Primary balloting kicks off consequential fall campaign
America is hard wired to produce history every four years with its scheduled presidential election. In such years, that decision is generally the biggest story of the year, but not this year. In 2020 the presidential election probably isn’t the biggest or second biggest or even third biggest story of the year.
In many ways Decision 2020 has become an afterthought, a bystander to more epic events as the United States battens down in a global pandemic, shivers through an economic calamity and awakens to a cultural revolution that aims to shake the foundations of the republic.
For you Arizonans who have been locked down and masked up, fixing your gaze on COVID-19 and the tectonic shifts it triggered, we draw your attention back to an election fast approaching.
There are big decisions before you.
Your vote will help decide the next president and direction of the country. It will decide if Arizona will select a second Democrat to the U.S. Senate and possibly tip the world’s most important deliberative body to America’s liberal party. Your vote could shift the balance of power in the Arizona Legislature, decide how much Arizona corrals Big Energy at the Corporation Commission and push across initiatives to legalize recreational marijuana and tax the rich for education.
So take a moment and read about the big decisions before you. There’s a lot riding on your vote.
The presidential race in Arizona
President Trump won Arizona with 3.5% in 2016, but the reliably red state is now up for grabs and Joe Biden appears to have the edge.
The former vice president and presumptive Democratic nominee has been leading in the latest polls with an edge ranging from 2 to 7 points.
In mid-June, the Biden campaign finally began turning its attention to Arizona as a battleground state, naming a state director and a senior campaign adviser. The campaign also launched a $15 million, five-week ad blitzin six battleground states, including Arizona.
Trump, meanwhile, won’t give up Arizona that easily. He set up his reelection efforts more than a year ago and recently held a campaign rally in Phoenix even amid the raging coronavirus pandemic.
Earlier this month, Jeff DeWit, Trump’s 2016 Arizona chair and former state treasurer, became Trump’s reelection campaign chief operating officer. It’s unclear exactly how he’ll help Trump win Arizona again, but both camps will certainly fight it out.
Republicans still have the voter registration edge with 1.3 million over 1.2 million Democrats. But independents make up a third or 1.2 million of Arizona registered voters.
Voter turnout plays a decisive factor in every election but more so this year because the coronavirus pandemic has turned the nation upside down. Trump’s public support has slipped over his handling of the health crisis, but he has shored up his attacks on the mail-in vote, something that experts say tends to benefit Democrats.
U.S. Senate
If there is a looming figure in Arizona’s race for U.S. Senate, it is the president of the United States. With his poll numbers fading in the pandemic, Donald Trump has become the dead weight Republican Martha McSally must pull to Election Day, even as the president repels moderate Republican and independent women who are key to winning this race.
McSally and her Democratic challenger Mark Kelly boast sterling records. Both served their countries in combat, McSally as an Air Force pilot and first woman in U.S. history to fly a fighter jet against an enemy; Kelly as a naval aviator who flew 39 combat missions in Operation Desert Storm. Kelly was an astronaut who flew four missions into space. McSally boasts Master’s degrees from Harvard and the U.S. Air War College.
Kelly is a centrist who promises he will exercise independence and moderation in the Senate. He wants to deliver health insurance to every Arizona, invest in infrastructure, lower interest rates on student loans and put greater restrictions on guns while still respecting the Second Amendment.
McSally is sounding the alarm on the cultural revolution that wants to defund police departments across the nation and erase American history. She would guarantee health-care coverage in the individual or group market. On foreign policy, she vows to take a hard line against China for its failure to quickly alert the world of coronavirus and for its rise as a regional and global hegemon.
Kelly enjoys a wide lead, but this is a year when events may influence the electorate more than any debate or policy. With more of the long, hot summer ahead, no one can grow complacent. So fine is the equilibrium in the U.S. Senate that Arizona could tip control to the Democrats if it elects Kelly. That alone could be a factor that moves tens of thousands of votes.
Corporation Commission
Legal challenges will reshape the makeup of the Corporation
Commission.
Judges booted two of the four Republican candidates, including incumbent Boyd Dunn, off the primary election ballot following challenges on their nomination petitions. The decisions were upheld by the state Supreme Court.
Dunn was undone in part by a petition circulator working on his behalf, who disclosed that she had forged or falsified more than 100 of the signatures she collected.
The rulings mean that unless a Republican launches a successful write-in campaign and garners at least 6,663 votes to win the party’s nomination, only two Republicans will advance to the general election to compete for three seats.
Democrats, who are running a full slate of three candidates, would be assured of winning at least one of the open seats. That would close the Republican advantage to 3-2 on the five-member board.
Boyd’s departure also means that none of the utility regulators who approved a rate hike on APS customers in 2017 will be on the panel come January. That increase, along with APS’ long delayed admission that it spent millions of dollars in dark money to influence the 2014 election, helped usher Democrat Sandra Kennedy into office in 2018.
A larger Democratic presence on the commission could pose challenges to APS interests, especially given progressives’ beliefs that the Corporation Commission should force utilities to get more of their power from renewable sources such as solar and wind.
Expect that debate to be front and center in the general election.
Arizona Legislature
Democrats haven’t controlled the Arizona House since 1966.
But there’s a 31-29 split now and a lot of talk about the state turning purple. Which means that, in theory, if Democrats can flip two Republican seats in November, the gavel will be theirs.
It’s not improbable. Democrats flipped four House seats in 2018. And the national party, hoping for big wins in Arizona this year, is pouring resources into state legislative races.
If the House is going to flip, it’s likely to come in races like Legislative District 6, where Democratic Flagstaff Mayor Coral Evans and independent longtime county supervisor Art Babbott are challenging Republican Rep. Walt Blackman and former lawmaker Brenda Barton.
That is the most hotly contested House race, for now, in the general election.
But first, we’ve got primaries – and a handful of intriguing intra-party challenges to sort through.
Ironically, the most heavily contested race in August will be in the Senate, which has a 17-13 Republican advantage and isn’t expected to flip in 2020. But the matchup between conservative Rep. Nancy Barto and moderate Sen. Heather Carter could change the dynamics in the Senate, given that Carter is often a key swing vote.
In the House, keep an eye on Tucson’s Districts 2 and 3, where vigorous challenges are expected against sibling incumbents Alma and Daniel Hernandez, Jr., and in the west Valley’s District 13, where conservative former lawmaker Steve Montenegro is making a bid to rejoin the House.
Ballot initiatives
COVID-19 did a number on ballot initiatives this year. And not just in Arizona.
At least 11 other states that allow citizen-led efforts to make laws at the ballot box saw groups delay or outright nix their campaigns because of difficulty in gathering qualifying signatures amid the pandemic.
In Arizona, groups abandoned efforts on a second, competing marijuana legalization measure, as well as proposals to eliminate property taxes for older homeowners and to place greater restrictions on school vouchers.
Arizonans could see as few as one initiative on the Nov. 3 ballot and as many as four:
A measure to authorize recreational marijuana, including individuals to grow their own plants;
A proposal to impose a tax surcharge on individual income above $250,000 to boost funding for public schools;
A plan to permit prisoners serving time for nondangerous offenses to earn credits for early release.
A proposal to require 20% pay raise for health care workers such as nurses and aides but also janitorial and housekeeping staffers and to ban higher charges for health care services by out-of-network providers.
Three of the four submitted 420,000 signatures or more — each must have 237,654 to qualify. Second Chances, the prison-sentencing reform, submitted about 397,000 signatures. Some of the initiatives may face challenges aimed at removing sufficient number of signatures to keep them off the ballot.
Clarity might not come until mid-September. One asterisk: The Outlaw Dirty Money constitutional amendment requiring disclosure of large individual donations in campaign spending. Backers suspended their efforts over public health concerns and are seeking relief from either the governor or the courts to use the signatures already collected toward qualifying the measure for the 2022 election.