Playing defense

Dems will have to rely on a write-in to take the Senate … The legal inner workings of Arizona’s abortion ban … And please delete this email without reading.

Democrats’ biennial game plan to take over the House and Senate usually centers around the handful of competitive districts where a Democrat could take a Republican’s seat. 

Now, they’ll have to play defense in a left-leaning district that wasn’t center stage in the strategy before. 

Democratic Rep. Melody Hernandez was planning to coast into the Tempe-based Senate seat in Legislative District 8 that’s currently held by Sen. Juan Mendez, who is facing term limits and is now running for one of the district’s House seats.¹ She had already filed petitions to qualify for a spot on the primary ballot, and would likely have an easy path to the Senate with the district’s left-leaning electorate.

But on Friday, she got hit with a lawsuit arguing too many of her nomination petition signatures were invalid and that she hadn’t paid past fines. Yesterday, she announced that she was dropping out of the race, leaving Democrats counting on a write-in candidate and throwing the fate of this safe Democratic seat into question. 

As of today, Republican Roxana Holzapfel is running uncontested on the November ballot to represent the blue district.

We don’t think our art intern, ChatGPT, understands the rules of soccer.

“My focus is now on helping a Democratic write-in candidate for the LD8 Senate seat successfully cross the finish line, to help flip the legislature in November,” Hernandez wrote in her departing statement. 

Republican David Alger filed the lawsuit challenging Herndandez’s nomination signatures. He opened a campaign to run for a House seat in LD8 ‘s last election, but didn’t make the ballot. He also lost a bid for state representative in central Phoenix in the 2020 election.

The complaint against her is two-fold: that too many of her signatures were invalid for technical reasons, like the voter not actually living in her district or otherwise being ineligible to sign, and that she still had outstanding fines totaling more than $1,000 from filing campaign finance forms late.²

Politicos were already chattering about Hernandez before the lawsuit. She needed 405 valid signatures from registered Democrats or independents in her district and filed just 451, most of which were paper-based. Savvy readers will recall that any candidate without a cushion of at least 30% more signatures than the minimum often faces legal challenges. 

Rather than fight it in court, Hernandez dropped out.

Five hours after Hernandez posted that she was dropping out of the race, Lauren Kuby, a former Tempe city council member and failed 2022 candidate for the Arizona Corporation Commission, announced her bid as a write-in candidate for the seat. 

But write-in campaigns are time-and-resource-intensive affairs with no guarantee of victory. Even when it works, it can turn a safe Democratic seat into a tossup where the party has to spend time and energy. 

Here’s how it works: Kuby will need as many voters to write in her name on the primary ballot as she would have needed signatures on nominating petitions — in this case, at least 405 votes. If multiple Democrats file as write-ins, the one with the most votes (assuming that’s more than 405) wins.³

It won’t be the first time in recent history that Democrats have had to salvage a seat with a write-in campaign. In the last election, Democratic Rep. Diego Espinoza qualified for the ballot, won the primary election against fellow Democratic lawmaker Richard Andrade, then dropped out of the race to become a lobbyist for Salt River Project instead, leaving Democrats scrambling to fill the seat.⁴

Luckily for them, there was no Republican on the November ballot. Eva Diaz ran for the seat as a write-in in November and won with more than 6,600 votes. 

That’s not the case in LD8. Holzapfel ran for the office two years ago and only got about 37% of the vote against Mendez. But if Democrats can’t field a successful write-in candidate in the primary election, she’ll be the district’s next senator.

Hernandez is the latest to walk out of the revolving door at the Legislature. She’ll finish out the year after her former seatmate, Jevin Hodge, resigned amid sexual assault allegations. Hodge took over for Athena Salman, who left to take a job advocating for abortion rights. 

But she almost certainly won’t be the last candidate to get kicked off the ballot. 

Yesterday was the deadline to file lawsuits attempting to knock candidates off the ballot. Already four candidates have withdrawn from their races due to challenges, and dozens more candidates — from city council to Congress — will be heading to court in the next two weeks to try to keep their places on the ballot.

So you’re saying there’s a chance: Planned Parenthood has a small window to ask a Pima County Superior Court judge to suspend enforcement of the state’s territorial-era ban on abortion as they argue previously unlitigated constitutional issues, Capitol Scribe Howie Fischer reports. But even the organization acknowledges it’s a long shot. Meanwhile, the New York Times profiled Arizona’s Acacia Women’s Center, where Arizona’s looming abortion ban is deeply personal to the women awaiting treatment. 

“As the patients at Acacia scrolled through their phones and texted friends while waiting for their names to be called this weekend, they said the judges and politicians who supported banning abortion did not understand their lives, or why they had decided to get abortions,” the Times wrote.

Today is the 100th day of session!: Arizona’s governor and legislative budget experts started the year in disagreement about how bad the state’s financial deficit is, but a group of economists in the Finance Advisory Committee analyzed updated projections that found slightly better conditions. This fiscal year’s shortfall is now projected at $650 million, and next fiscal year is projected at $676 million. That’s down from a combined nearly $2 billion. 

“The good news is that the bad news isn't quite as bad. But the bad news is it's still really bad,” Finance Advisory Committee member Alan Maguire told KJZZ’s Mark Brodie.

Fairweather election deniers: A lot of people told Cochise County Supervisor Peggy Judd that they would bail her out of legal trouble if she fought to hand-count ballots, but few are coming to her aid in the criminal case against her for voting not to certify her county’s election in 2020, Votebeat Arizona’s Jen Fifield writes. So far, her online fundraiser had brought in about $3,500, and she’s due in court for oral arguments on Friday.

---

Instead of donating to Judd’s election denial fund, consider donating a subscription of the Agenda to someone in need.

---

Our Time to retire: Cochise County Court Administrator John Schow announced his looming retirement days after someone blasted out his dating profile on Our Time, a dating app for seniors, to county officials and the Attorney General’s Office, the Herald-Review’s Terri Jo Neff reports. He is married and told Neff that the timing of his resignation had nothing to do with the email. 

“With public trust in the government already low, I felt it was important to make those who work or interact with John aware of his behavior,” the email outing him read.

A lot of calls: Police received emergency calls from schools regarding threats of violence about 10 times a week from 2019 to 2022, and in 96 of those cases, police found a weapon in students’ possession, L. M. Boyd and Yana Kunichoff report in the Republic. The threats have steadily increased year-over-year, and the Phoenix Police Department fielded about half of the 801 gun threats across the state in 2022. The Republic created a database of incidents sorted by police department and will roll out more stories as part of the investigation this week. 

A lot of clubs: Gov. Katie Hobbs signed a bill from Republican Rep. Alex Kolodin to allow students to opt out of paying club fees. Kolodin said he sponsored the bill so that Jewish students didn’t have to pay for pro-Palestinian groups that he says call for “the annihilation of (Jewish) people,” University of Arizona Don Bolles Fellow Leah Britton writes. 

Disproportionate deaths: In Arizona, Black people die from opioid overdoses more than any other race or ethnicity, a new Arizona Department of Health Services report says, per Cronkite News’ Jack Orleans. 

Don’t outsource your janitor: Maria Sanchez, who has worked as a janitor at Phoenix City Hall for more than a decade, was fired for not wearing her uniform three times in her decade of service, the Republic’s Taylor Seely writes. Coincidentally, Sanchez had recently started unionizing against her employer, a company called 3H & 3H, which paid her 10 cents more than minimum wage after a decade with the company. City officials had nothing to do with the firing, since she worked for a contractor the city hired, and now they’re reconsidering that contract. 

"Everyone deserves to work and be compensated fairly, and when the contract is up for a rebid within the next few months, I am in favor of exploring options to prioritize companies who provide fair wages for their employees," Mayor Kate Gallego told Seely.

We’ve all accidentally sent a text to the wrong person, but this flub from a Republican lawyer at the state House takes the cake. 

The state House’s general counsel prepped a handy 24-slide presentation outlining a strategy for House Republicans to undercut a ballot initiative enshrining access to abortion in the state constitution. They could come up with competing, and more limiting, ballot measures through a strategy that “dilutes votes” of the original ballot initiative. 

How do we know that? It was sent to all House members, not just Republicans. And Democrats, predictably, forwarded it to everyone. 

“Please keep in mind that these discussions are all very preliminary and the draft ballot language and presentation is confidential and privileged and constitutes legal advice. Do not share outside of the House Majority caucus,” the attorney wrote in an email to the entire House. 

The email was quickly followed by a recall, though that clearly didn’t work. 

The slideshow presents a phased-out plan to “give voters something other than the extreme abortion-on-demand AAA Initiative.” Arizona for Abortion Access, or AAA, is behind the ballot initiative to protect abortion rights. 

The Republic’s Ray Stern spells out the strategy, which includes transmitting voter referrals to the ballot before Arizona for Abortion Access turns in their signatures. That way, Republicans’ measures show up on the ballot first.

1. Arizona term limits are basically a sham, as they allow lawmakers to move from the House to the Senate and back forever — they just can’t serve more than four consecutive terms in either chamber.

2. That law came about to bar one specific candidate from running for office: former lawmaker Doug Quelland, who owed $31,000 in fines from violating Clean Elections rules. His former seatmate, Linda Gray, ran a bill to keep him from being eligible to run again.

3. Only votes for qualified candidates who have filed paperwork to be write-ins count, so don’t bother writing in Arizona Twitter personality “Clue Heywood” on your ballot. It won’t count.

4. A few other semi-recent examples of surprise write-in victories come to mind: After qualifying for reelection in 2008, Democrat Mark DeSimone was arrested for domestic violence and dropped out of the race. Democrat Eric Meyer stepped in with a successful write-in campaign in the primary, then won a seat for Democrats in a competitive Phoenix district. And in 2010, Republican Don Shooter ran a successful write-in campaign to represent the Yuma area in the Senate, narrowly defeating Democratic Sen. Amanda Aguirre in the November election.