The Daily Agenda: Spoilers gonna spoil
How Andy Biggs almost faced a real threat ... It's not Watergate, unfortunately ... And four years is a long time to spend at the circus.
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Last year, following the Jan. 6 attempted coup at the U.S. Capitol, the architects of the historic recall campaign against former Arizona Senate President Russell Pearce regrouped with a new plan: They were going to dethrone Republican U.S. Rep. Andy Biggs.
Ten years before, Republican activist Tyler Montague and Democratic union organizer Randy Parraz had formed an unlikely alliance that brought together moderate Republicans, independents and Democrats to topple Pearce at the height of his power.
They believed that Biggs had moved too far right for his East Valley district by peddling conspiracies, defending the attacks on the Capitol and attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election — just as Pearce had out-flanked his voters by authoring SB1070, Arizona’s hardline immigration legislation that sparked massive protests and boycotts against the state.
So they dusted off their old playbook1 and set to work. Federal law doesn’t allow voters to recall a congressman, so they would back an independent candidate who appealed both to Republican and independent voters fed up with Biggs and to Democrats who wanted to boot him out.
And they had just the independent challenger in mind: Clint Smith, a local lawyer with his own practice who was a co-chair of the Pearce recall campaign.
But the plan hinged on it being a two-way race. And it probably would have worked, too, Montague says now, if it hadn’t been for one man: Democrat Javier Ramos.
“That race could have been explosive. Like it would have brought a lot of national focus and had money firehosing into it and all that,” Montague said. “I spent a lot of time trying to set this game plan up, and that spoiler ruined it.”
After doing some polling to back up their thesis that Biggs would be vulnerable to a more moderate conservative independent in a one-on-one race, Montague and Parraz met with Raquel Terán, the chair of the Arizona Democratic Party. Terán knew the strategy, having cut her teeth on the Pearce recall campaign before helping to defeat former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. The Democratic Party couldn’t dissuade Democrats from running in the district, she told them, but if they could keep the field clear, the Dems would back a center-right independent candidate over Biggs in November.
As an independent, however, Smith started at an automatic disadvantage: He needed nearly three times the number of signatures as Biggs to qualify for the ballot. Running without a party also means no financial support or access to party resources like volunteers, voter lists or discounted mailing. Still, the campaign was going well, Montague said, as Smith started racking up endorsements, grassroots volunteers and good press. But when Ramos got into the race, it blew up the plan.
Ramos, a tribal lawyer, isn’t a particularly formidable candidate. He has sworn off campaign contributions, for example, and has only spent about $9,000 in his bid for Congress. Still, he has the Arizona Democratic Party’s backing and simply by being an option on the ballot, enough Democrats will almost certainly vote for him to ruin the tight coalition that Smith would need to win, Montague said.
Montague and Parraz sat down with Ramos to explain their strategy, Montague said, but he seemed to sincerely believe, against all logic and evidence, that he could actually win in Biggs’ solidly Republican district.
“The only thing I’m going to spoil is their dreams when I win,” Ramos told us, before declaring he didn’t want to discuss his campaign because we showed our bias against him by asking if he was a spoiler.
It’s not technically impossible that Smith could win a three-way race, Montague said, but it’s “not probable at this point.” At least, Biggs could finish the race with less than 50% of the vote, which Montague hopes will scare Biggs a bit.
“If we make the guy actually have to raise money and campaign, then maybe he'll think twice about being such a kook. You know, there's still a net public benefit to a little bit of accountability,” he said.
Nottergate: Phoenix Police arrested the man who broke into Katie Hobbs’ campaign office in downtown Phoenix. Police say Daniel Mota Dos Reis was actually already under arrest for another burglary in the area when they received the photos of him at Hobbs HQ, and they re-arrested him on several new felony burglary charges. He has no obvious political ties to any political campaign or ideology and stole some electronics.
They’re all close: Several political prognosticators moved the U.S. Senate race to the toss-up category in the final weeks before Election Day, noting that Democratic U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly’s edge had winnowed. Politico attributed the GOP surge in the race not to candidate Blake Masters, but to gubernatorial contender Kari Lake, who is boosting Masters’ campaign, and to a negative national political environment for Democrats and the Biden administration.
Back on: Planned Parenthood resumed abortion services at its Arizona clinics after the state agreed not to enforce the pre-statehood outright ban as legal challenges continue, though the services could be temporary as court cases move forward. A new state law banning abortions after 15 weeks is still in place.
Learn from their mistakes: As Cochise County figures out how or if it will hand count audit more ballots, we turn our attention to Nevada’s Nye County, where a hand count is going about as well as anticipated. The Associated Press reports that the county faces an emergency lawsuit to stop the counting, and observers of the process have seen mismatched tallies and recounts.
Not so grassroots: The drop box watchers in Arizona are part of a national coordinated effort to video tape the boxes and send information to True the Vote, the group behind “2000 Mules,” Votebeat’s Jen Fifield reports after accessing a trove of documents related to the effort. True the Vote then plans to give information to Protect America Now, Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb’s group to pass on to local law enforcement.
The firehose is open: After Republicans grew anxious about the lack of spending from the Republican Legislative Victory Fund, the PAC dropped more than a half-million dollars to boost Republicans and attack Democrats in a handful of competitive legislative races in recent days. And the Free Enterprise Club recently dropped more than $75,000 to help elect far-right Republican Steve Robinson, co-founder of We the People Alliance, which attempted and failed to recall several Republicans who didn’t believe the 2020 election was stolen, in his write-in bid for the crazy all-write-in race that’s happening for the West Valley’s Legislative District 22 Senate seat after the Democratic nominee, Rep. Diego Espinoza, dropped out to take a lobbying gig.
Vote like your vote depends on it: Rachel reports for The Guardian on Proposition 309, referred to the ballot by Republicans in the Legislature, which would create harsher voter ID requirements both for in-person and mail-in voting. Opponents, including county recorders, believe the measure will disenfranchise voters and expose voters’ personal information.
Show on the road: The race for president of the Navajo Nation came to Phoenix, where incumbent President Jonathan Nez debated candidate Buu Nygren at Arizona State University, giving Navajos who live in the Phoenix area the chance to hear directly from the candidates, the Arizona Mirror’s Shondiin Silversmith reports.
Settle in: The Associated Press walks through why election results aren’t finalized on election night. In Arizona, don’t expect to see news organizations call many statewide races on election night. It may be later in the week, or the week after the election, depending on how close the top races are. It takes time to verify mail-in ballots dropped off at the polls on Election Day.
When in doubt, hire a consultant: The University of Arizona has hired an outside consulting firm that specializes in crisis management and workplace violence prevention to analyze its safety protocols, the Arizona Daily Star’s Kathryn Palmer reports. UA hired the firm after it faced scrutiny for failing to protect professors from an expelled student’s harassment in the wake of professor Thomas Meixner’s murder by a former student on campus.
(Don’t) ask me anything: Besides charging $50 for wi-fi like a fancy resort in the early 2000s, the Arizona Republican Party is putting a host of new restrictions on members of the press who want to attend its election night party, including corralling them in the back of the room and not letting them ask questions, the Arizona Mirror’s Jim Small and Jerod MacDonald-Evoy note.
“We don’t want the press going out and talking to people who are going out and having a good night,” AZGOP spokesperson Kristy Dohnel told the Mirror.
Old story, new location: A Bullhead City woman is suing to block a local ordinance that prohibits feeding people at city parks after police charged her with a crime for cooking for the homeless, then ultimately dropped the charge, the Associated Press reports.
Drinking and pondering: From a Tucson sports bar, the New York Times’ Katherine Miller ponders what post-Trumpism means, writing that Kari Lake and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin both represent the future of Trumpism. Also in the Times’ opinion pages, Frank Bruni thanks Lake for laying bare the double standard she uses to judge elections.
“A Republican victory in a tightly contested race means that Democrats’ desires or schemes to corrupt it didn’t pan out. Let freedom ring! A Democratic victory means that George Soros cast a magic spell over voters while a global cabal of socialists and pedophiles used space beams to scramble the results that voting machines spit out,” Bruni writes.
Niche drama alert: Warring reenactment troupes in Tombstone have gotten into public arguments while trying to woo tourists to watch their shows, resulting in police reports and some of the gunslingers leaving town, Los Angeles Magazine reports.
After Katie Hobbs put out a press release declaring Kari Lake’s rhetoric was related to the break-in at her office, Lake called an “EMERGENCY” press conference yesterday to attack the press for reporting what Hobbs said.
At the presser, Lake announced, in jest, that she had actually caught Hobbs breaking into her campaign headquarters — and unveiled a giant photo of a person in a chicken suit as the punchline, calling on the press to report the story with the same scrutiny that they reported the very real break-in at Hobbs’ office.
Lake then demanded the press to use some critical thinking before biting on a story — kinda like Lake did in 2018 when she reported that the RedForEd movement was actually a ploy to legalize marijuana.
And she tossed the first question to Gateway Pundit’s Jordan Conradson, last seen under arrest for beating his girlfriend, before taking direct shots at Axios Phoenix’s Jeremy Duda (whose name she intentionally mispronounced as “dud ah”) for reporting on the break-in at all (he didn’t) and the “Arizona Repugnant’s” Stacey Barchenger (which she mispronounced as “bartender”) for reporting on Hobbs’ comments that Lake was to blame (she didn’t).
With Lake at the helm, the sideshow becomes the main event. And if she wins the governorship, we’re in for four years of circuses that bear no resemblance to governing — or even to reality itself.
The Pearce recall was possible because of the unique structure of a recall election — it allowed for a Republican-on-Republican contest that was not limited to Republican voters. Pearce’s district was solidly Republican. And Republican primary voters liked Pearce’s particular strain of anti-immigrant conservatism. But in a recall, Republican Jerry Lewis, a charter school executive and Latter Day Saints leader, offered the entire electorate a more compassionate vision of the Republican Party. Democrats, independents and moderate Republicans backed Lewis, and he won by 12 percentage points. And for a deep cut, that race also had a potential spoiler: Olivia Cortez. Recall supporters sued to get her off the ballot, saying Pearce and his friends had recruited her specifically to split the vote against him. A judge agreed but let her stay on the ballot anyway. But she ultimately withdrew to get opponents to drop the whole legal affair. And although the ballots had already been printed and her name was on them, after all the attention the case got, she only received 1% of the vote.
Heh that was my suggestion on the independent part of th Smith campaign! Thanks, I had those questions.