The Daily Agenda: Let's certify this thing
The Daily Agenda: Let's certify this thing
And leave 2022 in 2022 ... The de-MAGA-fication may take some time ... And she really is the best.
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All 15 of Arizona’s counties are set to certify their local elections by today’s deadline, and by next Monday, the state will follow suit and put an end to the 2022 election.
Unfortunately, that won’t be the end of it.
Losing candidates and their ground troops are still doing everything in their power to cast doubt on their losses and the entire election system — and just like 2020, it seems we’ll be fighting over this year’s election until the next election.
Arizona voters narrowly rejected the election deniers at the top of their ballots, but election denialism is still strong in Arizona.
Failed gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake is suing Maricopa County officials for not responding to her public records request demanding documents about the election problems quickly enough. She told Steve Bannon that the lawsuit is just the beginning of her legal crusade to overturn the 2022 election results, promising she has “whistleblowers coming forward and at least one smoking gun.”
“Before (Gov. Doug) Ducey and (Secretary of State Katie) Hobbs sign their John Hancock to that certification, they better think long and hard about what they know about what happened in that election. Because when we drop our lawsuit, they will hear it,” she told Bannon.
Lake doesn’t have a real case to make in a court of law. No amount of slick legal maneuvering will change her election rejection by more than 17,000 votes. Her public records lawsuit is nothing more than an attempt to make her case in the court of public opinion instead.
Meanwhile, Republican attorney general candidate Abe Hamadeh, whose narrow loss is the closest in modern Arizona history, filed his own lawsuit demanding a court declare him the winner of this month’s election, arguing that he would have won if Maricopa County hadn’t bungled the election without citing evidence to back up his assertion that a flawless election would have had a different outcome.
And in the current Attorney General’s Office, Assistant AG Jennifer Wright, who sent a letter demanding answers from the Maricopa County officials that election deniers are holding up as proof of wrongdoing, is catching some well-deserved scrutiny for peddling election misinformation and hyper-partisan screeds online. (County officials responded to her Sunday, saying the county did not break any laws.)
To get a flavor of how 2022 will play into January’s legislative session, look no further than how the Arizona Legislature’s “Liberty Caucus” ran with that letter to declare the AG has “vast evidence that (officials) have grossly broken the law.” And outgoing lawmaker Kelly Townsend fired off a subpoena to the county, demanding they answer her long list of questions by 9:30 a.m. today.
The outrage and doubt that Republican leaders are sowing translates into more angry, misinformed people, some of whom gathered outside the Capitol this weekend, demanding a do-over of the election. The die-hard election conspiracists, cheered on by sore-loser Republicans, simply cannot believe that their slate of extremist Republicans lost Arizona unless there was some cabal of left-wing conspirators working against them.
Of course, there’s a simpler answer: Voters, especially conservative independents and moderate Republicans, simply couldn’t stomach the extremists on their ballots, as the Republic notes in an analysis of the vote. Or, as Hobbs’ campaign manager put it in a post-mortem interview of the campaign, “It became clear the race was about Kari, and that was fine with us."
Meanwhile, Hobbs is building her transition team, meeting with dignitaries and setting her policy agenda for the next year.
Lake and her election-denying friends will stay stuck in 2022, and they’ll attempt to keep us all stuck there with them. Let’s all do our best to not let them hijack the next two years like they did the last two.
If at first you don’t succeed, double down: Following the Trump slate’s drubbing at the polls, Republicans wonder if the Arizona Republican Party can be de-MAGA-fied as AZGOP Chair Kelli Ward prepares to step aside next year. The Republic notes that while John McCain was able to use his influence to place business Republicans in key positions within the party during a power struggle back in 2014, it doesn’t seem any effort is afoot to do that these days, nor is there a potential leader waiting in the wings with a clear alternate vision for the party. Meanwhile, Karrin Taylor Robson landed a profile in the Republic, but it doesn’t appear she’s in any position to take over Ward’s gig either.
She’s no Doug Ducey: Governor-elect Katie Hobbs spoke about her legislative agenda in a post-election sit-down interview with AZFamily’s Dennis Welch. She warned that repealing the full abortion ban will likely have to come from the initiative process, signaled she’s wary of calls from election officials, including Stephen Richer, to consider banning dropping off mail-in ballots on Election Day, and wouldn’t commit to tearing down Gov. Doug Ducey’s shipping containers on the border wall or keeping his “border strike force,” though she hinted she’s not a big fan of either idea.
Is this the free market at work?: In its contract with the City of Phoenix for its big “AmericaFest” convention next month, Turning Point USA asked for the city’s help in barring its competitors from hosting dueling events nearby, the Republic’s Richard Ruelas notes.
Convenient timing: The Alliance Defending Freedom, a Scottsdale-based Christian lobbying firm, is suing the FDA arguing the “abortion pill” is not safe and the agency put “politics over science” when it approved the drug more than two decades ago, Capitol scribe Howard Fischer writes. The lawsuit comes as the state Court of Appeals is still deciding the fate of a terrirtorial-era law outlawing abortion in Arizona completely.
2023 is gonna be wild: Although voters rejected the election deniers at the top of the ballot, the Arizona Legislature will be full of more election deniers than ever. The Arizona Mirror’s Jerod MacDonald-Evoy profiles some of the big names.
We’ve come a long way, Arizona: The passage of Prop 308, which grants in-state tuition to undocumented students, offers better evidence that Arizona is moderating than voters’ rejection of election deniers, former Arizonan Fernanda Santos writes in the Washington Post. She writes that the young, undocumented backers of the proposition, Reyna Montoya and Jose Patiño, offer “a lesson in skilled political maneuvering, grass-roots organizing and persistence” in post-SB1070 Arizona. And in the Republic, Montoya and Patiño tell their own story of securing in-state tuition for the next generation of undocumented kids.
Clue Heywood almost won: Almost 5,000 Arizonans wrote in a candidate for governor, a big increase from 2018, and almost none of those names submitted were for qualified write-in candidates, MacDonald-Evoy writes in the Mirror. Arizona’s uncontested mine inspector race got 41,000 write-in votes, which slows ballot counting.
The more things change…: Rural school districts in northern Arizona face financial ruin if lawmakers don’t lift the school aggregate spending cap by March —again — the White Mountain Independent’s Pete Alshire writes — again.
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"The outrage and doubt that Republican leaders are sewing" .. I think you mean sowing, unless you're trying to shift us from agricultural to crafts metaphors.
As you note in today's Agenda, "Of course, there’s a simpler answer:" ... if readers happen to not be familiar with it, they should look up "Occam's Razor." Although this principle is described in a number of different ways, the basic idea is simple: if there are multiple ways that you could explain the same result, pick the simplest one. Or if you are a fan of probability theory, consider that the probability of multiple independent events is the product of the probability of each of them - so if a conspiracy theory is true to its moniker, and requires many unlikely things to all happen, the probability of the whole theory is miniscule.
As you explained, there are plenty of relatively conservative voters in Arizona who are not election deniers, but who tend to vote Republican when the candidate seems reasonable. This is often reflected in results here. So having a group of fairly outrageous candidates lose statewide is not a shocker, and elaborate explanations are not credible (including implying a much larger number of election anomalies than results suggest). Applying Occam's Razor, the alternate explanations are shaved away. It's really pretty simple. A majority of Arizonan voters voted against these performative extremists.