In a Monday e-mail to supporters, his campaign had one message: “Jesse Kelly wants to protect Social Security.”

The same message appeared as a note on his Facebook page, and he reiterated it again during an interview with a local radio station Monday morning.

“I will be on 104.1 FM at 8:00 am to correct Giffords’ distortion of my plan to save Social Security. We must make sure your money is there when you retire,” he wrote in a status update on his Facebook page.

In that radio interview, he laughed off a question about whether he wanted to privatize Social Security and Medicare. And a mailer he sent out after he won the primary features a table claiming that Kelly will “protect Medicare.”

His approach represents a marked shift from comments he made earlier on the campaign trail, when the emphasis was on how to eliminate both Social Security and Medicare.

“If you have any ideas on that, I’m all ears. I would love to eliminate the program,” he told the Tucson Weekly in 2009 when asked about his thoughts on eliminating Social Security.

When asked in a separate radio interview whether Social Security should be privatized, he said: “You must! ... Right now, you have to take steps to reform it, to privatize it, to phase it out.”

In the Tucson Weekly interview, he also answered “yes” when asked whether he would support eliminating Medicare. “But to say you’re going to do that instantly would be disingenuous and not realistic and not fair to the people who have earned it.”

His campaign manager, Adam Kwasman, said Kelly had not shifted gears and has always said he intends to protect people who have already paid into the benefit systems. “We want to transition ourselves,” he said.

Kelly himself told POLITICO in an interview last week he planned to keep his messages the same. “The campaign honestly doesn’t change. It’s the exact same thing,” Kelly said, sitting in the lobby of the Arizona Biltmore as the state’s party establishment gathered for a unity fundraiser in a nearby ballroom. “The message, the answers stay the same, because people actually realize that Gabrielle Giffords is actually extreme,” he said.

Still, his new emphasis is a reflection of a general election reality: Only one other Arizona congressional district has more Social Security beneficiaries than the Tucson-based 8th.

Democrats have already seized on various statements Kelly has made over the course of the primary campaign in an attempt to frame him as an extremist. In a memo released after Kelly’s primary election victory, Giffords campaign manager Rodd McLeod outlined a series of remarks Kelly made on Social Security, Medicare, and taxes that the Democratic campaign believes will hurt him.

Completely missing from that litany: Military, veterans and border security issues, three areas where Giffords has worked hard to define herself but where Kelly could gain traction. Kelly, 29 years old and six feet eight inches tall, dropped out of college to join the Marines—he led an infantry squad during the invasion of Baghdad—and pushed state Sen. Jonathan Paton, his Republican primary opponent, to the right on immigration.