Two moderate Democrats are benefitting from mailers pitching them as “labor endorsed” — but those mailers aren’t coming from unions.
They come from a pack of big businesses interests.
As primary Election Day approaches, several corporations and commercial entities are pooling their money behind a few moderate Democrats in some of the most contentious battles for seats at the Arizona Legislature.
And serving those businesses and groups — which include Airbnb, the Arizona Association of Realtors, and Arizona Public Service — is a network of politicos and lobbyists led by a former top campaign advisor to Gov. Katie Hobbs.
Joe Wolf is one of Arizona’s most prominent Democratic political strategists. In 2022, he was the senior campaign adviser for Hobbs’ run for governor.
Nowadays, beyond running his consulting firm Fillmore Partners,1 he’s also the chair of Arizona Values Fund — a PAC that has been mailing out near-identical flyers in support of a few Democratic candidates: former Rep. Deborah Nardozzi and Reps. Alma and Consuelo Hernandez.
As you can see in the fine print, these mailers were paid for by Arizona Values Fund.
The PAC wasn’t active until June, when it received the following contributions:
$40,000 from the Responsible Tourism Coalition (which describes itself as “Arizona’s leading short-term rental organization” and received a $700,000 war chest from Airbnb to spend this election cycle)
$50,000 from the Arizona Association of Realtors
$25,000 from Arizona Public Service (APS)
$20,000 from Committee for Arizona Leadership (which takes most of its funding from Greater Phoenix Leadership, an organization of Arizona’s biggest corporate CEOs and power players)
To finish off the quarter, Wolf received $10,000 of that money, which he transferred from the PAC to his firm for services.
He declined to answer questions about the PAC’s goals, its support of the Hernandez sisters and Nardozzi or its coalition of funders.
However, Tom Farley, the chair of the Responsible Tourism Coalition, shared some thoughts on why he decided to contribute $40,000 to the PAC and join forces with the realtors, APS and business community high rollers.
“It really is about shared values in the policies, being supportive of those who are supportive of entrepreneurship and have a balanced approach when it comes to regulating, protecting private property rights,” Farley said. “Who is supportive of private property rights? Who opposes new taxes and fees?”
Farley lobbies on behalf of Airbnb. Before that, he worked for the Arizona Association of Realtors as its CEO for four years and many more as its lobbyist, he noted.
His current operation — Cornerstone Public Affairs — consists of four founding partners who merged their lobbying businesses together in the fall of 2023, Arizona Corporation Commission records show. One of the other partners is Chad Guzmán, who worked as an APS lobbyist during much of the 2010s.
Guzmán also worked with Wolf as one half of Fillmore Strategy, corporation commission records indicate. Wolf took full ownership of it when Guzmán left.
“I’ve know (Wolf) and (Guzman) for years, just like I have folks that are at the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and (Greater) Phoenix Chamber of Commerce,” Farley said.
Nardozzi — who’s running for a Senate seat representing North Tempe, South Scottsdale and the Gila River Indian Community — is challenging incumbent Sen. Lauren Kuby, a progressive Democrat who’s been outspoken on housing issues and critical of corporate housing interests during her time at the Legislature.
During an Arizona Clean Elections Commission debate that we hosted in June, Nardozzi argued that Arizona’s housing challenges stem from a lack of supply. Kuby pushed back.
“We need to make sure that short-term rentals don’t take over our neighborhoods,” Kuby said, adding that only a sliver of housing that’s built is considered affordable.
The Arizona Values Fund PAC spent more than $22,000 on the Nardozzi mailers.
Kuby thinks the PAC’s effort will ultimately backfire, arguing that voters in her East Valley district oppose corporate influence in politics and policymaking.
“It’s disturbing to me. It’s no surprise that we’re seeing this influx of money, but it’s very telling. It’s clear who the corporate interests are aligned with in this race,” Kuby told us. “They’re taking away from the housing supply. We have so many outside investors buying up homes and turning them into short-term rentals. I strongly believe we have to return the authority back to cities so cities can regulate them in allegiance with community interests.”
Nardozzi said she couldn’t speak to the independent expenditures or the motivations of Airbnb, APS, the Arizona Association of Realtors or the PAC that they’re funding.
“I can only speak to my own, and my campaign is funded five and ten bucks at a time by neighbors who are sweating the same kitchen-table math I am during the worst cost-of-living crisis in generations, and who feel betrayed that the incumbent keeps voting against affordable housing bills that would let young people finally buy a home here,” Nardozzi said.
Specifically, she cited Kuby’s votes against three variations on the “Arizona Starter Homes Act,” which would have barred cities from mandating HOAs, design features and structure of homes or private streets and roads for developments. In 2024, a handful of Senate Democrats joined Republicans to narrowly pass HB2570, while the House approved it in a nonpartisan split that affected both parties. When it reached her desk, Hobbs vetoed it. Its 2025 version — which was similar — passed the Senate with five Dem votes, but was not considered by the House.
Down in Tucson, Alma Hernandez — the centrist Democrat who often votes with Republicans and who’s running against challenger Rocque Perez in one of Arizona’s dirtiest primaries — is getting far more support from the PAC.
The expenditures on mailers promoting her have totaled about $54,700, the latest campaign finance filings show.
Hernandez didn’t respond to a request for comment, but Perez called it “no surprise” that the groups were spending to support his opponent, whom he called a “sellout.”
“When Airbnb, realtors, utilities, and other corporate interests spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in a Democratic primary, voters should ask what policies and priorities they’re investing in,” Perez told us. “My campaign has been unapologetic about standing with renters, workers, and stronger corporate accountability.”
For Farley, the question of who to support was driven more by the candidates’ approaches to lawmaking than any specific policy positions.
It comes down to one main question: Who’s open to a conversation?
“Sen. Kuby seems to be far more in her spot — it doesn’t really matter what the issue is — than Nardozzi is, even though Nardozzi has served in the House,” he said, adding that Hernandez sisters tend to operate with an open door — a lobbyists’ love language. “They (the Hernandez sisters) are not always going to vote with you, but they certainly will hear you out. And when they hear things negatively impacting their constituents or taking away opportunities, they will very much fight against those types of things.”
Farley said the PAC probably won’t spend any additional money in the last week before the primary election contests — it’s saving its war chest for the general election. And should Nardozzi and the Hernandez sisters win in their races, the Airbnb-funded PAC will most likely throw them more support, he added.
Generally, the Airbnb lobby has been pretty successful down at the Legislature, especially this session.
Of at least five bills that attempted to regulate vacation and short-term rentals this year — sponsored by a mix of Democrats and Republicans — all of them died in committee.
One, however, passed the House of Representatives.
HB2429 was sponsored by GOP Rep. Selena Bliss and would have allowed local governments to enforce more regulations on short-term rentals in relation to overnight occupancy rules, sex offender checks, regulatory permits and suspending them for violations.
But the bill languished in Republican Sen. David Farnsworth’s Appropriations Committee.
In April, Farnsworth told us he didn’t know why his committee didn’t consider it.
“At this point, I honestly don’t remember if I discussed (the short-term rental bill) with someone else and made a decision, or whether it just kind of fell through the cracks,” he said. “But of course, I should have had a follow-up conversation with the sponsor, which obviously I did not.”
After supporting the bill in an initial vote, Alma Hernandez switched up her position when an amendment was added that would have forced local governments to require sex offender background checks for rental stays.
Hernandez didn’t vote one way or another after the amendment was added.
And interestingly, just a week before, Airbnb donated another $250,000 to the Responsible Tourism Coalition, bringing the war chest to more than $400,000.
Election Rounders: Shortly after Gov. Katie Hobbs signed an executive order banning some state employees from using insider information to make money on prediction markets, Maricopa County Supervisor Thomas Galvin said he’d like to do the same with county employees, “especially during election season.” Government employees outside of Arizona have used insider information to bet on gambling platforms like Polymarket. For example, a U.S. Army soldier made more than $400,000 on the platform through a successful bet on former Venezuela president Nicolás Maduro’s kidnapping, while actively involved in the operation.
A win for school voucher fraud: Arizona Treasurer Kimberly Yee scored a legal victory when a Maricopa County Superior Court judge ruled she didn’t have to give 12News detailed spending records from the school voucher program. Judge Christopher Whitten ruled that the line-item transactions didn’t qualify as public records, and gathering all those records would have been unduly burdensome, per 12News. The news station sued Yee after she stopped providing detailed records on voucher spending last year. The station also sued Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne for similar records, where a settlement exposed that vouchers were used for trips to places like New York and Disneyland, Craig Harris reports for 12News. Yee took to Twitter to celebrate and rub salt into 12News’ wound.
Bring back the movies: Attorney General Kris Mayes joined 11 states in suing to block Paramount from buying Warner Bros. Discovery, per States Newsroom. The states argue the $110 billion merger would violate the Clayton Act, a federal anti-monopoly law. While the lawsuit focuses on how the merger could reduce competition among movie studios, it would also put the billionaire Ellison family in charge of the parent company of CNN, months after the Ellisons bought the parent company of CBS News.
Behind the Green curtains: The former GOP official now running as a sham Green Party candidate spent more than three-quarters of her $1.1 million in public campaign funds on a business in Nevada that didn’t exist until right before she started paying it, Caitlin Sievers reports for the Arizona Mirror. Risa Lombardo’s campaign paid Bootstrap Campaigns $887,000 for everything from mailers to social media management. The payments may violate Arizona’s campaign finance laws that require detailed accounting of who gets public dollars and which services they provided.
Watch out, Stanton: Kai Newkirk made it onto the Washington Post’s list of progressive candidates who might knock off Democratic incumbents. Newkirk is running against U.S. Rep. Greg Stanton in Arizona’s 4th Congressional District, where Stanton’s support for Israel and the Laken Riley Act might make him vulnerable to criticism from the left.
If we used prediction markets, we’d lay a $100 billion bet that President Donald Trump’s announcement tomorrow will not “destroy six years of narratives spun by liars in media and government,” as Seth Keshel, a renowned election bullshit artist and husband of Republican Rep. Rachel Keshel, prognosticated yesterday.
Our guess? Trump will walk up to the mic with a grim expression on his face and blame his 2020 election loss on Hunter Biden. Or communists. Or windmills. Or whatever else flutters through his mind.
But the truly funny part will come after Trump’s announcement.
That’s when Republican candidates for offices in Arizona will have to yell about whatever Trump comes up with tomorrow.
We’re hoping it’s windmills.
1 Correction: The original version of this edition called Fillmore Strategy a lobbying firm. It’s a consulting firm, as Wolf is not a registered lobbyist.