The season three recap

The ICYMI edition … Tom throws someone under the bus … And they were scared, too.

Hey readers, 

We’ve been combing through the last year’s worth of Agendas in anticipation of our third birthday this week. 

And wow. What a rollicking year it has been… 

Today we’ve pulled some of our favorite episodes from Season Three of “The Agenda,” our daily newsletter/telenovela about Arizona politics and government. 

Tomorrow, we’re going to tell you about some of the plans we have in store for the Agenda as we enter “The Agenda, Season Four: The Election and its Consequences.” 

But first, we want to take a moment to celebrate a few successes of the last year. 

Because it was a doozy of a year.

The biggest success of all, of course, is that we made it another year! It may not seem like much, but considering survival is never really a given around here, we think it’s worth a pat on the back. 

So thank you, dear supporters,
for making that possible!

This past year, especially, has been filled with projects. From launching the Tucson Agenda to firing off deep fakes of Kari Lake, we’ve taken some big swings.  

But the most exciting project by far has been building Skywolf, our legislation tracking service and political intelligence tool. 

We launched Skywolf in January because we know there’s a deep need in Arizona’s political community for a better, smarter option for your legislation tracking, advocacy and research. At Skywolf, we’re building the tools political professionals need to analyze legislative action and never miss the details that matter. 

While others are attempting to go 50 states wide and an inch deep, our strategy is the opposite. 

We’re going deep into Arizona, building not only a legislation tracking tool but a political intelligence service with a suite of features to help your organization advocate politically. We’ll tell you a little more about that tomorrow as we dive into our plans for 2025 and beyond.

But if you’re a political professional who needs a better system for managing your organization’s advocacy, you can schedule a demo of Skywolf today. 

This year has also brought new people into the Agendaverse, from Caitlin and Curt and the whole crew down in Tucson, to our new copy editor Christian Sawyer, who pens his own fantastic newsletter called the Ground Party Papers about homesteading, alternative building, water policy and Cochise County politics. It really is good. You should click. 

And of course, our own Nicole Ludden, who has been everything we hoped for and more since joining us last November. Besides being a fantastic reporter, she’s sharp, funny, disciplined, organized, a stabilizing force in the generally chaotic Agendaverse, and an all-around wonderful person to work with. 

Finally, our most beloved (and hated) addition this year, our art intern, ChatGPT. We have some exciting news on that front that we think both fans and haters will like. We’ll dish it out tomorrow.

Ok, on to the highlights from what we’re calling “The Agenda, Season Three: The Rise of the Machines.”

1. Election Coverage

In the last year, we’ve introduced you to some of the most interesting candidates of the cycle, including the Green Party sham candidates who later earned national attention, and the “Reagan Republican” creating deep fakes of the Gipper to trash Kari Lake.

We also wrote more primary previews than we can remember and told you all about the least important election of your lifetime.

And we couldn’t go one election without writing about political sign drama and Arizona’s history of political sign chicanery.

2. Watching the Watchers

We reported on reporters, including the myriad conflicts of interest that former Republic publisher Mi-Ai Parrish had at her job leading Arizona PBS. We have not been invited to appear on PBS since.

And we picked on the new corporate overlords at the Arizona Daily Sun in Flagstaff, leading to a fascinating interview with local newspaper baron Francis Wick about his purchase of the paper and plans to grow it. 

3. The Saga of Leezah Sun

Democratic Rep. Leezah Sun became a main character, briefly, before being bounced from the Legislature. That led to our favorite subheadline of the year: “You are cordially invited to roast Rep. Leezah Sun.”

4. Explaining the Process

Our explainers of nerdy processes, like how to force a vote on repealing the territorial-era abortion ban, really held up. And you all seemed to appreciate our explainer of how to kick a candidate off the ballot. We also walked you through how to background candidates like a pro, and how to read financial disclosure statements and campaign finance reports.

But perhaps our most popular explainer of the year was our simple analogy of the state Capitol as a small town (full of some of the worst people you know).

And of course, we created Deep Fake Kari Lake to teach you how to spot deep fakes. In the process, we got threatened with a lawsuit and became pros at spotting candidates trying to pass off ChatGPT writing as their own. 

5. Friends, Games and Shenanigans

We held more events, created more games and engaged in more hijinks than ever before. Our Drinking With Politicians series was a huge hit, and we filled up Valley Bar’s concert hall with a bunch of nerds listening to politicians. That’s pretty impressive on its own.

But our favorite event was the day we spent just gabbing with you in the comments section. Our March Madness competition was a bit insane, but it brought in a lot of new readers, and our pop quiz, crossword, election predictions and drinking games were big hits.

On the hijinks front, our bill to create a monument honoring assassinated reporter Don Bolles made it further than in past years. And that ad we bought in the Arizona Daily Star still makes us laugh. 

6. Yes, Even Some Traditional Journalism

Season Three wasn’t all gimmicks and lolz. We broke some important news this year, too, including the news that lawmakers were skipping work for a trip to Israel, the incredibly generous bonus structure at the Attorney General’s Office and Kris Mayes’ endorsements of people she’s tasked to investigate.

We also popped election conspiracist Mark Finchem for breaking election law.

And we told you about how Democratic lawmakers abandoned one of their colleagues who uses a wheelchair rather than advocating to get her into a presidential event. 

7. Appreciating Art and Literature

We’ve also introduced you to all sorts of other cool newsletters and alternative news sources this year, including by inviting friends like former Republic columnist Robert Robb and former Arizona Daily Star editorial cartoonist David Fitzsimmons to pen pieces for our audience, along with many others.

And finally, we’ve brought you some truly fantastic and deeply disturbing art. If we had to pick just one image that our art intern, ChatGPT, has illustrated for us this year, it’d be this one.

Back and forth: Monday was a busy day for state officials arguing over education funding. Gov. Katie Hobbs and six Democratic lawmakers called for an audit of the Arizona Department of Education’s funding decisions since January 2023. They pointed to a lack of transparency in decisions about which school districts saw cuts in federal funding, as well as a reported $24 million that ADE officials let expire last September. Not to be outdone, Superintendent Tom Horne announced that the U.S. Department of Education contacted his office last week to offer a waiver so Arizona could recoup the funds that expired, the Arizona Mirror’s Caitlin Sievers reported. Horne blamed his predecessor, Kathy Hoffman, and said the employee who “incompetently” handled those funds no longer works at the ADE. 

A little drama: Several big Arizona counties certified the primary election results, and while it wasn’t as chaotic as years past, there still was some drama, the Republic’s Sasha Hupka reports. In Pinal County, Supervisor Kevin Cavanaugh, who claimed he was cheated after he lost the sheriff’s race, voted to approve the certification “under duress.” In Maricopa County, we saw a bizarre encounter with Barbara Hiatt, wife of failed Maricopa County Recorder candidate Don Hiatt. She claimed there was fraud and said she trusted Russian elections more than U.S. elections. Supervisor Thomas Galvin wasn’t having any of it and told her “good luck” trying to vote against Putin in Russia.

New-ish face: Former lawmaker Eric Meyer is a lawmaker again after the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors appointed him to fill a vacant seat in Legislative District 4, KTAR’s Kevin Stone reports. Meyer fills the seat left vacant when Laura Terech stepped down in June to take a job with the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office. Terech was one of seven Democratic lawmakers who left this year, and with Meyer’s appointment, the Democrats are back to strength. 

Pants on fire: Green Valley News’ editor Dan Shearer called out David Lara’s “complicated relationship with the truth” after Lara, who just won the Republican primary for Yuma County Recorder, repeated a rumor he knew was false at the Republican National Convention. The rumor was that asylum seekers had tied up all the local ambulances, which forced the San Luis Fire Department to use off-road vehicles to transport patients. Before he went to the GOP convention, Lara called the fire chief, who said the rumor wasn’t true. But Lara, who’s blamed 11 election losses on voter fraud, went ahead and repeated the rumor on national television.

Get him a faster getaway car: A tortoise escaped from the Rooster Cogburn Ostrich Ranch and was making its way across Interstate 10 near Picacho Peak when state troopers rescued (or should we say caught?) the tortoise, the Republic’s Coleby Phillips reports. The name “Stitch” was on a label on the tortoise’s shell, which tipped off the state troopers that the tortoise probably was from the nearby ostrich ranch.

One of the good things about election season is it drags back up all the ridiculous stuff candidates did in the past. 

One of the top two vote-getters for a seat on the Scottsdale City Council is the same guy who made national headlines a decade ago when he confused a busload of YMCA campers with migrant children, the Phoenix New Times’ TJ L'Heureux reports.

Adam Kwasman, a former Republican lawmaker, was running for Congress in 2014 and immigration was one of his big issues. He was talking to supporters and the press by a road near Oracle when he heard a bus was headed their way and took off after it. As the yellow school bus passed by, he could see the “fear on their faces,” Kwasman said later. 

The campers on the bus were laughing and taking pictures on their iPhones, 12News’ Brahm Resnik reported at the time, shortly after making Kwasman squirm through a pseudo-apology. 

“They were sad too,” is still one of the greatest lines in Arizona politics.