Ducey changed Arizona
IN 8 YEARS AS GOVERNOR?
After just six months on the job in 2015, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey hopped an overnight flight from Paris to Mexico City. It was a 12hour plane ride, and he flew coach. At the Paris Airshow, he had pitched aerospace industry leaders on the perks of the Grand Canyon State. The Mexico City leg was part economic development, part signal: We’re here to make friends, as former Ducey chief of staff Kirk Adams recalled it, after prior administrations’ divisive immigration policies had soured relations with Arizona’s southern neighbor.
It was a telling page in the initial chapter of Ducey’s eight years in office, a tenure the fiscally conservative Republican marked by stabilizing and growing the state’s finances, rebuilding its economy after the recession of the late 2000s and rebranding Arizona’s image in the national limelight.
Ducey, who is now 58, did much of the work behind the scenes, leaning on his talking points and business chops built prior to his time in the public sector.
While praised for changing the state’s economic outlook — including from his Democratic successor, Gov.-elect Katie Hobbs — running Arizona like a business came with success stories and a few failures. His policy wins, especially a private school voucher program similar to one voters rejected years ago, were often as divisive as the state’s politically purple landscape, and he has faced criticism that those efforts benefited his allies and wealthy Arizonans more than the majority of residents.
After eight years in office, Ducey’s leadership has reshaped the state, potentially for generations.
When he leaves the Governor’s Office on Jan. 2, Ducey will be the first Arizona governor in 35 years to finish two full terms.
He will depart with a string of major conservative policy accomplishments — including the state’s largest-ever income tax
“We’ve left the state better than we found it.” Gov. Doug Ducey
cut, the voucher program and two expanded courts that he filled with judges — in a state that has turned from reliably red to a battleground.
“We’ve left the state better than we found it,” he said in an interview, when asked about his tenure.
It’s a period of leadership from a governor most comfortable in a boardroom that has earned effusive praise from conservative organizations and allies — the author George F. Will wrote this month that Ducey was the “most successful governor of the 21st century.”
Ducey’s legacy also is marked by his leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic, an unforeseen public health crisis that’s an enduring line of critique among the governor’s detractors who say he valued politics more than the lives of people. Arizona’s death rate from COVID-19 is the second highest among states in the nation; nearly 32,000 people have died.
And in the past two years, the establishment conservative has found himself at odds with an unexpected foe: members of his own political party’s farthest right flank, who castigated him for not going along with their efforts to overturn election results.
“As governor, there are tests along the way,” Ducey said, naming wildfires, flooding, COVID-19 and deaths of prominent citizens and law enforcement officers among those trials. He named Kayla Mueller, the 26-year-old aid worker from Prescott who was kidnapped in Syria, held captive by Islamic State terrorists and killed in February 2015.
“That’s part of signing up for leadership. When that phone does ring in the middle of the night ... those are all tests along the way. It’s one of the toughest things about the job. You oftentimes do get the bad news first. And that’s something that you have to embrace, and do your duty, and tend to the responsibility depending on the situation.”
Businessman turned governor sets the tone
Portraying himself as a pro-growth conservative, Ducey defeated Democrat Fred DuVal to replace Republican Gov. Jan Brewer in 2014 following a stint as state treasurer. His race for the GOP nomination that year saw unprecedented anonymous political spending — millions of dollars paid to get Ducey elected that was funneled to Arizona by allies of the mega-rich Koch brothers.
Ducey would later appoint DuVal to the Board of Regents, overseeing the state’s three public universities, and implement DuVal’s idea for a teacher training academy.
That appointment was an “act of rare political grace” that angered Ducey’s Republican base, as DuVal sees it, and despite their disagreements on some issues, he commended Ducey as true to his campaign promises.
“He knew who he was, why he was running and specifically what he sought to do,” DuVal recalled of the race. “And did it. Agree or disagree, his impact has been enormously consequential.”
Ducey entered the Governor’s Office pledging to make government run at the speed of business, and occasionally, according to his former staffer and Arizona Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Danny Seiden, measuring the cost of government services in the lingo of his former profession.
“That’s a lot of waffle cones,” Seiden recalled Ducey saying. The governor made a fortune growing the Cold Stone Creamery ice cream chain from a single Tempe shop to a national franchise.
Arizona had started its slow recovery from the recession, but the state faced an estimated $1 billion shortfall in Ducey’s first year in office. His first budget in 2015 cut heavily from social welfare programs and higher education to balance the books.
Ducey’s openness to cutting state spending coupled with his focus on business set the tone for his time in the Governor’s Office. He would be the state’s chief salesman when it came to building a business-friendly Arizona and changing the state’s economy, and he had no problem with dialing back government services.
One key moment came amid the 2015 Super Bowl in Glendale, which was just a month into his first term. Ducey met with dozens of CEOs at a dayslong recruiting event tied to the NFL championship game, an event that saw the governor and his friend Michael Bidwill, the owner of the Arizona Cardinals, serve as recruiters. They teamed up on various projects in Ducey’s terms, including opening a massive vaccination site at State Farm Stadium during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In those early years, Ducey kept a focus on the state’s reputation, which his aides attributed in part to the state’s sluggish economy but also to divisive policies like Brewer’s notorious signing of Senate Bill 1070. The law made it a state crime to be in the country illegally, required people to carry immigration papers and allowed police to detain people based on suspicion of their immigration status, among other changes.
Widely condemned as permissive of racial profiling, others applauded the law, and legislatures in several other states considered similar bills. The law prompted a swift response in the form of travel and business boycotts, and a lawsuit from the U.S. Department of Justice. It kept Arizona in the punchline of latenight talk show jokes and headlines of exhaustive national media attention. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately struck down
parts of the law but kept other controversial portions intact.
“This became my home,” Ducey said of his move to the Grand Canyon State. “I just loved it. And I didn’t like our reputation, I didn’t like the way we were being presented.”
The backlash prompted Ducey to focus on border security as a public safety issue, leading to the launch of his Border Strike Force within the Department of Public Safety. While immigration rights advocates agree the state’s image has changed, they attribute that to the work of many advocacy groups and activists who got their start in the wake of SB1070. They say Ducey’s policies throughout his eight years in office — like using shipping containers as a makeshift border wall, leading to a legal battle, or a program busing migrants to the East Coast — as photo opportunities and not meaningful immigration reform.
“When it comes to Ducey’s solutions on immigration, I will say that he’s a showman,” said Luis Avila, a leading advocate for Latino and immigrant rights, and founder of the consulting firm Iconico.
Ducey’s efforts to change the perception of the state also meant dealing with a Legislature where some members put forward extreme bills, oftentimes on border or social policy issues, that seemed stuck in the prior era.
The governor’s staff sought to kill those measures before they could become negative news headlines or before he had to decide to sign or veto them, potentially creating a political rift.
“There were still those that were seeking to drop bills or pass legislation that really dealt in areas of the law that were gray as to the state’s role,” said Adams, Ducey’s chief of staff in his first term from 2015 to 2018. “Our legislative team worked very hard to make those bills go away. That occurred in a variety of means, sometimes a quiet conversation with a bill sponsor, or sometimes a quiet conversation with a member of leadership.”
The controversies of the governor’s first term weren’t limited to the Legislature.
The businessman-turned-governor fired, or forced the resignations of, at least five of his own department appointees in his first two years in office, most of them following negative news reports about their conduct.
More turnover of department leaders related to scandal or mismanagement of their agencies would come throughout his two terms.
And Ducey’s business ties would, at various times throughout his eight years, raise concern about his motives and whether he was prioritizing his allies and donors. Asked about that criticism, Ducey’s spokesperson C.J. Karamargin said, “We will dismiss that out of hand.”
His administration’s style to muscle through policy was sometimes seen as closer to intimidation, as in the 2016 push to get Republican Treasurer Jeff DeWit on board with a controversial education funding plan that became Proposition 123, which voters narrowly approved.
DeWit told The Arizona Republic in 2016 the behavior of Ducey aides in several meetings trying to gain his support as “threats.” Ducey himself and his staff, including Adams and Seiden, disputed that any bullying or coercion took place. DeWit could not be reached for this story; Seiden said the incident was blown out of proportion and he considered DeWit a friend.
What Ducey accomplished in first term
By the end of his first term, Ducey scored some major wins: the education plan, a bipartisan opioid epidemic response and an expansion of the state’s top court, a move that meant he could pick conservatives whose time on the bench would outlast his own time in office.
But there was work left to do, and Ducey turned to his wife, Angela, and three sons to get their support for another four years.
His three sons were in school when he was first elected, and while leading the state, Ducey often kept them out of his public life. The multimillionaire governor also made sure they learned some tenets of hard work, forcing them to get minimum wage jobs in the service sector. One worked a Chick-Fil-A, another at a Mcdonald’s; Ducey himself worked decades ago as a busboy at a Bob Evans restaurant in Ohio.
“I think when you have somebody that treats you poorly in a service setting, you’ll never treat anyone like that going forward,” Ducey said. “I also think you just learn going to fill out a job application to sit for an interview, and then to work with people that you don’t know. I think it’s a good life lesson.”
He pitched his family on a second term by highlighting what Ducey found to be one of the most unexpected perks of the job: Dinners at the White House.
Those dinners are one of the things “that I to this day still pinch myself and have a tough time believing that I was part of, given my background coming from Toledo, Ohio,” the governor said.
Ducey took Angela multiple times and made a deal with his sons.
“I wanted to put it to my family,” he said. “I said if I am reelected, I’ll be able to take all of you to a White House dinner … if that sounds good. And all the boys were in favor.”
Any goodwill built during those dinners with former President Donald Trump, however, wouldn’t withstand the test of politics, which soon saw Trump turn against the Republican governor.
‘I don’t always know what motivates a politician’
While he worked quietly to keep the extreme flanks of the Legislature at bay, Ducey wasn’t circumspect about his efforts to look beyond the state’s borders to change the state’s economic foundation.
He elevated the role of the Arizona Commerce Authority, the state’s economic development arm, within the administration, and formed an alliance with the ACA, himself, Bidwill, and the Arizona Chamber of Commerce.
Among the group, Ducey was the closer, known for writing his personal cellphone number on the back of his business card and handing it out to CEOs.
“I’m very comfortable talking to somebody in the private sector, often more at ease talking to somebody in the private sector than I am talking to someone in the state Legislature,” Ducey said. “I know what motivates a business leader. I don’t always know what motivates a politician.”
The governor’s pitch had five steps. First, be in the room. Then: Listen to what was important in their decisionmaking, learn what other states they were looking at — and ask how their conversations were with those governors.
Rarely, he said, did they have meetings with other governors.
Step five was addressing needs like lowering taxes, regulatory reform, and ensuring education, energy, water and other basics were available to companies looking to relocate their CEOs, employees and operations.
Occasionally to make that pitch, Bidwill would loan his helicopter — sometimes flying it himself — to take CEOs on tours of the Phoenix area. Other times, he’d host business leaders at his home and Ducey would be a guest of honor, or they would network at a Cardinals game.
The goal was a “wow factor,” Bidwill said.
Those efforts helped land major companies or expansions, with many success stories. A few also ended in controversy. Ducey welcomed Theranos to Arizona before the world knew its blood tests were a scam, as well as self-driving cars years before one would hit and kill a woman in Tempe. He touted regulation cuts as winning over those projects, though an Arizona Republic investigation found his administration created more rules than it eliminated.
But the major wins were big: Lucid, the luxury electric vehicle manufacturer, built a plant in Casa Grande; Caterpillar, the heavy equipment maker, placed a regional headquarters in Tucson; a massive $20 billion expansion of Intel’s semiconductor chip facilities landed in Chandler; and Taiwan Semiconductor
Manufacturing Co. started a transformational project in north Phoenix.
TSMC, whose $40 billion project is valued at well over twice the state’s annual budget, is one of the largest direct foreign investments anywhere in the United States. It has drawn praise including from Democratic President Joe Biden, who lauded: “American manufacturing is back.” Apple CEO Tim Cook has pledged to be the foundry’s biggest customer for its chips, the tiny tech brains that power cellphones, computers, cars and many other pieces of equipment.
Ducey began meeting with Taiwan Semiconductor’s leaders in 2017 and hosted the company chairman again this month before the president’s visit.
“I don’t think we could have had a better salesman for the state of Arizona,” said former U.S. Sen. Jon Kyl, a Republican who has advised Ducey, and whom Ducey chose to temporarily fill the Senate seat after the passing of U.S. Sen. John McCain.
Education funding, COVID-19 emerge as defining issues
Ducey was expected to cruise to reelection in 2018 until massive protests erupted among teachers, who walked out and protested at the Capitol demanding raises. The governor had offered them a 2% raise over five years, and their anger boiled over into his path to another election victory.
Ducey soon proposed a plan for 20% increases, a huge raise, ending the strike and helping assure his defeat of Democratic challenger David Garcia by 15 percentage points.
Earlier this year, a state auditor general report found those raises amounted to about 16.5%, falling a bit short of the governor’s goal, which Ducey aides blamed on districts diverting money to administration costs.
Ducey’s administration tallies billions in added spending on education in his time in office, which includes the boost from Proposition 123’s draw on state land trust dollars.
But for all the added spending, Arizona still has some of the lowest teacher salaries in the nation, though they have increased about $7,000 in Ducey’s tenure. Yet to be seen in data is how this year’s budget and its massive $1 billion in additional education funding affects those pay scales.
Often at odds with public education funding advocates, Ducey has instead focused on expanding other education options in the Grand Canyon State — even after voters resoundingly opposed a 2018 voucher expansion to nearly all students. In his final year, he went for, and won, an even bigger change: A statewide voucher program open to every public school student. In the first school year of eligibility, participation in the program has more than doubled and comes at a cost of over $300 million.
While Democrats especially argue vouchers draw on money that should instead go to public schools and creates achievement gaps for students based on income, others crown the expansion as a major piece of his legacy that can lift students out of struggling districts. The governor often argues competition among schools will generate a positive impact throughout the education system.
Ducey “is a dedicated public servant with a record of rising above partisanship to put all of his constituents first,” former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, a former presidential candidate and chairman of the school choice nonprofit ExcelinEd, said. “And, over the course of his eight years in office, Gov. Ducey demonstrated something I believe —– policy changes lives. It’s a model I hope many of the new governors from across the nation emulate.”
But public education allies and teacher’s union leaders question just whose lives Ducey has benefited from with education policies that push private options. While school funding overall and teacher salaries have increased, those haven’t kept pace with education needs or other states, said Marisol Garcia, president of the Arizona Education Association, which represents public school teachers.
“You can say you move up the ladder, but if everyone else is moving up, you’re still in the same place,” Garcia said.
Garcia said Ducey never took steps to meet with public education leaders throughout his tenure and said he “turned his back” on a promise to call a special session to address a cap on education spending that could create a spending cliff for schools early next year.
While school funding has long entangled governors in Arizona, another emergency that touched schools and every other part of life in the state would consume nearly all of Ducey’s attention. Just over a year into his second term, Ducey — and governors across the nation — faced an unforeseen challenge as the COVID-19 virus swept across the United States.
He initially worked in lockstep with public health advisers and across the aisle with public education leaders to close schools when the virus was new and unknown. He issued a stay-athome order and closed businesses like restaurants, bars and gyms, prior to a monthslong seesaw of changing restrictions as COVID-19 cases rose and fell.
While some public health leaders criticized Ducey for not doing enough, like never putting in place a statewide mask mandate, he was also blasted by others for going too far. The closures and restrictions prompted protests from business owners, workers and politicians in Ducey’s own party. Republican members who control the Legislature would, as result, pass a measure limiting the governor’s power in public health emergencies.
Ducey was also excoriated for later incentivizing schools not to implement mask mandates and remain open by promising federal funding. Those programs earned the disapproval of federal officials and prompted a legal battle.
Throughout the pandemic, Ducey’s response favored voluntary testing and vaccination strategies over government rulemaking. The federally funded vaccination site at State Farm Stadium, run by the Arizona Department of Health Services, was praised as a model by Biden and Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris. Today, just shy of 70% of Arizonans ages 5 and older have received the initial vaccine series, according to federal health monitoring data.
To Ducey, his decisions struck a balance between protecting “lives, livelihoods and individual liberties.” To his critics, Ducey was standing in the way of fighting the virus.
“How I believe he’ll be remembered is that during a time of crisis, he politicized the public health issues and rather than listening to education leaders he was focused on political gain,” said outgoing Superintendent of Public Instruction Kathy Hoffman, a Democrat. Responding to that criticism, Karamargin, the governor’s spokesperson, noted media and other reports that show learning loss among students during the pandemic that validated Ducey’s concerns about remote learning.
GOP base turns against Ducey after 2020 election
A few months later, Ducey would face another test of his tenure — an election he wasn’t running in.
The outcome of the 2020 presidential election left Ducey in a precarious political position: at odds with Trump, who was seen as a Republican kingmaker, and out in the cold among the GOP base. As Trump unleashed his pressure campaign to stay in the White House, Ducey withstood his demands, though he stopped short of a forceful rebuke of the president’s unprecedented actions.
Ducey, whose favorite talking points might be to remind that he is going to “follow the law” and “do my job,” signed off on Trump’s loss in Arizona as the law requires.
In silencing a phone call from the president during that certification ceremony, Ducey also took a hit with the farthest right faction of his party — a faction needed to win higher office, should he have chosen to do so. Rumors that Ducey was gunning for a cabinet position in a second term of the Trump administration were squelched by his single signature on the election certification, prompting months of backlash from the former president using Ducey as a favored punching bag.
Despite opposition from both the left and far right, Ducey’s final two years in office ultimately saw major policy ac
complishments, including the massive income tax cut, voucher expansion and enlarging the state’s appeals courts, one step below the Arizona Supreme Court. Arizona’s financial position has changed dramatically, with billions in revenue pouring into state coffers.
Ducey will leave the state with over $1 billion in its rainy day fund, which is like an emergency bank account for state operations. And according to Arizona Commerce Authority President and CEO Sandra Watson, its 2015 list of three of five megaprojects to recruit — those that would create 1,000 or more jobs or $500 million in investment — has grown to more than 60 possibilities in the pipeline this year.
“I have a lot of confidence and optimism for what’s in Arizona’s future,” Ducey said. “And I’m very hopeful that our state has a momentum and trajectory in the right direction that’s going to serve people well for a long, long time.”
Ducey: ‘I have an act or two left in me’
The state’s voucher program, tax cuts and expanded courts stand to be the governor’s most influential changes as he leaves office. Ensuring the state’s top two courts are stacked with conservative allies could shape case law for decades to come — including any of his own policies that land on their dockets as a new wave of Democrats come into statewide office.
Ducey has not said what he will do next professionally or politically, though he’s rumored to have interest in leading the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. First, he needs some time off. He owes his wife several vacations, he said.
“I do think I have an act or two left in me, and I do enjoy having a mission and a purpose,” he said. “But I’m going to give it a little time. This has been the best possible job in politics in the best state in the country.”
The business-first governor still has some work left to do. He intends to name judges to each of six remaining appeals courts vacancies, finish crafting the authority that will oversee a $1 billion water investment he signed into law this year, and has pledged to work with his successor, Hobbs, on a smooth transition.
And there are accolades to collect.
In early December, Ducey was honored in Washington, D.C., by the American Legislative Exchange Council — a conservative powerhouse known for drafting and pushing legislation across the nation — with its top award. The Thomas Jefferson Award honors leaders who back free market ideas, limited government and individual liberties.
By coincidence, he sat behind Seiden, his former staffer, on the flight home. Ducey was still sitting in coach.
“Even at the end of the administration I think he was in 17A at a window,” Seiden said.