Rebel vs Redeemer

Better than playing video games … Better than 2020 reruns … And piercing your right ear is holy.

Republican voters in Arizona’s 3rd Congressional District have two wildly different options on their primary ballot: an election denier who attended the January 6 riots, or a moderate Republican who considered joining the race as a Democrat. 

Jeff Zink has earned his spot in the far-right as the party's quixotic 2022 challenger to Democratic U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego in this West Phoenix liberal stronghold. Jesús David Mendoza is starting his political career in the middle, which hasn’t been easy. 

“By people on the far right, I get called a Democrat, I get called a RINO, a Democrat with an ‘R’ next to his name. ... And then on the far left, I get the same flack... ‘You're like a cockroach voting for Raid,’” Mendoza said. 

Our art intern, ChatGPT, can turn any quote into art.

The chances of CD3’s voters electing a Republican to take Gallego’s seat are little to none — the number of Democratic voters more than triple the number of Republicans in the district. 

So the press has understandably mostly focused on the Democratic primary race between Yassamin Ansari and Raquel Terán. But the Republican side of the ticket is just as interesting. 

Mendoza is a software engineer who moved to the U.S. from Colombia when he was 2, and he grew up to earn degrees in political science and human rights. His voter registration history is checkered with changes from independent to Republican and even a two-month stint as a Democrat. 

Zink ran a 2022 campaign for the CD3 seat and lost to Gallego resoundingly. (Though he joined a lawsuit with failed Arizona Secretary of State candidate Mark Finchem to challenge both of their 2022 losses.) He worked on the state Senate’s 2020 election audit. And he attended the Jan. 6 insurrection with his son, Ryan Zink, who was convicted of a felony and two misdemeanors for his role in the riots. 

Despite their political differences, Mendoza worked on Zink’s campaign for two weeks in 2022.  

That partnership soured, and Zink called out Mendoza during the duo’s debate in May.

“My opponent was a Democrat, he changed parties and became a Republican in order to run in this race,” he warned Republican primary voters.

Mendoza’s voter file confirms he switched his voter registration from independent to Democrat in August 2023. He switched to Republican about two months later. 

And he did, indeed, become a Republican to run in CD3, he says. 

Mendoza told us he’s always been an independent, though he tended to vote for Republicans. He’s not entrenched in Arizona politics, so when a friend of his told him to run as a Democrat, he changed his registration. Another friend told him to run as a Republican, so he did. 

“I'm not really a party guy, I'm not a company man. I'm more of a free thinker, independent thinker,” he said. 

But he knows running a successful campaign as an independent is nearly impossible due to the high signature thresholds alone. 

Instead, he says his goal is to “bring redemption between the two parties.” 

Mendoza carefully places a lot of his political stances squarely in the middle. He wants “incremental” immigration reform instead of comprehensive changes. He wants a federal ban on third-trimester abortions, but not for medically necessary procedures. 

So why waste so much time on a political campaign that has no chance in a Democratic stronghold? 

Mendoza said he doesn’t want to see the U.S. fall into the political turmoil his home country of Colombia has seen. 

“If I didn't try to say the message of peace that I'm trying to get across, and of redemption and reconciling the different parties ... I felt that I would go to heaven, and God would say, ‘Hey, David, you spent your whole life just playing video games,’” he said. “It makes me happy just to try and fail than to have never tried and not failed.”

Gauging her chances: Vice President Kamala Harris is breaking fundraising records and picking up delegates as she goes after the presidential nomination, the Associated Press reports. But can she win in Arizona? The Republic’s Stephanie Murray checks in with local politicos to see what Harris’ chances are in a state Biden barely won. The conventional wisdom is Harris can energize both the youth vote and apathetic voters who don’t like Biden or former President Donald Trump. The key issues will be immigration, where she’ll take some political hits, and abortion, where she has a strong message. 

High-risk couple: Former lawmaker and current Maricopa County supervisor candidate Michelle Ugenti-Rita lied on mortgage application documents, claiming to be unmarried when she was in fact married to former House Chief of Staff Brian Townsend, 12News’ Joe Dana reports. Ugenti-Rita and Townsend were quite the power couple around the Capitol back in the day,¹ but have since divorced and Townsend called out the mortgage fraud in their divorce filings. Ugenti-Rita is a former real estate agent, and lying on mortgage documents is a big deal. The AG’s office confirmed it has received a complaint about it. 

Water win, for now: In a bit of good water news, Lake Powell is at its highest level in three years, the Arizona Daily Star’s Tony Davis reports. That should lessen the risk that states will have to cut back on how much Colorado River water they pull from the lake, but a few dry years could put the lake back in the crisis zone.

“Will not cause”: A lot of the recent hand-wringing and arm-twisting over Colorado River water comes down to three words written a century ago, KUNC’s Alex Hager and KNAU’s Melissa Sevigny report. The 1922 Colorado River Compact says the Upper Basin states “will not cause” the water sent to the Lower Basin states to drop below a certain amount. But what if they’re not the ones causing less water to flow? The Upper Basin states are arguing climate change is to blame, not them. 

Costly mistake: An error on sample ballots cost Pima County $20,000 to fix, and counting, the Star’s Charles Borla reports. The county put the wrong primary election date on an insert, so officials sent out 135,000 postcards with corrected information. So far, the postage costs $20,000, and that doesn’t include printing the postcards themselves. 

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Radical roots: While we’re looking back at history, the Republic put together an “investigative podcast” about Arizona’s ties to radicalism, from the settler days in the late 19th century to the Goldwater years to a horn-wearing man storming the U.S. Capitol building. (If podcasts aren’t your thing, they posted transcripts of the episodes.)

Call the midwife: ABC15 created a statewide database of 400 licensed midwives. It’s the first of its kind and geared toward expecting parents who want to know which midwives have been fined or disciplined by state agencies. The news station’s Melissa Blasius, Kelsie Blazier and Courtland Jeffrey made the database after a Graham County woman died during a home birth last year. The family found out later the midwife they’d hired had been in trouble with state agencies.

Canyon kerfuffle: The new owners of a historic venue in Cochise County’s Ramsey Canyon are driving their neighbors nuts with loud, all-too-frequent weddings, the Herald Review’s Lyda Longa reports. Parking overflows into the street. Wedding revelers drive too fast. A drunken bridesmaid wandered into a house to use the bathroom. So many nasty messages have gone back and forth, the inn owners have injunctions for harassment against one of the neighbors. The neighbors called the sheriff’s department a bunch of times, but Cochise County doesn’t have any noise ordinances in rural areas. So the complaints are going to the planning and zoning commission instead.

Anybody heard from Moses lately? Apparently, he put blood on Donald Trump’s right ear, just like he did to his brother Aaron in the Bible.

Right after the assassination attempt, Republicans were pointing to Trump being touched by God. That talk hasn’t died down. In fact, Maricopa County Republicans are leaning into it even more. 

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