s seat after his death before losing that seat to Mark Kelly in a 2020 special election.

Turning Point’s Tyler Bowyer says McCain family helped Democrats

Bowyer also cited a poll about who influenced voters in Arizona’s 1st Congressional District, a race in which Democratic nominee Amish Shah defeated Republican Jay Feely. He said the poll results showed Cindy and Meghan McCain at negative 15-20 points.

“And you both did zero to help a single Republican in Arizona,” Bowyer wrote. “Your family has helped a lot of Democrats out of Trump spite. The polling was the polling, in CD-1 even, the name wasn’t helpful.”

McCain, who co-hosted “The View” from 2017 to 2021 and currently hosts the “Citizen McCain with Meghan McCain” podcast, disputed Bowyer’s assertion and defended her father’s legacy.

“Look, I don’t pretend to think that I’m some influential person, I don’t,” she said. “But I think my dad’s legacy is still very important to many Arizonans who lived under his leadership for so long, and I think he’s an icon. Granted I’m his daughter, so whatever, and I am hurt, confused and, quite frankly, furious that somehow I and my dad’s legacy is being dragged into this.”

McCain said Bowyer’s assertion showed that “the people at Turning Point Arizona do not have any respect at all for my family’s legacy” and believe “they are in charge of everything related to Republicans and Republican voters in Arizona.”

“And let me tell you, this isn’t the only election cycle they’ve lost,” she said. “They’ve now lost six in a row in their home state. And I’m sorry, but I have nothing to do with this.”

Meghan McCain is not only prominent Republican to criticize Turning Point

McCain is not the first prominent Republican to take issue with Turning Point in the wake of last week’s blue wave election. Gina Swoboda, former chair of the Arizona Republican Party, criticized the quality of the candidates the group backed.

“If you believe in your platform and your policy, you have to put people forward that have a path to victory,” Swoboda told KTAR News last Wednesday.

McCain echoed Swoboda’s concerns about GOP candidate quality in Arizona after Democrats swept all statewide offices, won both chambers of the Legislature for the first time in 60 years and flipped two congressional seats.

“I think there’s a bunch of people running the Republican Party in Arizona that would rather have a MAGA candidate and lose than an independent maverick and win,” she said. “And I’m just saying, the evidence of what I just experienced on social media yesterday with Tyler really supports that.”

Bowyer followed up Wednesday with a post that said that he “would love” to sit down and have a conversation with McCain.

“I think it would be positive,” he wrote on X.

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