The Daily Agenda: Don't duck debates
The Daily Agenda: Don't duck debates
Kari Lake is right? ... Thoughts and prayers continue ... And their ethics are unimpeachable.
Programming note: We won’t be in your inboxes on Monday morning since it’s a holiday. We’ll resume the Daily Agenda bright and early on Tuesday.
During election season, it sometimes feels like you can’t escape the candidates. They’re screaming at you during commercials in the evening news, filling up your social media feeds with hot takes and clogging your email inbox with pleas for money.
But, for a few of the key contenders for our state’s highest office, there’s one place you can turn to avoid them: a debate stage.
Katie Hobbs has skipped out on events that her Democratic challengers, Aaron Lieberman and Marco Lopez, frequently attend. She won’t be at the Citizens Clean Elections Commission and Arizona PBS debate either, the Republic’s Stacey Barchenger notes.
“It's noteworthy when a candidate for statewide office skips this debate because it happens so infrequently,” Barchenger wrote. “Some candidates who accept public financing have to appear, but in the last three elections, every candidate for governor but one has appeared, according to information from the commission.”
On the GOP side, two of the top three candidates won’t attend a debate put on by the Arizona Republican Party. Matt Salmon said he has a schedule conflict, but still wants to debate. Karrin Taylor Robson hasn’t said why she’s skipping it. Kari Lake will be there. (It seems the other two GOP also-rans, Scott Neely and Paola Tulliani Zen, weren’t invited.)
As norm after norm gets busted in politics these days, it’s at least worth questioning the role of debates in helping voters make decisions. Candidates have endless avenues to talk directly to their potential supporters.
The research, especially at the presidential level, shows debates aren’t pivotal to most voters’ choices at the ballot box. They might help a voter who’s on the fence by showing them another side of a candidate, but the people most likely to watch a debate are already quite attuned to politics and candidates. They watch more or less to confirm their views.
But for races lower down the ballot, where name ID starts to falter, debates play a bigger role in introducing a candidate to the electorate. They help engaged voters understand whether candidates have a handle on the issues they’ll face in office. They put a prospective politician on a public stage to test whether they can handle the heat and the rigors of the job they’re trying to win.
Avoiding debates is a strategic choice. Hobbs, for example, doesn’t need the exposure because she holds a steady lead in the Democratic primary. The debate would only serve as a liability. The two trailing candidates would inevitably team up to attack her and drag her down. There is no upside to debating for her. She should do it anyway.
Robson and Salmon are likely avoiding their debate because of the host. AZGOP chair Kelli Ward and her loyalists at the party are solidly in the bag for Lake. Lake’s attempt to troll them into showing up is telling — she offered to give them the questions in advance. As a candidate, that shouldn’t be her call. It’s the moderator’s decision. Clearly Lake is the one in charge here. Her opponents should debate her anyway.
Whatever the strategic considerations, showing up for a debate, whether it’s before your own party or on TV for a general audience, is a show of respect for the voters you’re hoping to represent.
We can’t believe we agree with Lake, but she’s right when she says “voters deserve to hear from candidates outside of just paid political ads.”
What do you say about another mass shooting?: After 19 elementary school kids and two adults were gunned down at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, the familiar cycle of thoughts and prayers began. Some politicians went farther than the typical platitudes: U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego tore into Sens. Ted Cruz and Kyrsten Sinema, throwing out fuck-yous, which offended the Republic’s opinion writer Phil Boas enough to spend a whole column on errant curse words but not a word on how to prevent these weekly tragedies. U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar floated a wild conspiracy theory about the shooter, a part of the far-right playbook used to avoid contending with any real problems. Gov. Doug Ducey said he may try to revive his abandoned “red flag law” proposal at the state Capitol. And GOP gubernatorial hopeful Karrin Taylor Robson released a new ad showing her shooting a gun and calling herself a “proud gun owner” the morning after the Uvalde shooting. Sinema, talking to reporters yesterday, said she’d be talking to both parties to find ways to protect kids, but also said she doesn’t think “D.C. solutions are realistic here” when asked about the filibuster. U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly, for his part, declared, “It’s fucking nuts to do nothing about this.” Arizona lawmakers argued on the floor about whether mass shootings happen because the kids these days are godless, abortion-celebrating gender-confused animals and about how to arm more teachers. Meanwhile, Arizona’s laws remain friendly to gun owners, and we’re left wondering how much longer we can avoid another mass shooting here.
They’re all super ethical: The Senate Ethics Committee met to define the parameters of its investigation of Republican Sen. Wendy Rogers after her “fed boy summer” remark following the last mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, a little more than a week ago. The committee unanimously decided to have the Senate’s own lawyers interview her, produce a report and let her respond. Meanwhile, the committee also voted to look at other states’ laws on deeming an office vacant as Democratic Sen. Juan Mendez refuses to show up to work after he and Rep. Athena Salman had a baby and decided they didn’t want to risk working in person at the Capitol. Finally, the committee dismissed a complaint against Democratic Sen. Lisa Otondo alleging she was in on a corruption scheme with Democratic Rep. Robert Meza. The House Ethics Committee has already dismissed a similar complaint against Meza.
We show up to work at home every day for you! Pay us $8. It’s cheaper than a lawmaker’s salary.
Another thing the state isn’t inspecting: A state audit showed the Arizona Department of Health Services isn’t properly responding to complaints or following through with required inspections in a timely manner at long-term care facilities where family members say their loved ones experience abuse or neglect, Arizona Public Media’s Andrew Oxford reports.
When you have so much free time you just start wasting your own: Not content to let his spectacularly bad idea go down in flames in the legislative process and move on, Arizona Rep. John Fillmore held an event at the Capitol about a functionally meaningless “Arizona Election Integrity Declaration” that calls on other lawmakers to withhold their votes on a state budget until their election bills are signed, though Fillmore himself did not sign the declaration. Fillmore wanted one day of in-person voting only, with a hand-count of paper ballots afterward and winners announced the next day, a near-impossible feat. Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer estimated it would take more than 2 million man-hours to count all the ballots by hand.
Free Brittney: Cherelle Griner, Brittney Griner’s wife, told Good Morning America that she wants the U.S. and President Joe Biden to do more to secure Griner’s release from Russian detention. She said Griner would love to not need to play overseas, but has needed to do so to afford her life. She has heard from Secretary of State Antony Blinken, but not Biden directly.
"I was grateful for the call, you say she's top priority, but I wanna see it. And I feel like to see it would be me seeing BG on U.S. soil," Cherelle said. "At this point I don't even know who I'm getting back when she comes back."
Another unconstitutional law: A state law that made it a criminal offense for petition gatherers to receive payment per signature was deemed unconstitutional by the Arizona Court of Appeals, though the law banning the practice will remain intact without the criminal penalties for signature gatherers, the Republic’s Mary Jo Pitzl reports. The court sided with Petition Partners and decided that the threat of criminal prosecution violated First Amendment rights.
Dying to own the libs: Nearly 10,000 deaths from COVID-19 complications could have been prevented by vaccination, the Arizona Mirror’s Dillon Rosenblatt reports on a new study by the Brown School of Public Health. More than 30,000 Arizonans have died from the virus.
A drop in the bucket: The City of Tucson started a new program designed to help essential workers buy homes by paying for some of the purchasing costs. The program, funded mostly through COVID-19 relief dollars, will help about 250 workers in medical and other frontline jobs, the Arizona Daily Star’s Nicole Ludden reports. And in Maricopa County, supervisors have approved much more spending on affordable housing than in a typical year because of the influx in COVID-19 relief funds, KJZZ’s Katherine Davis-Young reports.
Not the biggest settlements, but still costly: The Phoenix City Council approved two settlements totaling $800,000 in lawsuits brought against the Phoenix Police Department by the families of Ekom Udofia, who was shot by police, and Dawn Bestenlehner, who was struck by a stolen U-Haul truck that police were chasing without their sirens and emergency lights on, the Phoenix New Times’ Katya Schwenk reports.
Gov. Doug Ducey signed a bill that will require superior court clerks to send monthly records of people who were convicted of a felony to the Arizona Secretary of State to cancel their voter registration.
Arizona Sen. Kelly Townsend’s Senate Bill 1477 calls on the Secretary of State’s Office to then cancel that person’s registration in the state’s voter registration database and notify the appropriate county recorder so they can also cancel the person’s registration.
Townsend said her bill was inspired by an ABC15 report that showed how former Phoenix mayoral candidate Tim Seay got dozens of people to sign up to vote even though their voting rights had not been restored.
For details on how to properly restore voting rights after a felony, check out the Maricopa County Recorder’s website. For a single felony conviction, voting rights get restored automatically after a person completes their sentence and pays any fines and restitution. More than one felony conviction requires petitioning a court.
In the lawsuit that never ends over the public records that the public will probably forget about by the time they’re all finally turned over, the Cyber Ninjas got a new judge because the old judge was reading the news too much – and that new judge was the one who sided against Shady Park in the lawsuit brought against the music venue by ASU’s Mirabella, a retirement community on the Tempe campus.
The Republic and American Oversight, now in a consolidated case pursuing the records, sought to have a different judge after the change, to no avail.
