Swinging in the Sunbelt
Still the center of the political universe … Turning Point’s turning point … And Jack tweets goodbye.
When we launched the Agenda a little more than three years ago, we declared that Arizona was at the center of the political universe.
“All roads lead to Arizona politics. Big national stories start and end here, in our weird little world. Arizona is no longer a political curiosity: We increasingly hold major weight and importance in the future of our country. We’re the main event.”
This week, as we wait for early voting to begin and ballots to arrive in mailboxes in our first election as an officially purple state, we’re reminded just how much that’s still true.
When we wrote that in 2021, Arizona had just voted for a Democratic president for the first time in decades, and we were embarking on a brave new future as a swing state.
Since then, Democrats have the three top statewide offices — again for the first time in a generation.
Now, they’re aiming for a second consecutive presidential victory and another U.S. Senate seat. Not to mention potentially flipping the state Legislature (and a bevy of local offices, including the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office and Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, to name a few.) But we’ve heard that before.
A lot has changed in the last three years, and a lot hasn’t.
Let’s reflect…
Presidential Visits
Arizona has become even more of a top destination for presidential contenders.
Just this week, Kamala Harris and her husband are coming, as are vice presidential hopefuls Tim Walz and JD Vance. And we wouldn’t be surprised if we saw Donald Trump again within the next week or so.
In 2016, Clinton only came here once in what was heralded as a brave show of confidence in her electoral map ahead of her almost-certain victory. Trump campaigned here seven times that year. In 2020, Joe Biden touched down in Arizona exactly once1 in a socially distant rally series of events. Trump visited seven times again that election cycle, per the Republic’s Zach Bradshaw, who has a handy tally of the presidential contenders’ visits over the years.
This week’s visit will mark Harris’ third visit since becoming the nominee2 That’s on par with Trump’s visits this year — he rallied in Phoenix in June, in Glendale in August and in Tucson last month, per Bradshaw.
Money and Ads
You can tell Arizona still holds a top slot in the presidential battles because you still can’t turn on a TV without staring down a presidential ad.
The presidential campaigns have spent more than 100 million in Arizona, with at least $50 million more on the way in the next month. That makes Arizona the fourth-most-advertised-in state for the presidential candidates.
Democratic groups account for about 55% of that spending, per data from AdImpact, a firm that tracks that sort of thing.
And our Senate seat is one of just a handful in play — though you might not realize it from watching the ads. Kari Lake is barely on air, having been outspent on the airwaves three-to-one so far. Ruben Gallego has another three-to-one margin on reserved airtime going forward, with PACs aligned with him reserving about $28 million in ads from now until election day, to team Lake’s $9 million.
This year, even the porn stars have a PAC that’s active in Arizona, the New York Times reports. The ad, which warns that Trump’s Project 2025 wants to ban porn and make it a crime to produce, is running on pornographic websites in seven swing states, including Arizona.
The Polls
Four years ago, Trump was lagging in the polls in Arizona.
Only a small handful of pollsters had predicted a Trump victory here, and FiveThirtyEight clocked the polling average showing Joe Biden up by more than 2.5 percentage points through election day.
This year, Trump is narrowly leading in the polls. He’s ahead of Harris by about 1.5 percentage points, per the polling average.
And while voting blue was a big moment for Arizona, it wasn’t pivotal to the 2020 election. Biden won with 306 electoral college votes. Without Arizona, he still would have won the presidency.
Like Biden, Harris is spending most of her time and money in the Rust Belt, though we Sun Belt states still make the map.
Meanwhile, Lake is faring far worse in the polls for her U.S. Senate race than she was at this point in the governor’s race. Two years ago, Lake was in a dead heat against Katie Hobbs, and later polling showed her taking the lead.
This year, Lake has yet to lead in a single reputable poll. Many of the polls put her down double-digits to Gallego.
In the latest episode of “Managing Time Wisely with Republican Sen. Jake Hoffman,” Hoffman investigates the universities’ “MAJOR security breach” and secret plot with Kamala Harris to steal the election.
Today’s episode started with the Harris campaign apparently texting a large number of Arizona university students, which Hoffman deemed “more election interference,” “tremendously unethical,” “likely illegal” and a “breach of American students’ (personally identifiable information).”
There’s a lot going on there so let’s take this one piece at a time.
First of all, the students’ information, including their cell phone numbers, is in the student directory. That’s a public record. We reporters use it all the time, as do data harvesters, who then resell the information. It’s all perfectly legal and students can opt out.
Secondly, there’s no law against using that information for a political campaign, as Hoffman claims.
Third, that kind of “personally identifiable information” isn’t restricted under the federal FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) law. The law restricts people from seeing individual education records, like grades, not that a student exists.
Finally, the claim that this is “tremendously unethical” is very rich coming from a guy who runs a troll farm that has been linked to all sorts of shady activity.
Hunting for votes: Turning Point, a right-wing activist group with heavy political interests in Arizona, is trying to get more potential Donald Trump supporters to vote by targeting hunters and churchgoers as demographics the group thinks can sway the vote in swing states, per the Associated Press. Turning Point’s spokesperson said conservatives are taking lessons learned from losing Arizona in 2022 to mobilize voters. Instead of pushing conspiracies that discourage Republicans from voting, for example, the group is encouraging low-turnout voters in reliably red districts to cast mail-in ballots.
Vacations on us: Recently indicted Apache County Attorney Michael Whiting spent tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars on seemingly personal expenses like cars, dinners and a three-day California trip with the family of a woman killed in an ax attack, the Republic’s Robert Anglen and Elena Santa Cruz detail through newfound expense reports. The reports total $200,000 in county reimbursements throughout five years, and many of the frivolous expenses violated county policy.
Hidden numbers: Phoenix voters will decide if the mayor should get an 18% raise and if City Council members should get a 25% pay bump this November, per KJZZ’s Christina Estes. The commission charged with recommending pay increases hasn’t done so in 20 years, and the ballot doesn’t tell voters the mayor and council members make about double their $88,000 and $61,600 yearly salaries when their pensions and benefits are added in.
You can vote to give us a raise today.
Meritless mandates: Arizona’s Constitution says university education has to be “as nearly free as possible,” but that has yet to be realized in the state, Capitol scribe Howie Fischer writes. Students have tried to stop tuition rate hikes by citing the state Constitution, but the state Supreme Court declined to weigh in on those arguments. The state Legislature hasn’t been any help either, and has relied on the Arizona Board of Regents to cap costs for students.
Supreme transparency: Supreme Court Chief Justice Ann Timmer wants the court to be more publicly accessible, she said in a rare sit-down interview with ABC15’s Nick Ciletti inside the courthouse. Timmer traveled to the state’s 15 counties to devise a sweeping plan to reform the court amid historically high levels of distrust in it.
Saving water: The Gila River Indian Community activated the country’s first-ever solar-over-canal project to generate renewable energy while saving water across the 2,700-foot line along Interstate 10 near Sacaton, the Arizona Mirror’s Shondiin Silversmith reports. And researchers at Arizona State University and the University of Arizona are trying to figure out how to keep trees healthy using less water. They’re having promising results, per KJZZ’s Bridget Dowd.
Jack McCain, who — and we can’t stress this enough — rarely ever tweeted, announced he is departing from Twitter, leaving us with only Meghan McCain’s tweets to read.
The genesis of this personal exodus was the “‘they're eating cats’ narrative, that was in large part driven by X,” he wrote.
Luckily, nobody seems to have explained to him the Republican Party’s role in pushing that particular conspiracy.
Fun fact, that was four years ago today.
Not to mention, Harris and Biden each did a stop here when he was still the nominee.
Wait until Hoffman hears that the phone company used to dox EVERYBODY by putting their phone numbers & home addresses in a book that was distributed, for free, to EVERYBODY. What a dystopian nightmare!
Jack McCain leaving Twitter is somehow important? No. It is not. To paraphrase Chump..."so what"? Routine users of Twitter or "X" or other social media sites are so full of their own self-importance it is sickening. Go read a book.