The Daily Agenda: The timing is unforgivable
The Daily Agenda: The timing is unforgivable
Would not rehire ... The Bar isn't sending its best ... And it's super unconstitutional.
The next state senator in the West Valley’s Legislative District 22 will be elected via a write-in campaign, a rarity in state politics.
Democratic Rep. Diego Espinoza won his primary election for the district’s Senate seat, then promptly withdrew from the race. He was running unopposed, meaning he would have easily won.
Espinoza instead took a job as a lobbyist with Salt River Project — one that he applied for while running for office. He won’t be able to lobby his former legislative colleagues for a year, at least not legally, so he’ll be focused on local issues, the company said.
Now, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors will need to appoint a replacement Democrat for the remainder of Espinoza’s term. And anyone who wants to run for the general election will need to start a campaign to get write-in votes.
The forthcoming mess was completely avoidable. If Espinoza was applying for a job outside the Legislature and knew he didn’t intend to keep running, much less fill his term, he shouldn’t have run.
His primary opponent, Democratic Rep. Richard Andrade, said as much, telling the Associated Press that Espinoza “wasn’t true to the voters, knowing that he was going to do this.” Other Democratic colleagues panned Espinoza’s moves, too.
Normally, our “sore loser” law prevents a candidate who lost the primary from running in November as a write-in candidate. But state statutes specify that that doesn’t apply when the winning primary candidate withdraws from the race. So Andrade could be back in the running, if he wants to be.
And while candidates mounting a write-in campaign during a primary have to reach a certain number of write-in votes to make the general ballot, the same isn’t true for the general. They just have to register with the Secretary of State’s Office by the end of the month.
The registered write-in candidate who gets the most people to write in their name will win. And it could be anyone — including a Republican. If a Republican had run in this Dem-heavy district, they would almost certainly have won in November simply by being on the ballot.
In a statement about his departure, Espinoza said he was “proud of the many accomplishments for my legislative district, our Latino community, Arizona, and our country.”
But going out this way — and possibly throwing the heavily Democratic district to Republicans because of it — is the ultimate disservice to the voters who put their faith in him.
Even Biden debated Trump: Ahead of Friday’s deadline to RSVP for the one and only gubernatorial debate of the 2022 election, Dem nominee Katie Hobbs officially declined to attend. Instead, she demanded separate one-on-one interviews with Arizona PBS’ Ted Simons where she won’t have to interact with Republican Kari Lake at all. Hobbs argued the GOP primary debate was a spectacle and Hobbs has “too much respect for the people of Arizona” to inflict that upon them again, which would be a whole lot more persuasive if she hadn’t also ducked her own primary election debate against Marco Lopez. In other debate news, Democratic U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly agreed to debate Republican Blake Masters, 12News’ Brahm Resnik reports.
Definitely not getting Lawyer of the Year: The State Bar of Arizona is investigating Jack Wilenchik, a prominent Republican attorney, for his role in coordinating Arizona’s fake electors scheme after the New York Times got a hold of emails where Wilenchik called the fake electors scheme a fake electors scheme. Here’s the best part: Bar investigations are usually shrouded in secrecy, and we only know about the investigation because the lawyer assigned to do it for the Bar asked a reporter from the Republic to turn over their notes. The Republic declined.
Cool maps: The Republic’s Mary Jo Pitzl and Caitlin McGlade mapped primary election results across Maricopa County, finding that GOP gubernatorial contender Karrin Taylor Robson won the retirement communities and the swing-voter heavy areas along the Loop 101 corridor. Matt Salmon won one precinct in the GOP primary, despite having dropped out after ballots were printed, but the precinct only had one voter.
Extra double tough on crime: Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell announced a new policy last week to crack down on crime by requiring all plea deals involving firearms in the commission of a crime to include mandatory prison time. That was actually already the policy, the Phoenix New Times’ Katya Schwenk notes, but now a supervisor must sign off on any exceptions to that policy.
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Cleaning up other people’s messes: After a long standoff over who would pay for Blake Masters’ campaign — U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who doesn’t really like Masters, or tech billionaire Peter Thiel who set Masters up with $10 million in the primary and set him loose on Arizona — McConnell announced he’s holding a fundraiser for Masters tonight. That’s good for Masters, because as the Republic’s Ron Hansen notes, Masters needs money for this campaign. Meanwhile, the Arizona Mirror’s Jerod MacDonald-Evoy noted Masters hired two fake electors to work on his campaign. They include Greg Stafsten, the ex-executive director of the AZGOP, and Mesa resident Lori Osiecki, who is part of the separate, fringier fake electors who billed themselves as “sovereign citizens.”
We love a lookback at a law: Jake’s Law, which Arizona lawmakers passed in 2020, was designed to increase access to mental health care treatment for young people by allowing schools to refer and pay for students’ care when insurance and families couldn’t cover it. So far, hundreds of students have gotten treatment through the law. But more than half of schools still haven’t referred any students for care through it, suggesting some students aren’t getting help they need, the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting’s Shaena Montanari and Maria Polletta report.
More border gimmicks incoming: The state is stockpiling shipping containers in Nogales, potentially to install as another temporary border impediment there like Gov. Doug Ducey directed in the Yuma area, the Nogales International’s Angela Gervasi reports. And about those containers in Yuma: Some of them went onto the Cocopah Indian Tribe’s land, despite the tribe’s refusal to put them on tribal land, which created safety hazards, the Associated Press reports. And in related news, a new surveillance tower went up on the Tohono O’odham Nation, the final tower of a “virtual wall” the tribe resisted for many years, the Border Chronicle’s Todd Miller reports.
The 2000 Mules playbook: In what by now has become a standard refrain, the group behind the thoroughly debunked documentary “2000 Mules” essentially ghosted the Arizona Attorney General’s Office, Axios’ Jeremy Duda reports. The AG repeatedly asked for supporting evidence and a hard drive to back up True the Vote’s claims about ballot mules, and the group never turned anything over.
Plz help us: The director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources wants the federal government to step in to institute more cutbacks on the Colorado River after states have so far failed to negotiate with each other, the Arizona Daily Star’s Tony Davis reports. Nevada’s top water official previously did the same. And, the New York Times posits, the states that rely on the Colorado River for water could learn some lessons from decisions made a decade ago to save the supply of the Yakima River basin in Washington state.
A rock and a hard place: The City of Tempe told people living in an encampment by Tempe Town Lake that they needed to move out by the end of August, displacing dozens of people who set up camp there, some of whom have lived there for decades, the Republic’s Sam Kmack reports. The city cited risks of flooding and fires, but the people living there and their advocates say they have nowhere else to go.
The new (likely unconstitutional) law that prohibits people from filming cops within 8 feet won’t even be defended by Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, Capitol Media Services’ Howie Fischer reports.
Arizona Republican Sen. John Kavanagh, who’s been warned of the constitutional problems with the bill from the start, was still surprised that Brnovich won’t defend it. The Legislature will have to find its own attorneys for the case brought by media organizations and the ACLU.