The Daily Agenda: It's a contest for U.S. Senate, not Trump's heart
The Daily Agenda: It's a contest for U.S. Senate, not Trump's heart
Recorded calls are precious treasures ... What are we worth to you? ... And Betty's race time was pretty solid.
The GOP candidates in the U.S. Senate race in Arizona need Trump’s endorsement to break up the crowded field.
And they’re doing whatever they can to court it.
Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich wrote a stern letter about election integrity that wasn’t followed up by mass arrests of election officials, so Trump yesterday cut him out of the running for the endorsement while dangling the prize anew to the remaining candidates.
Brnovich responded to the former president’s thrashing by continuing to praise him and said he “understands (Trump’s) frustration” but as AG, he had to follow the law. Those pesky laws.
Blake Masters, the Peter Thiel wunderkind, would be an obvious choice for Trump support: He served on Trump’s 2016 transition team and recently flew to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring after saying he believed Trump won the 2020 election. But Masters’ inability so far to climb the polls on his own accord (and with Thiel’s money1) may make him too risky an investment for Trump.
Masters is one of many to seek Trump’s favor at the Florida compound, where an “entire political economy” has sprung up around courting the former president, the New York Times’ Shane Goldmacher reports.
“Nothing reveals Mr. Trump’s hold on the party quite like the genuflections and contortions of those seeking his political approval,” Goldmacher writes.
Jim Lamon is investing heavily on TV, using mostly his own money, and started his campaign last year with an ad that aired well outside his voter base in Arizona: He put it on Fox News in New Jersey, hoping that a certain former president would see. His Let’s Go Brandon ads and the one he played at the Super Bowl depicting him shooting U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly (the husband of Gabby Giffords) while wearing cowboy garb are also a not-so-subtle nod to the former president’s tastes. He’s also a strong contender for the endorsement.
And then there’s former Adjutant General for Arizona Mick McGuire, who hasn’t debased himself for Trump’s fleeting approval, but just put out an ad touting his military background and showing some cool planes (Arizona has a penchant for pilots in office).
Former lawmaker and energy regulator Justin Olson is also still running, but the fact that we had to Google “is Justin Olson still running for U.S. Senate?” to check isn’t a good sign.
Despite millions spent by the candidates, polls have shown the majority of voters still undecided in the GOP primary. In a race with no clear frontrunner, Trump’s endorsement could be a campaign-deciding moment.
Brnovich is still leading the fractured field in early polling, mostly coasting on name ID. The Trump endorsement will probably rocket the recipient into frontrunner status.
But if the GOP electorate doesn’t clearly congregate around one candidate in Arizona’s August primary, it won’t leave the victor much time to recuperate before facing the real challenge: Kelly and his huge war chest.
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You do not want Dave on your beat: ABC15’s Dave Biscobing dug up recorded phone calls between Phoenix Police Department’s second-in-command and other top ranking officers talking about how they “just got f***ed” by Police Chief Jeri Williams when she denied knowing about the 2020 protest arrests that Biscobing had exposed. Williams has blamed her employees for not telling her about the arrests, but the calls showed they had informed her. Biscobing has been investigating the issue for more than a year, and it’s clear from the tapes that his accountability reporting shook the department.
Good branding and hashtags will get you far in life: Gov. Doug Ducey is banding together with almost all the other Republican governors, most of whom live nowhere near the U.S.-Mexico border, to form a new “American Governors’ Border Strike Force” based on his own Border Strike Force, a gimmick that amounts to, as best anyone can tell, Department of Public Safety officers doing basically their regular crime-fighting duties.
Respect the game: The Pima County Board of Supervisors appointed a new county administrator, Jan Lesher, and halfheartedly tried to get to the bottom of three-decade county administrator Chuck Huckelberry’s decision retired without actually telling them, the Daily Star’s Tim Steller reports, noting the real intrigue wasn’t that he didn’t tell members of the board, rather, that he apparently informed staff not to tell them.
“The people in the chain of command were expected to keep Huckelberry’s secret, even, apparently, from the board that oversees him. He was the boss; they were the underlings,” Steller wrote.
They’re baaack: Skyrocketing home rental prices and expiring pandemic-related protections for renters mean evictions are almost back to the pre-pandemic highs. The Republic’s Catherine Reagor, Jessica Boehm and Ralph Chapoco have a long, glossy piece that highlights Arizona’s status as the “wild, wild West for landlords.”
Lingering grief: The Republic’s Daniel Gonzales writes about how parents, teachers and students at one south Phoenix elementary school are dealing with the trauma of six caretakers dying from COVID-19 in two months. Gonzales offers this jarring statistic:
“More than 140,000 children in the United States lost a parent or grandparent caretaker due to COVID-19 from April 1, 2020, through June 30, 2021.”
Trucker protests on all the borders: Ports of entry in Nogales may see a boost from truckers who are avoiding Texas after Gov. Greg Abbott required trucks crossing the border from Mexico to undergo a state police inspection in addition to a federal one, slowing traffic there and sparking trucker protests, the Nogales International reports.
Oh, you mean “test” it. No, never done that: After expensing some weed to Gannett, the Republic’s Ryan Randazzo explains how you, too, can get test results on your marijuana and how to read those results.
If you’re into the murder podcast genre: 12News has a new crime podcast, the latest edition of which covers the 2005 case of a then 20-year-old Tucson man who killed his grandparents and pleaded guilty except insane.
If you’re into the divorce story genre: KJZZ’s Phil Latzman and Matthew Casey detail the Arizona Coyotes’ messy split from Glendale and its search for a new home in the Valley in a two-part piece.
Yeehaw: The Mesa Police Department is experimenting with an Arizona inventor’s tool to basically cowboy rope cars during chases, the East Valley Tribune’s Scott Shumaker reports. So far, it seems to work.
Time to learn a new skill: Inmates at the Saguaro Correctional Center are utilizing a new program to become certified to translate books into braille for readers who are blind, 12News’ Chris Latella reports.
Rather than highlighting one bill today, we want to note several that are on, or likely heading to, Gov. Doug Ducey’s desk.
House Bill 2498, sponsored by Republican Rep. Jake Hoffman, would ban cities and counties (and any other subdivision of the state) from requiring COVID-19 vaccines. Ducey already tried to ban that, but Tucson and Pima County went ahead with policies anyway.
Republican Rep. Beverly Pingerelli’s HB2439 requires school boards to oversee which books are in schools’ libraries and allow for parents to see which books are in the library and which books their kids check out. Educators and opponents of the bill warn that it could lead to book-banning.
HB2161 from Republican Rep. Steve Kaiser adds to the Parents’ Bill of Rights. The bill says that subdivisions of the state “shall not interfere with or usurp the fundamental right of parents to direct the upbringing, education, health care or mental health of their children.” If violated, parents can bring a lawsuit. The bill’s language is vague and could cause all sorts of lawsuits, opponents contend.
Democratic U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema finished the Boston Marathon this weekend, and she posted on Instagram to celebrate the occasion. But while she was running the marathon (in impressive time) it appears she was also running from her critics.
If you look at the results for the marathon, there’s no finisher named Sinema. However, if you look up Sinema’s bib number, 19994, you can find Sinema’s marathon-running alter ego, a 45-year-old from Phoenix named “Betty Smith.”
Why run under another name for a premier race? Perhaps because the last time she intended to run the marathon (she ended up not running because of a broken foot), a bunch of progressive activists showed up to protest her.
After a long courtship, Trump recently endorsed the other Thiel-backed U.S. Senate candidate, J.D. Vance in Ohio, which brought in millions in Thiel bucks to boost Vance.