Dashing toward the finish line
Time to rummage the mail pile … 60 billion is a lot of gallons … And souvenirs from doomed campaigns.
We’re halfway through the primary election — do you know where your ballot is?
Ballots have been sitting in mailboxes across Arizona — or on kitchen tables or in piles of junk mail or somewhere, we swear we still have it — for more than two weeks now.
Voters have a mere 11 days left to fill out their ballots, drop it in the mail or run it down to a local polling station.
If you don’t have a ballot, you’re probably either not on the Active Early Voting List, or you’re an independent. Or you lost it.
Either way, there’s a simple solution: Call your county recorder. Today.
Independents can vote in either party’s primary, they just have to request a ballot. But today is the last day to request a mail-in ballot. Otherwise, you’ll have to vote in person early or on election day. Call your recorder.
And if you lost your ballot or want to sign up for the early voting list, your recorder can help you with that too.
Two-thirds of voters who will vote in the primary still haven’t voted. More than 60% of registered voters won’t even bother to vote in the primary.
The vast majority of politicians are elected in the July 30 primary, not in November.
At least six of the state’s nine congressional races will essentially be over after the primary. Only about a half-dozen of the state’s 30 legislative districts are competitive, meaning maybe a dozen of the state’s 90 legislative seats are really up for grabs in November.
And that’s not to mention the multitude of countywide races. If you live in a solidly Republican or Democratic county, well, pretty much all the races are over after the primary.
With the clock ticking away, campaigns are desperately trying to get voters to fill out their ballots and drop them in the mail before they forget and the election comes to a close. Sophisticated campaigns do that by tracking who has returned a ballot so far, and who has yet to vote.
Democratic strategist Sam Almy of Uplift Campaigns is Arizona’s top ballot tracker. Every election, he builds a public-facing digital dashboard that monitors who has returned their ballots across all 15 counties.1
The dashboard offers a detailed look into who is voting in Arizona and who isn’t.
Among the starkest disparities is that old people are voting, while young people are not.2
Voters over the age of 55 have returned about 80% of the ballots that election officials have received so far. Meaning people under the age of 55 have returned only 20% of the ballots in this election, even though they make up about half of all registered voters.
While the dashboard doesn’t show voter race or income, you can get a proxy by looking at districts with mostly white voters versus majority-Latino districts, or by comparing districts with higher incomes to lower-income areas.
In the financially well-off and largely white Congressional District 1, covering central Phoenix, Scottsdale and Fountain Hills, roughly 16% of voters have voted, and 22% of Democrats have already sent in their ballots for that district’s competitive Democratic primary.
In CD3, which is a majority-Latino district covering the southwest Valley, it’s basically half that. Only 8% of voters have voted, and only 12% of Democrats have cast their ballots.
The dashboard also shows which party has returned more ballots.3 And while that data can offer some insights into which team is most fired up to vote, it’s a lot more telling during the November election.
More useful for the primary perhaps is looking at which ballots independent voters are choosing. About 55% of independents who have voted so far have cast a Republican ballot, signaling either that they plan to vote for Republicans in the general election, or that that’s where the more exciting races are in the primary.
But the biggest takeaway is how few voters will ultimately determine the outcome of so many races.
Our politicians, for the most part, are picked by the select few who vote in primaries.
Overall turnout in the primaries should clock in at around 35%, as it has in past presidential election cycles. That means your next lawmaker, congressman or county supervisor will likely be chosen by a third of the Republicans in your area or a third of the Democrats in your area.
That’s somewhere around 15% of registered voters in your area.
Be part of that elite 15%. Fill out your ballot this weekend and send it in.
Water war accord: Three Arizona tribes signed a historic water rights settlement agreement that moves them closer to getting the rights to 60 billion gallons of water every year, the Navajo Times’ Donovan Quintero reports. The agreement also would allow the Navajo to move water around the Nation to areas where groundwater is unreliable, and secure $5 billion to build the pipelines to deliver water. The next step is to get federal lawmakers to sign off on it.
Speech is a privilege: Republican Rep. Alex Kolodin had his computer and laptop confiscated during a meeting at the Republican National Convention, as party officials kept a tight lid on what delegates could know, or say publicly, about the GOP platform, the New York Times reports. Kolodin objected to the fact that he and other delegates didn’t have a say in developing the party’s platform, calling it “all for show.” Kolodin also went off on “Democracy Now!” host Amy Goodman when she approached him for an interview. He declared the liberal radio host “literally tried to shoot our president.”
“You Democrats have lost your privileges to go on and on and on — I know who ‘Democracy Now!’ is — to go on and on and on about January 6 when you literally tried to shoot our president. First you tried to throw him in jail. Then you called him a fascist. Then you literally tried to strip his Secret Service protection from him. And then you tried to use the Deep State to kill the guy. So yeah, you’ve lost your privileges to talk about January 6,” Kolodin said.
Appeal, appeal, appeal: Opponents of the Secure the Border Act (Prop 314 on the November ballot) are filing an appeal with the Arizona Supreme Court after a Maricopa County Superior Court judge disagreed with their argument that the ballot measure violated the state constitution’s single-subject rule, the Arizona Mirror’s Gloria Rebecca Gomez reports.
Adapt, adapt, adapt: Despite doomsaying about the future of Phoenix, two local experts say Phoenicians can adapt to rising temperatures over the next decades. Matei Georgescu, director of ASU’s Urban Climate Research Center, and Ray Stern, a Republic reporter who wrote the 2013 book ”Apocalypse No,“ break down the challenges, like water supply, dealing with triple-digit daily low temperatures, and avoiding meth, which is a big reason heat-related deaths have jumped in recent years.
No such thing as free money: A property tax error from years ago means school districts in Maricopa County are going to take a $150 million hit, ABC15’s Elenee Dao reports. A judge ruled earlier this year that some property owners were improperly taxed when their houses were reclassified as rentals or secondary homes. The statewide cost is expected to be about $300 million.
Culinary crimes: A Tempe Municipal Court judge said trespassing charges can move forward against Austin Davis, the director of the nonprofit AZ HUGS who feeds unhoused people in Tempe parks, ABC15’s Ford Hatchett reports. The city says Davis needs to get permits to host “charitable food events” in parks. His organization did ask for a permit, but the city denied the request in January.
Big deals: Senate candidate Mark Lamb says rival Kari Lake offered him a cabinet position in the Trump administration if he would drop out of the race, the Republic’s E.J. Montini writes. Former state Republican Party Chair Jeff DeWit offered Lake a deal to keep her out of politics and she destroyed him by releasing a secret recording of him offering her the “bribe.”
Older than dinosaurs: A Snowflake man has been digging up footprints of giant lizards that roamed Eastern Arizona 240 million years ago, long before dinosaurs, AZFamily’s Mason Carroll reports. James Lang spent the past five years carrying or dragging the ancient tracks to his house (he eventually got a tractor to make it easier). The tracks are now being studied at the New Mexico Museum and he’s still digging up more.
“I come out in the morning, drink my coffee, and just sit there and look at that and think I have an entire museum in my front yard,” Lang said.
Fake elector and State Sen. Anthony Kern is following Donald Trump’s lead and selling “Indicted Trump Elector” T-shirts with his mug shot for $28 on his campaign website, Cronkite News’ Amaia J. Gavica reports as part of a profile of the collector junk being sold at the Republican National Convention.
Maybe the shirts can pull in the $2 million he’ll need to turn his flailing campaign for Congress around!
Also, if you’re looking for a birthday gift to celebrate the Agenda’s third birthday next month, consider this book of Trump tweets as poetry, “The Collected Poems of Donald J. Trump.” Either volume 1 or 2 is fine. The “covfefe” hats are also pretty cool.
Or better yet, upgrade to a paid subscription today!
Wouldn’t it be cool if the Secretary of State’s Office created a dashboard like this, considering they have all the data? (And a fun footnote to this footnote is, when ABC15 reporter Garrett Archer worked in the Secretary of State’s Office, he would tweet out all this data. But Katie Hobbs let Archer go when she took over as secretary of state, launching his illustrious career in TV. Before that, he had been a Republican campaign data specialist who was hired to the Secretary of State’s Office under Republican Michele Reagan, making him one of the rare reporters to come from the “dark side” into the light, rather than the usual reverse path. We did a Q&A with him about it, and other stuff.)
Shocking, we know.
For what it’s worth, Republicans have turned in more ballots, though Democrats have turned them in at a slightly higher rate.
The deep state ate my homework.
Alex Kolodin appears to be a deranged, deluded loon.