Gotta collect them all

Candidate playing cards … Still the king of crowds … And the nut doesn’t fall far.

Figuring out who to vote for, and who Arizonans will elect each election season, is a game of strategy. 

So we made it an actual game! 

Our readers told us they loved our primary prepping series breaking down the bios of each primary election candidate in the survey we put out a few weeks ago. So we’re doing something similar by making every candidate in a competitive legislative election their own playing card.  

And we’re throwing in a “district flashcard” with details of the competitive districts they’re running in, too. Start collecting them now, because we’re doing the same thing for the winners of the election — so you can have a full legislative deck. 

First up, Legislative District 2. Sen. Shawnna Bolick is fighting off a challenge from current LD2 Rep. Judy Schwiebert. 

With Schwiebert looking to switch chambers, there will be at least one new lawmaker representing the district.

Republican Rep. Justin Wilmeth is teaming up with newcomer Ari Daniel Bradshaw to win the district’s two House seats. 

Democrats only nominated one candidate, Stephanie Simacek, for the two seats. They hope the “single-shot” strategy will help her overcome the district’s Republican advantage, though it means at least one of the district’s representatives will be a Republican. 

See full-size images of all the cards here.

Still weird: Donald Trump delivered a fact-challenged speech in Glendale Friday, drawing a marginally larger crowd than Kamala Harris did at the same venue a week before. Anti-vax longshot presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy dropped out and endorsed Trump, as expected, while Trump focused big chunks of his speech on the election that’s about to be stolen from him and the border, including praising the good old days when Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio ran the border. 

Barely even wild: The Democratic National Convention wasn’t very “weird,” the Republic’s Bill Goodykoontz writes as he rounds up the convention’s top five “wildest” moments, which also weren’t that wild. 

“Call me square but the light-up cowboy hat has never been a look I embraced. But people aren't wearing fake bandages on their ears in homage to their leader,” he wrote. 

Discrimination and nondiscrimination: Trans Arizonans do not need to undergo gender-affirming surgery in order to change the gender on their birth certificate, Capitol scribe Howie Fischer reports. A federal judge declared state laws and policies requiring surgery in order to change birth certificates are unconstitutional and discriminatory. And in Pinal County, Supervisor Kevin Cavanaugh, who recently lost his race to become sheriff and suspects his county’s election was rigged, was the lone vote against updating its employment nondiscrimination policy to include gender identity and other currently unprotected categories, which was part of a requirement to receive some federal funds, Pinal Central’s Mark Cowling reports. 

“If I were to simplify (the policy) for everybody, don’t discriminate. … Just don’t discriminate when you’re hiring, firing, promoting, demoting,” Pinal County Attorney Kent Volkmer told the board. 

Now that’s enforcement: Nearly 200 candidates for offices in the Navajo Nation may be kicked off the November ballot thanks to new tough transparency laws that actually punish candidates for not filing campaign finance reports, the Navajo Times’ Donovan Quintero writes. Candidates still have time to appeal, but beyond being kicked off the ballot, violations could result in jail time. 

Election frauds: Election officials in swing states across the nation are prepping for another Trump-inspired election rejection, putting new laws and regulations on the books to try to ensure that the votes that are cast are counted, the team at Votebeat writes. In Arizona, officials hope that the indictments of Cochise County supervisors, who attempted to reject their county’s election results, will give other supervisors pause if they’re considering not certifying their elections. 

The legal way!: Republican U.S. Rep. Juan Ciscomani is trying to balance his own personal story as a child immigrant with his support for Trump, who frequently demonizes immigrants, in one of the most competitive U.S. House races in the country, the New York Times writes. 

“People know that we’re not talking about being anti-immigrant. We know that we’re not talking about the immigration process that I went through. This is not about that. This is about tackling the aspect of it that people are breaking the law,” Ciscomani told the Times. 

How much did that logo cost?: It took Arizona a year to draft up a new branding logo, which Gov. Katie Hobbs unveiled last week, the Arizona Mirror’s Shondiin Silversmith writes. The consulting firm who helped come up with it says the logo represents Arizona’s diverse culture and they hope that “every Arizonan can look at this new brand and see a piece of themselves in there.” 

The young deciders: 12News’ Brahm Resnik sat down with four Gen-Z voters to find out how the kids these days feel about their options on the ballot. It was a great little segment that’s worth a watch if you don’t have a teen in your life to ask.

Maricopa County Sheriff candidate Jerry Sheridan has spent the last two election cycles trying to distance himself from his former boss, Joe Arpaio. 

But he may have undone some of that hard work by appearing on stage with Donald Trump on the seventh anniversary of Trump’s criminal pardon of Arpaio. 

Not to mention, he seems to have taken on Arpaio’s campaign pledge to put animal abusers’ “asses in jail.”