Digging up the down-ballot

All the numbers fit to print … Flip or be charged … And Dagny fanboys unite.

Elections provide a whole lot of numbers you can slice up a bunch of different ways. 

As political nerds, we can spend all day geeking out on fun little stats — some insightful, some interesting, some stupid. 

In fact, that’s what we did yesterday. 

So without further ado, here are some of the random stats we found from last week’s primary elections. 

We have no idea why our art intern, ChatGPT, decided this was the image today, but it’s kinda pretty.

880: The total number of candidates who ran for local office.¹ Maricopa County obviously led the way with 208 candidates, but we gotta hand it to the Camp Verde candidates. They really went after it. A dozen people ran for the three open seats on the town council. Nearby, eight people ran for three seats on the Cottonwood council. Must be something in the water. 

297: The number of city council, town council, and mayoral seats up for grabs. They’re the ones who oversee your police departments, decide whether to fix the pothole in front of your house, and generally deal with all the local stuff that comes up. If you blinked, you might’ve missed out on deciding who wins these races. A lot of cities and towns use the primary as their election day and only hold elections in November if there’s a runoff.

206: County seats up for grabs this year. We’re talking about the county supervisors who decide your property tax rates, the assessors who decide how much your house is worth, the treasurers who keep track of your payments, the constables who knock on your door if you don’t pay, the sheriff who sends deputies to find you if you’re not home, the county attorneys who decide whether to charge you, and the judges who decide whether you go to jail for not paying.

131: Local races that only had one candidate. That means one-quarter of local offices were already decided even before the primary election. These single-candidate races are more common than you might think. A lot of counties only had one candidate for about one-third of their offices.

90: County races without a Democratic candidate. Democrats didn’t run any candidates at all for county offices in Gila and La Paz counties. 

51: County races without a Republican candidate. The GOP managed to field candidates for at least some county offices in each county. But their ranks got pretty thin in some places: Just two Republicans ran in Apache County and three in Santa Cruz County. 

45.9%: The voter turnout rate in Yavapai County, the highest in the state. Gila County was close behind with 43.3%. Yuma County was at the opposite end of the spectrum, at 20.7%.

9: Races that didn’t have any candidates from the two major political parties. Four of those races were in Greenlee County, where no Democrats or Republicans ran for one of the three supervisor seats, assessor, treasurer, or superintendent of schools. But there are some independents in the mix, too. 

6: The number of write-in votes for two seats on the Hayden Town Council. Those were the only ballots cast in those races, making them the smallest vote totals of any race we could find.  

2: The number of votes separating two candidates running for a seat on the Payson Town Council. Political newcomer Charlie Bell is leading longtime Council Member Barbara Underwood, though the race is headed for an automatic recount. 

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Guilty as charged: After former Trump attorney Jenna Ellis agreed to cooperate in exchange for dropping her charges on Monday, Republican activist Loraine Pellegrino became the first of 11 electors charged in Arizona’s fake electors case to plead guilty yesterday, Politico reports. Her admission to one charge of filing a false instrument won’t land her any jail time, but three years of probation.

Battling ballot measures: A Maricopa County Superior Court judge ruled the Legislature’s referral, the “Tipped Workers Protection Act,” will remain on November’s ballot after a group advocating for wage increases in the service industry challenged the ballot measure for being deceptive, per the Arizona Mirror’s Caitlin Sievers. That group, Raise the Wage AZ, put up its own ballot measure called the “One Fair Wage Act,” which would actually increase tipped workers’ wages, while the legislative referral would allow employers to pay tipped workers 25% less than minimum wage if that make $2 more than minimum wage with tips included. 

Back to the desert: Kamala Harris and her new VP pick, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, will visit Phoenix on Friday at a rally in a yet-to-be-announced location as part of their campaign tour of swing states, the Republic’s Laura Gersony reports. It will be Harris’ eighth visit to Arizona since 2023. Meanwhile, “the Trump Campaign” sans Trump or his running mate JD Vance, but including surrogates Kari Lake, U.S. Reps. Eli Crane and Andy Biggs and others are hosting a prebuttal press conference in Chandler on Thursday to denounce Harris’ “Unruly Border Crisis & Extreme Agenda.” 

Bureaucracy is blazing: After the Earth experienced its hottest year in 2023 (and this year could be even hotter), a dozen government workers from cities like Phoenix are meeting monthly to discuss extreme heat. But often times officials don’t have the political power to enforce heat-mitigation policies, Grist’s Zoya Teirstein writes. Arizona got the country’s first statewide chief heat officer this year, but it’s up to lawmakers, mayors and the governor to follow through with mitigating measures like tree planting, making reflective rooftops and establishing cooling centers. Speaking of heat, Attorney General Kris Mayes is suing the owners of the Buenas On 32nd apartment complex on Indian School Road after residents went without AC for two months, per the Phoenix New Times’ Morgan Fischer. 

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The lawsuits won’t stop: A Republican-backed group is suing Arizona county officials for not searching for noncitizens on the voter rolls and kicking them out, Capitol scribe Howie Fischer writes. America First Legal claims Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer is breaking the law by not sweeping voter rolls of those who signed up to vote using a federal form, which only permits them to vote for president and members of Congress.

The latest news in the investigation into Apache County Attorney Michael Whiting’s alleged misspending of tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars is so crazy, it deserves its own section. 

Whiting has an “alter-ego as a fanboy of a Norwegian pop singer” Dagny, per the Republic’s Robert Anglen and Elena Santa Cruz. They unearthed several social media posts where Whiting declares his adoration for the singer, and a now-deleted video where he makes fun of his own anti-bullying merchandise — a pink shirt that says "Sober Boys Rock” — in a Swedish hotel room with a woman who runs a Dagny fan page and another who’s been photographed wearing the shirt and toting Apache County gift bags.  

After news of the investigation broke, Dagny fan pages deleted the video and cropped Whiting out of photos. But those social media posts show he took four trips to Europe to attend Dagny concerts in 2022. 

1. Hank did the math in his head and guesstimated 840. Not bad.