Series of blunders doomed Garcia bid
Analysts: Dem struggled amid gaffes, lack of cash
After making his way through a horde of supporters, stopping every few seconds to shake hands or take selfies, David Garcia took the microphone at Roland’s Mexican restaurant.
It was Aug. 28, and the Democrat had just secured a decisive primary win. The crowd could barely contain itself.
“You’re looking at a working-class kid from Mesa who is one step away from being governor of his home state,” he told the whooping, whistling throng. “How cool is that?”
One step away was as close as he got.
A little more than two months later, incumbent Gov. Doug Ducey crushed Garcia by nearly 15 points in the general election. It was the biggest defeat of any Democrat running for statewide office this year, by at least 6 points.
And unlike the fates of other progressive gubernatorial candidates of color, Garcia’s loss drew minimal attention beyond state lines. His campaign hadn’t grabbed the national
spotlight like Stacey Abrams’ gubernatorial bid in Georgia or Andrew Gillum’s in Florida.
Beating a Republican incumbent in red-leaning Arizona was always a long shot.
But in an election year that saw growing progressive activism and frustration over publicschool funding — not to mention controversies that marred the reputations of Uber and Theranos, two of the governor’s innovation darlings — many wondered why a longtime educator who represented the state’s shifting demographics lost so spectacularly.
In the days after the election, analysts pointed to the same key factor that Garcia and his camp did: a lack of campaign cash that would’ve allowed the Democrat to hit back against relentless attack ads that filled the pre-election airwaves.
They differed, though, on why he struggled to raise the money.
Garcia’s campaign cited an “anemic” Democratic donor base in the state, saying the more established Ducey outfit had a built-in network of big-name contributors.
Outside strategists of both parties cited a lack of messaging discipline, saying Garcia veered away from his strength — education — to tackle issues that revealed far-left positions.
“Garcia should’ve been a magnet for money in this (national) environment,” said consultant Chad Campbell, a former state lawmaker who contends Garcia unnecessarily waded into thorny conversations. “If he had stayed focused on education, I think he would’ve been in much better shape.”
Instead, unrelated remarks gave opponents ammunition to paint him as a radical. And Garcia never blasted Ducey as hard as Ducey’s polished public-relations machine slammed him.
Ducey also faced less hostility from voters than incumbent governors elsewhere, meaning voters weren’t as motivated to remove the Republican.
“Ducey’s numbers were huge,” longtime GOP strategist Lisa James said the day after the election. “God Bless David Garcia, but he ran a terrible campaign.”
Garcia’s fundraising difficulties started early, despite his front-runner status in the Democratic primary. Opponent and state Sen. Steve Farley raised more than he did in all but one reporting period.
“Our name ID and our support was such that, barring some catastrophe, we were going to be the nominee, much like (then-Democratic Senate candidate Kyrsten) Sinema was going to be the nominee,” said Ian Danley, Garcia’s campaign manager.
“Usually, when you have that kind of inevitability, the donor class goes, ‘You’re the guy, so we’re in. Maybe we like the other person, but it’s going to be you, so let’s start helping you get ready.’ And that didn’t happen.”
The lack of primary support, coupled with Ducey’s fundraising prowess, underscored the need to seek funding outside of Arizona — an effort those who’d encouraged Garcia to run had promised would be successful.
It wasn’t: Trips to the progressive Netroots Nation conference in New Orleans and to the home of San Francisco billionaire Tom Steyer failed to significantly move the needle.
Meanwhile, just before the primary, Ducey had more than 12 times as much money in the bank than the three Democrats combined.
His finance reports included contributions from national players such as Charles Koch and relatives of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.
Garcia’s Netroots appearance not only failed to bring in cash, it did irreparable harm to his candidacy, analysts say.
The last-minute trip meant Garcia had to cancel a Phoenix fundraiser, a decision later bemoaned by hosts left with a hefty catering bill and a full fridge. Things got worse after he took the New Orleans stage for his keynote speech.
“Just imagine treating our southern border as an asset and not a liability,” he told the cheering crowd, putting his hand over his heart as he grew increasingly passionate.
“Just imagine our ‘dreamers’ (migrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children) … finally having the opportunity to contribute, study and learn in the only country they have ever known.”
And then: “Just imagine, no wall. No wall in southern Arizona.”
Garcia later said he was referring to the wall envisioned by President Donald Trump, not calling for removal of existing border structures. But when sliced for commercials, the remarks allowed Republicans to create an image of a governor who would open the border to anyone and everyone, allowing drugs and human traffickers to flood the state.
“Regardless of where Arizona voters fall on immigration, most of them do realize that the existing wall serves a purpose,” said Jennifer Duffy, who analyzes races for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.
“I think that the real turning point in this race came when Republicans started airing those excerpts from that speech.”
Duffy said she believes Garcia, at the time of the conference, was “sort of desperate to raise some progressive money and didn’t really think about the long-term impact of what he’d said.
“I’m not sure why he didn’t expect a Republican camera to be in that room. It was like a Hail Mary pass for funding, and it ended up being his undoing.”
Democratic consultant Julie Erfle, who previously served as executive director of advocacy organization Progress Now Arizona, had a similar take in an op-ed she wrote for the Arizona Mirror.
“Garcia had to use the last precious few weeks of the general election to clarify his positions on immigration,” she wrote. That “effectively changed the direction of the 2018 election from a focus on education to one of immigration and border security, a seismic shift in a year that saw unprecedented volunteer efforts from public school parents and teachers.”
The Garcia team took issue with the messaging argument, saying Garcia at no point adopted extreme positions.
“The framing that’s emerging is, ‘Run to the middle, that’s how you win — Sinema did it. Run to the left, you’ll lose,’” said Danley, the campaign manager. “I just think that is not the right lesson. I don’t think we ran this crazy, radical campaign. We just didn’t avoid hard questions of race and immigration that most Dems avoid.”
Ducey, in contrast, returned to safe talking points over and over, even if they sometimes stretched the truth.
He promoted his teacher-raise plan to tamp down criticism about investment in public schools, billing himself as proactive even though widespread unrest among teachers and parents had forced his hand.
He marketed his multi-agency Border Strike Force as an essential part of Arizona’s law-enforcement infrastructure.
And he promoted the state’s economic growth as a result of his business-friendly policies, repeating over and over that Garcia would raise taxes at levels higher than those actually supported by the Democrat.
“Ducey is very good at talking about the economy and why that’s important for the state,” said Duffy, the national analyst. “His biggest image problem is that he’s boring, and voters seem OK with that as long as he does the job they elected him to do.”
Compare that bland reputation with the threatening caricature of Garcia effectively created by his opposition.
James Garcia, a communications consultant with no relation to David Garcia, said the flurry of attacks ads were effective not only because they were well-funded and thus, incessant, but because they carried a “racial tinge” that validated the perceptions of voters “already predisposed to that idea that Latinos are the ‘other.’”
One of the more controversial ads funded by the Republican Governors Association, for instance, began with photographs of a white family with two young daughters. It then shifted to pictures of human trafficking and drug smuggling.
“As a mom with two daughters, nothing is more important than keeping them safe,” the mother and narrator said. “That’s why I’m worried about David Garcia.”
Several TV spots also darkened his face.
“Even though David had run for state superintendent (in 2014), I think there were just a lot, lot of people around the state who probably didn’t know who David was and hadn’t heard much about him until the barrage of television ads came,” James Garcia said.
“Once they saw those ads, they must’ve imagined a human-trafficking drug criminal was running for governor. If that was the only thing I knew about David, I wouldn’t have voted for him, either.”
Beth Castro, the daughter of Arizona’s last Latino governor, Raúl Castro, also called the ads “very racist.”
She said racial dynamics had changed little since her father ran more than four decades ago, criticizing Ducey for failing to denounce the ads she found most bigoted.
“Everyone I talked to down here (in the Tucson area) was like, ‘Look! They darkened his face and he looks like a drug lord,’” she said. “There were teachers who, after #RedForEd, really wanted Garcia, and that got totally lost.”
In a post-election interview, Garcia and his staffers said they didn’t regret pursuing the Gov- ernor’s Office instead of trying again forth estate superintendent seat Garcia had nearly won.
“Part of the reason we needed to run for governor and not something down-ballot is that it’s so accessible to people who feel so forgotten,” said Danley, the campaign manager.
“The community needed a purpose. They needed something that they could connect to in order to participate, to become active in our democracy, and it took us doing something that was bold and aggressive.”
Though its efforts ultimately fell short, the campaign clearly mobilized young voters and voters of color who hadn’t been active before.
Volunteers with MiAZ, a coalition of advocacy groups, knocked on at least 1 million doors in support of Garcia and other progressive candidates. Garcia received about 50,000 individual small-scale donations, and several university students waited in line for hours to vote for him.
“I’ve been doing this for 12 years, and I hadn’t seen a candidate speak to these types of organizers in the way that David did,” said Raquel Terán, a longtime community organizer who won a state House seat on Nov. 6.
She said Garcia’s work laid a foundation for future candidates, and that “things are going to be different” in four years when there is no gubernatorial incumbent.
“It’s one thing to know in theory that voting matters, and you can go tell people that, but this time, there was an opportunity to go ask people to vote for somebody,” Terán said. “The Latino vote was energized, and it was because the top of the ticket was someone they could relate to.”
Eight days after the election, Garcia was still trying to dig his way out of a mound of texts and emails from those energized voters.
“I’ve been trying to work through them — I can’t tell you how many I’ve received,” he said. “It’s literally overwhelming, and that’s a good way to end this. It reminds me that the group we needed to motivate and inspire, we did.”