Arizona is on the verge of a political earthquake

Just how it shakes out remains to be seen

Welcome to a Wednesday night edition of Progress Report.

I’ve been getting a fair number of texts today about the Teamsters’ decision to not endorse either presidential candidate, many asking me just what the hell happened. Unfortunately, I think a lot of national leaders and Teamsters are wondering the same thing. I can at least offer some perspective and let you in on some of the insight I do have from the past few months. Because I actively cover Teamsters campaigns and respect a lot of local leaders, you’ll have to read between the lines to ascertain my opinion on this.

First, the union’s claim that neither candidate were willing to commit to the Teamsters’ most important issues is transparently silly, to the point of being discrediting.

Just compare the two parties: On the one hand, the Biden administration bailed out the Teamsters’ pension fund and its NLRB just ruled that Amazon delivery drivers are company employees, opening the door to the union organizing up to 275,000 new workers. On the other hand, Trump’s NLRB limited unionizing opportunities, his Supreme Court is closing in on neutering the labor board’s authority, and Project 2025 takes dead aim at its very existence.

The Teamsters released the results of a patchwork of surveys, spanning the Biden and Harris candidacies, that show its members vastly in favor of Trump. There were no cross tabs or explanations of who was surveyed or when it happened, but I can definitely see Trump at least splitting this blue collar, mostly male vote. Just how much that has to do with Sean O’Brien, the union’s president, playing footsie with the GOP and then speaking at the RNC, can’t be quantified, but I wouldn’t be shocked if that really made a difference with whoever was polled.

Ironically, O’Brien’s flirtation with the GOP, and the intense scrutiny it earned him both outside and especially inside the union, would make for a great reason for him put the thumb on the scales. O’Brien, the first democratically elected president of the Teamsters, needed to have his stunt vindicated amid so many grumbles of discontent from regional unions and leaders. Several statewide Teamsters federations subsequently announced their own endorsement for Harris, and there are broader coalitions within the national union working hard to push back against the risk of members going for Trump en masse, which they’d blame on O’Brien.

This neutrality is essentially an endorsement of Trump, and I’m not sure whether O’Brien actually thinks it would be rewarded by a Trump White House or just saw it as the best way out of the predicament he created for himself. His own presidency is riding on it.

OK, tonight we are speaking with Arizona state Sen. Christine Marsh about her race and all the chaos happening down there.

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The November elections will go a long way toward determining whether Arizona is in a fertile new era of progressivism or its shift blue has been more of a mirage in a traditionally red desert state.

After decades spent wandering the desert, Arizona Democrats began to emerge as a legitimate political power in the late 2010s. Things moved fast: Democrats now control nearly every statewide elected office, including the governorship and both US Senate seats. They’re also a few seats away from flipping both houses of the legislature, which would give them their first-ever legislative trifecta, at least in the modern era.

Yet it’d be hard to describe Democratic voters in Arizona as overly confident. Their wins in 2022 were largely by paper-thin margins and the Republicans that they defeated are the most rabid, reactionary, reality-challenged radicals that the desert has to offer. Had the weather been different, or a few TV ads more effective, the state would remain solid red. In many ways, Arizona was just a rounding error from being run by people who believe the Woke Mind Virus is a side effect of Covid vaccines.

For example: Gov. Katie Hobbs only finished 17,000 votes ahead of Kari Lake, the former TV anchor who overdosed on red pills sometime after 2016 and is now running for Senate. Lake’s brand of dead-end MAGA nationalism now defines the Arizona GOP, an amalgamation of border militias, paranoid election truthers, far-right religious grifters, and the Moms for Liberty types. 

The education culture warriors have been particularly empowered in Arizona, where Republicans shoved a school privatization program down the throats of voters who had rejected it several years earlier. They then ran big slates of bored zealots and took over local school boards in 2022, sending communities spiraling into chaos. Carine Werner, a mother of adult children, was one of two Moms of Liberty types elected to the five-member Scottsdale Unified School District, which they proceeded to turn into a cultural battlefield. 

Together they threw fits about innocuous things, like an app for young students that included lessons on “being a good citizen” such as “protests, striking, picketing, and boycotts,” which they deemed radical culture war subjects (you can imagine the kinds of protests and boycotts that were described in the module. Werner tried to stop the school district from using NPR podcasts, too, in part because they endorsed wearing a mask during Covid — naturally, she’s a Covid truther, as well. 

Here’s something she retweeted in 2023, one of the few pre-2024 tweets that she hasn’t deleted:

Now, Werner is looking for a promotion and has her eyes on a state senate seat currently held by Sen. Christine Marsh. A Democrat, Marsh couldn’t be any more different from her unqualified rival — named Arizona’s Teacher of the Year in 2016 and now in her 33rd year in the classroom, Marsh is a measured lawmaker who takes forceful stances on matters of deeply held principle. 

We spoke in 2018, ahead of her victory against a more moderate Republican, and now she’s taking on Werner in a district that actually leans red. It’s a tough race, and could decide control of the legislature, but Marsh sounded completely confident when we spoke 10 or so days ago.

Are you frustrated to see education issues sort of regressing after vouchers and culture war set in?

I don't know if frustrating is the right word; it’s just kind of a shame, because we are still dealing with the same issues that we have been dealing with for decades: systemic underfunding, very high class sizes. That was the primary reason that I launched my first campaign in 2017 was to try to mitigate that, but the Republican majority party is pretty set on not getting us above the bottom of the nation.

How do you deal with that?

I think we need to have a concentrated effort on actually moving above the bottom of the nation in so many of the metrics. To be fair, there has been some level of funding pumped into public education, but not nearly enough to budge from the bottom, so it hasn't come even close to mitigating the problem on any type of a significant level. 

We need to have a very robust discussion about class size. For a pretty long time, we had the highest class sizes in the nation, and now I think we have either the second-highest or the fourth-highest, and we need to be having a very robust discussion about that, and about the toll that takes on our students and on our teachers as well. [Note: It’s fourth highest]

What about the number of families that are using vouchers? Because that number has skyrocketed — largely providing tuition money for families who already send their kids to private school.

I think we're going to have to have conversations about placing a cap on it. We had an amendment — I don't even remember if we ended up attaching it to anything, but in 2023 I had an amendment that capped it at three or four thousand students above where it was at that time. We do not have enough revenue to support two very different public education systems, and the rest of the state, whether they realize it or not, is paying the price.

We don't have enough funding to adequately address our critical housing needs, or to really deal with our roads. Our infrastructure needs some help and some updating and some funding, and it's not there. The rest of the state is indeed paying the cost for all of this.

You mention housing costs, which are particularly egregious in Arizona.

I am in a relatively affluent community compared to the whole rest of the state, but the rent prices are high, and a lot of what is happening in my community is actually around the short-term rental market. There are three or four legislative districts that have a large percentage of the state’s short-term rentals, and mine is one of them. People don't recognize the effect that that has on the housing market. We've lost 70 to 75,000 homes to short-term rentals owned by investment firms. 

I have nothing against Airbnbs. My last trip, I stayed at an Airbnb. I wasn't part of the legislature, but in Arizona, they passed a law in 2016 to preempt all municipalities, the cities and towns, from regulating short-term rentals. It raises the cost of housing, because these investment firms can pay top dollar cash and individual families can't compete with that. Then it's a domino effect. 

So what do you see as the solutions for this warped housing market?

We need to repeal that 2016 law, for starters. I’ve run that bill all four sessions, and needless to say, it didn't see the light of day. There is another state — I want to say it's Minnesota — that has a cap where an investment firm can only own 10 short-term rental homes, versus in Arizona, where there are investment firms that own close to 100. [Note: Minnesota passed this bill in the House, but it died in the closely divided state Senate)

In other states there's density restrictions where there can only be X number of short-term rentals within a square mile or on a particular street or whatever it might be. There's a lot that we can do, but that likely will not happen with the current majority party.

Despite the closeness of the legislature and having a Democratic governor, it doesn’t seem like a ton gets done or moves through the GOP majority.

That’s the crux of a lot of what's happening in Arizona. Because of the way our primary system works, the radical right is for the most part who gets elected to the state legislature. Most races in Arizona at a legislative level are determined at the primary election. There aren't very many where the general election is actually where the decision is made.

So down at the Capitol tends to be the right end of the Republican Party. But that's not what is behind the doors that I knock, at least not in my district. Certainly some of them are, but I’ve had grown men — I'm 58 and I'm talking men older than I am —  come out on their doorstep and quite literally tear up because the party that they knew and loved does not exist anymore. It’s really gut-wrenching. The great irony is that a lot of those moderate Republicans really don't have too much of a voice.

Do you think open ranked choice primaries would help? Because there’s a ballot initiative this year, as you obviously know, that would establish that for Arizona elections.

Yeah, the open primary is on the ballot, but how many candidates go on to the general election is left to the legislature, and that is making some people rather nervous. Historically speaking, at least in the last few election cycles, the legislature has moved further and further to the right. 

A colleague that I worked very closely with, he was the chair of the Senate Education Committee, and I'm the ranking member for the Democrats, he was very moderate and he lost his primary to somebody very MAGA who Trump endorsed. So that moderate voice is gone.

Another representative who was moving to the Senate, David Cook, there was going to be a whole lot of policy that I'm not going to agree with him on, but I would consider him a pretty moderate voice, and he lost his primary. So I mean, just those two right there the Senate, no matter what, in November, unless the Democrats are able to tie or flip the Senate, is going to be even further to the right.

Thinking about the kind of stuff that this legislature has pulled, I know that they redirected money from the opioid settlement to the Department of Corrections, which is something that really upset you given your personal connection to the issue.

I voted against this past budget primarily for that reason, that so much of the opioid settlement funds was allotted to the Department of Corrections. I would argue that the Department of Corrections legitimately needed and should have gotten some of that, but not the amount that actually ended up going to them. I mean, we gave up all kinds of programs. 

There was money earmarked for Naloxone, for school nurses, and some remediation programs. All kinds of statewide education programs about the dangers of fentanyl, veteran services had some money earmarked for them, there was money for some re-entry programs. The list goes on and on. I was very publicly disappointed, and am still disappointed.

The last thing I want to ask about is the border, because it’s obviously such a big issue nationally, but more as a talking point than reflective of any reality. In Arizona, you have to contend with the reality of the situation, and Republicans are now weaponizing it again with that initiative that would allow local police to arrest and deport undocumented immigrants. How much is it dominating conversation there?

I think border security is definitely on people's minds. I think that particular bill went through on a party line vote period. I think there's a whole lot of us who agree that we need to increase border security. It is in our best interests as Arizonans. It is in our best interest to have increased border security, especially at the legal points of entry, because that is where the vast majority of fentanyl is coming across. 

But that particular bill, with allowing local law enforcement to basically function as immigration officers, I think is going to have some very dire unintended consequences. Who's going to report a rape or a robbery [if their immigration status is not satisfactory]? That was part of the reason that immigration was separated from the state level to begin with, to ensure that you have safe communities and people have law enforcement officers that they can go to when there are problems. 

If that bill passes, I think we are then facing some pretty significant unintended consequences, — or maybe they're intended, I don't know. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and say unintended consequences and not intended consequences

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