The Daily Agenda: Democracy isn't sending us its best
The Daily Agenda: Democracy isn't sending us its best
Abolish primaries? ... Defund the police? ... Delicate hands?
Democracy as we know it isn’t serving Arizona well.
Don't worry, we’re not about to launch into some Trumpian rant about stolen elections and decertification. Instead, we want to talk about Arizona’s primary election system. More specifically, we want to talk about destroying that system.
Over the last decade, the political chattering class has made several attempts to abolish Arizona’s primary election system and replace it with another model. It has never caught on.
And for good reason. Ranked-choice voting is confusing as hell. “Top-two” primaries sounds only slightly less ominous than its other name, “jungle primaries,” but neither has a catchy ring to it. It’s hard to explain how other systems of primaries would work, let alone why Arizona should take such a drastic step to implement these radically different models.
First, a brief explainer is probably in order.
Top-two primaries are relatively simple. Everyone runs in one big primary — with party labels or without them, depending on how it’s designed — and if nobody gets more than 50 percent of the vote, the two top candidates move on to a general election. The concept isn’t alien to most voters — that’s how many city council elections work.
Ranked-choice voting is more complicated. All the candidates are on the ballot — again, with or without party labels — and voters vote for their favorite candidate. But they also cast a vote for their second, third, fourth and perhaps even fifth choices (though only the second choice ever comes into play). If nobody gets more than 50% of the (first choice) vote, the lowest vote getter is disqualified, and their voters’ second-choice candidates pick up those votes. If none of the candidates has more than 50% after that, the process is repeated. (Still with us? If not, this short video does a good job explaining.)
But 2022 may provide the impetus needed for the public to take a second look at whether our primary system is serving voters, especially the growing bloc of independent voters, or only the most extreme politicians, according to longtime consultant Chuck Coughlin. He’s hoping that after seeing what the current primary system has wrought on Arizonans, voters will reconsider the other methods of voting.
“The examples of this election cycle are going to be immense. When Mark Finchem wins the Republican primary or Kari Lake wins the Republican primary and Rusty Bowers loses his Republican primary, people are gonna go, ‘What the fuck happened here? Why is this happening?’” he said. “It's because of this very narrow segment of the electorate that turns out in the primary and what you force candidates to market to. You have to open up the market.”
Coughlin is gearing up for an initiative in 2024 to change Arizona’s primary system, though whether that’s to a top-two primary or a ranked-choice voting system is still an unsettled question. Changing the primary system is a steep hill, but Coughlin has gathered a crew of political bigwigs behind the concept, including Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, former U.S. Rep. Jim Kolbe, former Mesa Mayor Scott Smith, former lawmaker Heather Carter, soon-to-be-former Sen. Paul Boyer and others.
For now, the focus is on explaining how Arizona’s primary system screws independent voters and candidates, leading to extremists getting elected. Independent candidates, for example, have to collect way more signatures to even qualify for the ballot than partisans. And while independent voters can vote in either primary, they rarely do because they have to specifically ask for a ballot.
We’re still not sold on the idea of ranked-choice voting, or even top-two primaries. But it’s hard to argue that the current system is producing the best possible outcomes for anyone except extremist politicians playing to their parties’ bases.
Vote early vote often: Today is the last day to mail in your ballot for the August primary. If you can’t get it in the mail today, drop it off to a polling location or early ballot drop box.
Polls are bull: The GOP primary for governor is either a dead heat or Kari Lake is walking away with it by double digits, depending on which poll you believe today. An internal poll Karrin Taylor Robson’s team is shopping around has the two candidates tied at 43%, the first poll that doesn’t show her outright losing. Meanwhile a poll from Data Orbital’s George Khalaf (whose dad is Lake’s treasurer) has Lake at 43.5% and Robson at 32.4%. That’s significantly different from his poll from two weeks ago that showed Lake up by just 4 percentage points.
Freeways are for peasants: After Robson’s campaign claimed she wasn’t even on her private jet when it flew from Scottsdale to Glendale during her tour with Mike Pence and Gov. Doug Ducey last week, AZFamily’s Dennis Welch tracked down a bunch of trips that she definitely was on and definitely didn’t report as an in-kind contribution to her campaign, as required by law. The campaign said it would amend its campaign finance reports.
New caucus just dropped: As part of a national push at legislatures across the country, some Arizona Republican lawmakers are forming a “Freedom Caucus” modeled after the congressional caucus, Axios’ Jeremy Duda reports. The new caucus will have more structure and resources than its predecessor at the state Capitol, dubbed the “Liberty Caucus,” but will have the same goal of holding the line against RINO policies. That’s what the Liberty Caucus did in opposing this year’s budget, which forced legislative leaders to work with Democrats on a bipartisan proposal.
Ooh, a ghost byline: The Republic’s Robert Anglen and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez (now at Washington Post) combed through eight years of Attorney General Mark Brnovich’s press releases and concluded that they’ve gotten more outwardly political since he joined the U.S. Senate race.
Lawmakers don’t want to know: Arizona may soon have the largest school voucher system in the country, but the state collects less data and has fewer accountability measures than other states, the Republic’s Yana Kunichoff reports. The voucher expansion that lawmakers passed this year actually included several provisions requiring more transparency, but those were stripped out in a last-minute amendment, while Democrats’ attempts to add in more reporting requirements were ignored.
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There’s always prosecutorial discretion: Democratic Pima County Attorney Laura Conover is fighting Brnovich’s attempt to declare Arizona’s territorial-era ban on abortions the law of the land, Capitol scribe Howie Fischer reports. Conover’s office recently filed papers in Brnovich’s lawsuit attempting to lift the stay on that law, arguing that since lawmakers have continually regulated abortion in Arizona, those laws take precedence, not the old one outlawing abortion almost entirely. Even if the courts side with Brnovich, Conover noted her office has prosecutorial discretion about what kinds of crimes to pursue.
I’m sorry, did you say pounds?: The Arizona Court of Appeals is hearing a case about a Tempe barber who was arrested in 2011 with more than 10 pounds of marijuana, but had his conviction expunged under Prop 207, which allows for expungements of arrests up to the now-legal limit of 2.5 ounces. Weed reporter David Abbott explains in the Phoenix New Times that the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office is appealing that expungement in a case that will help define the limits of the expungement provision of Prop 207.
Desegregated: More than 40 years after Tucson Unified School District was first put under court oversight due to a racial discrimination lawsuit, a federal judge declared last week that the district had met its obligations and achieved “unitary status.” The longstanding desegregation case had hamstrung the district’s governing board, which had to seek court approval before making changes to everything from bus routes to extracurricular activities.
Not a single mention of Paul Gosar?: In a piece datelined from Prescott, the New York Times’ Stuart Thompson explains that while QAnon-loving candidates aren’t faring well on the campaign trail, their extremist ideas are picking up traction in the GOP, where Q-like election conspiracies abound. Meanwhile, the Arizona Mirror’s Jerod MacDonald-Evoy details local QCandidates’ plan for a “regime change” in the GOP and other weird things.
“While Ms. Lake has no overt ties to QAnon and has criticized the attention it receives as a distraction, the movement’s influencers are orbiting her candidacy. She has appeared with QAnon influencers including Mr. (Ron) Watkins and has received an endorsement from Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, who has become a celebrity in QAnon circles,” Thompson writes.
If you didn’t get a subpoena, did you even try to steal the election?: The Washington Post got a copy of the Department of Justice subpoenas to Arizona Senate President Karen Fann and Sen. Kelly Townsend, that “show the breadth of the criminal investigation by the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington into efforts by supporters of Donald Trump to use ‘false electors’ to try to undo Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.” The subpoenas demand communications with a host of Republican candidates, operatives and activists.
Come for the hot races, stay for the heat: Not content to pump money into battleground legislative races, a pair of progressive groups — The Arena and The States Project — are experimenting with staff fellowships to send staffers to work on a handful of legislative races in Arizona, Politico reports.
Reimagine that answer: Sen. Raquel Terán, chair of the Arizona Democratic Party, struggled through a tough interview with Brahm Resnik on “Sunday Square Off” while refusing to say whether she supports defunding the police when he asked six times. Planned Parenthood has said forgoing police union funding is a requirement to get its endorsement, which Terán has.
“What I support is reimagining how we use our resources in our community,” she said.
Don’t text either: The feds wiretapped Santa Cruz County Assessor Felipe Fuentes and a local business consultant as part of their investigation into Fuentes long-running scheme to solicit bribes in exchange for rezoning property to make it more valuable, the Nogales International’s Jonathan Clark reports. In one recorded call, Fuentes asks for a bribe so he and his wife could buy plane tickets to Minneapolis. Fuentes has pleaded guilty and his sentencing is scheduled for next week.
“…talking about vacations, I wanted to thank you for the money. I had a very nice time with my wife,” Fuentes said in one of the calls, per a transcript.
Legislative District 21 covers Tucson’s south side down to the airport and Sahuarita all the way down to Nogales, and it snakes along the U.S.-Mexico border over to Bisbee and Naco. It’s a deep-blue, mostly Latino district where Republicans originally fielded no candidates, though several have since launched write-in campaigns.
Rosanna Gabaldón is running uncontested for re-election to the Senate in what was formerly LD2, where she has served since 2013. But there’s a three-way Democratic primary for the district's two House seats, where Consuelo Hernandez seeks to replace her brother, outgoing state lawmaker and current congressional candidate Daniel Hernandez, and join her sister, Rep. Alma Hernandez, in the House. Meanwhile Sen.1 Stephanie Stahl Hamilton, is attempting to hang on after being drawn into LD21, which has little overlap with her old LD10. And joining the mix is Akanni “Oye” Oyegbola, a former city council member in South Tucson who’s leaning on his background in business and local government in his first run for the state House.
Republicans didn’t field candidates for the House or Senate, but Damien Kennedy and Deborah McEwen are attempting to secure enough write-in votes to qualify for the general election ballot in the House, and Jim Cleveland is doing the same for the state Senate seat.
We’re not sure what to make of this graffiti found near State Route 51 and Bell Road2, but we’ve been pondering it all day.
Is there a deeper message, or is this just an unambiguous commentary on the state of Doug Ducey’s delicate hands? Is this an insult or a compliment? What kind of moisturizer does the governor use? When he’s no longer in politics, would he consider a career in hand modeling?
And most pressing: Given that delicacy is a combination of factors, including silkiness, strength and size, who would have this level of knowledge about the governor’s hands?
We reached out to the Governor’s Office with these questions and more, but spokesman C.J. Karamargin didn’t want to talk about the governor’s hands.
Stahl Hamilton was a representative before she was appointed to the Senate last year to fill the seat left vacant by Daniel Hernandez’s primary challenger for congress, Kirsten Engel. Tucson politics is a small world.
We originally assumed this was at the Capitol, and the fact that it isn’t makes this tag all the more confounding.
Why won't the Governor's office discuss Ducey's hands??? What are they trying to hide???
It is great you reached out to the Governor's office to ask about his hands! Perhaps he is a lock picker?