The late Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain would be happy that Joe Biden has won the presidency, his widow Cindy McCain said Monday.
“I think my husband would be very pleased,” Cindy McCain, who endorsed the former vice president and is part of his transition team, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Monday.
“We were good friends with the Bidens,” she continued. “And I just know he is looking down and going, ‘You did the right thing.'”
Her comments come as Biden, who CNN and other networks projected will become the 46th President of the United States after the battleground state of Pennsylvania on Saturday pushed him over the 270 electoral votes needed to capture the White House, continues to lead in the McCains’ home state of Arizona. CNN has not called the race in the state.
McCain, who was featured in a video that aired during the Democratic National Convention, leaned heavily into Biden’s character and empathy in her endorsement and said she was hoping to reach suburban women who may have been on the fence on who to support. She also appeared in an October ad for the Biden campaign, saying that he would “always fight for the American people, just like John did.”
Trump has frequently attacked John McCain by name, including in 2015, when he said he didn’t consider McCain a war hero because he preferred service members who were not captured. He again went after the late senator following Cindy McCain’s announcement, criticizing him for “endless wars” and the state of the Veterans Administration.
Cindy McCain said Monday that she believes Biden could make good on his promise to unify the nation.
When asked if she believed Biden’s commitment to working across the aisle to get things done was possible in the current political climate, she replied, “I really do. I would not have supported Vice President Biden if I had thought … anything but that.”
She noted that Biden and her late husband had experience “working directly across the aisle with each other, disagreeing a lot, but they were able to get things done because they did for the good of the country.”
“That is the difference in President-elect Biden with regards to this White House,” she said. “I believe they can get things done and I also think that they’re going to heal the country by working that way — and that’s of course what we all want.”
CNN’s Eric Bradner, Sarah Mucha and Chandelis Duster contributed to this report.
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