The Daily Agenda: Take a deep breath
The Daily Agenda: Take a deep breath
We survived? ... She's a lone wolf ... And we've been "doxxing" donors since 2021.
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Well, friends, we’ve made it. It’s finally the Friday before Election Day.
That means the constant commercials, texts, calls and door-knocks will stop very soon. If you haven’t turned in your ballot yet or intend to vote in person between now and Tuesday, expect to get lots of outreach reminding you of your vote’s importance and how to cast your ballot.
While all of the electioneering can be annoying (and we agree, it can be), Rachel is reminded of a conversation she had with swing state voters in 2020, as Arizona was on the precipice of becoming one of the handful of states that prove pivotal to American politics.
A voter in Michigan, a state with more experience in the swing category, told her that being such a coveted voter provides “the constant opportunity to matter.”
That’s what we, as Arizona voters, now have. Our votes will decide the fate of our state. Our ideas tend to get exported to other places. And we’ll be in a fateful spot again come 2024, during the next presidential election.
The annoyances of being a coveted swing-state voter aren’t as bad as being ignored. We get a chance to set an agenda and tell our leaders what matters to us through our votes. We can make or break candidates and campaigns. We can decide a presidential election.
We matter. It’s a heavy burden. And as the election season ticks away, we want you all to remember just how important you — the engaged, conscientious voter — are to Arizona.
Hang in there for the next few days, and for the rounds of counting, recounting and conspiracies that follow. We need you.
Solidarity: Journalists at the Republic will walk out for the day today to protest poor wages and working conditions at the company, joining Gannett journalists at some papers nationwide. The Republic’s union is in its third year of contract negotiations with the company. (We would have skipped the newsletter in solidarity today, but we had already written it when we found out.)
Vote centers > polling places: Navajo voters in Apache County have one of the highest rate of rejected ballots in the state, Votebeat’s Jen Fifield reports, because they often go to the wrong polling place in the vast rural area, a problem that could be remedied with voting centers (which do not require voters to vote at their specific precinct polling place). But Apache County officials have been unwilling to make the switch, even though Navajo Nation leaders have asked repeatedly for at least one vote center.
Sinema for Sinema: U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema blasted out an email to supporters yesterday reminding them the election is coming up and their votes are essential to defend reproductive rights, marriage equality. The problem? She didn’t mention a single Arizona Democratic statewide candidate or remind her supporters to vote for them. Meanwhile, in the Republic, columnist Laurie Roberts asks “where the heck is” Sinema? While she has gravitas among Arizona independents and Republicans that Democrats sorely need on the campaign trail, she hasn’t stuck her neck out to help the Democratic team, and she didn’t show up to last night’s event with former President Barack Obama, even though she was invited.
Speaking of being a team player: Kari Lake recorded some web videos for “America First” legislative candidates in competitive districts (or in the case of LD22, a blue district with a crazy all-write-in campaign). There is one notable absence though: While Lake stumped for two of the three candidates in LD9, she didn’t mention blackface photo poster Mary Ann Mendoza, who is running for a House seat. Update: she later deleted that tweet and tweeted for the whole LD9 team, including the blackface lady.
When even MSNBC is hostile territory: On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Republican strategist Susan Del Percio announced the results of an upcoming Emerson College poll show almost three-quarters of Arizona voters think that debating is an important thing for a gubernatorial candidate to do, and that is dragging Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Katie Hobbs down. Elsewhere in the show, the hosts took shots at Hobbs while discussing Obama’s visit to Phoenix, saying he spoke for nearly an hour because he had to: “Somebody in this campaign has to speak, and Katie Hobbs isn’t.”
Dems’ border problem: While Republicans lean into harsh rhetoric about immigration and the border on the campaign trail, Democrats tend to avoid the issue or sound a bit like Republicans, the New York Times’ Jazmine Ulloa reports. The leaders of grassroots groups that typically work on immigration issues, including some in Arizona, told Ulloa that they’re dealing with burnout and a lack of resources.
One last visitor: First Lady Jill Biden will be in Phoenix on Saturday to kick off a canvass with the Arizona Education Association in the final days before Election Day as the teachers’ union launches a last-weekend get out the vote effort. Only “legitimate” media, as determined by the AEA, will be allowed to attend the event, per its press release.
What’s in a name?: The Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission, the state agency, is suing Clean Elections USA, the group behind the drop box watching in Arizona, to try to get the second group to stop using the “Clean Elections” name because it’s hurting the agency’s reputation, the Arizona Capitol Times’ Nick Phillips reports. Clean Elections also wants Clean Elections USA to remove a post on its website about the Maricopa County election being “rigged.”
Points for creativity: Republican U.S. Senate candidate Blake Masters created an online video game called “Mr. Spaceman” that shows how “Mark Kelly destroys the things you love.” The game features things like the middle class and the economy, claiming Kelly destroyed them, as you try to blow them up in the game.
Now get her home: Officials from the U.S. Embassy in Russia met with the Phoenix Mercury’s Brittney Griner, who has been detained and imprisoned in Russia over marijuana possession since February, the Washington Post reports. Griner was "doing as well as can be expected under the circumstances.” The U.S. is still attempting a prisoner swap to release Griner, but Russian officials haven’t been cooperative.
Great, now he’s even more stressed: Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell told reporters yesterday that her office is reviewing the case of Randy Kaufman, the Maricopa County Community College District Governing Board candidate who was caught masturbating in a community college parking lot, to “determine appropriate charges,” Axios Phoenix’s Jeremy Duda writes. After Kaufman name-dropped a friend on the force and noted he’s running for the board, college police charged him under ARS 13-1403 A1, which makes masturbating in public a Class 5 misdemeanor. But under subsection B of that law, it becomes a felony if the masturbator “is reckless about whether a minor who is under fifteen years of age is present.” Police said he was about 190 feet from a preschool where kids were playing outside.
BS is popular online?: Candidates who peddle election denialism online see their engagement numbers juiced, according to a review from Bloomberg News of the Facebook and Twitter posts of every Republican running for Senate, Congress, governor, attorney general or secretary of state this year. The story includes some cool infographics that show Lake is one of the most prominent election denial posters in the country.
Decades of work down the drain: Author Tim Alberta criss-crosses the country trying to answer the question of why Latinos are abandoning the Democratic Party. He comes away with a 8,000-word piece in the Atlantic that starts and ends in El Portal, the south Phoenix restaurant owned by Arizona Democratic legends Mary Rose and Earl Wilcox.
“Earl and Mary Rose had spent decades waiting for the GOP’s bill to come due. On Election Night 2020, they toasted to a new era. And then the strangest thing happened. People started coming into El Portal to vent their frustrations and unload their grievances—against the Democratic Party,” Alberta writes.
Shape up or else: Pima County Supervisors are considering a plan to slash constables’ pay in half if the local constables don’t undertake large-scale reforms of how they do their jobs, the Tucson Sentinel’s Bennito L. Kelty writes. (While the constables don’t answer to the board, they do get their budget from the board.) The move comes after a wave of scrutiny on constables’ misconduct statewide, a series of resignations in the Pima County constables’ offices and the killing of local Constable Deborah Martinez on the job.
You’ve heard of megachurches…: Facing a teacher shortage, Westwood High School in Mesa crammed 135 students and four teachers into a single classroom. But this story has a twist: It actually seems to be working, the Associated Press reports. The mega-class is based on a concept called “team teaching” that was pioneered in the 1960s, and it was developed in consultation with professors at Arizona State University.
It did not stay in Vegas: After a viral photo showed him drunk at a slot machine in Vegas, speaker of the 24th Navajo Nation Council Seth Damon told the Navajo Times that he intends to go to a treatment facility for alcoholism in the next few days. Damon also faces a vote from the council on whether to put him on indefinite leave, and he’s on the ballot on Tuesday. Damon’s behavior wasn’t illegal, but he acknowledged his behavior “broke the integrity” of his office.
Abe Hamadeh, the Republican candidate for attorney general, really hates the Phoenix New Times, according to a story in the Phoenix New Times about how much Hamadeh hates Phoenix New Times.
Perhaps the silliest part of the story is Hamadeh’s claim that the New Times “doxxed” Brandon Rafi, the Arizona lawyer whose face is plastered on billboards all over town, by reporting that Rafi contributed to Hamadeh’s campaign. Of course, that’s public information. The New Times didn’t include identifying information, like a phone number or address, for Rafi. And Rafi is hardly a private figure — he’s quite literally put his face on hundreds of bright red billboards.
And for what it’s worth, Arizona has a doxxing law, and reporting on politicians’ financial backers doesn’t qualify, which you would really hope the attorney general would know.
"Great, now he's even more stressed." I can't stop laughing.
That last part is great. Going to lololol when I see Rafi billboards now 🤣