KJZZ’s Friday NewsCap revisits some of the biggest stories of the week from Arizona and beyond.
To talk about some early bills for next year’s legislative session, a senior Congressional Democrat stepping down from a leadership position and more, The Show sat down with Doug Cole of HighGround and former state lawmaker Aaron Lieberman.
Conversation highlights
MARK BRODIE: So guys, a few early bills prefiled. ‘Tis the season for lawmakers to get a head start on on prefiling bills. A couple of them are going to sound fairly familiar to people who have followed the legislative process over the past few years.
Doug, let me start with you on an election related bill. It seems as though one of the things that Democrats and Republicans agree on in terms of potential changes to election administration is they would love the results to be done earlier, and they tend to agree that one of the reasons that doesn’t happen is because people drop off their ballots too close to Election Day. They need to have their signatures verified, and that kind of slows down the process a little bit.
There’s a prefiled bill that would basically end late early ballots unless voters provide a signature verification. Is this a solution that you think Democrats and Republicans can agree on?
DOUG COLE: I think that bill — and for our listeners, that’s Senate Bill 1001, it was prefiled last Friday, which was when you first can file bills. It’s a very similar bill to a bill that Sen. J.D. Mesnard introduced last year. But I do think in this cycle, probably is going to have a little bit more momentum behind it.
What it says is early ballots must be turned in by Friday, and if you do come with an early ballot, then it goes through a signature verification process at the polling place, and then there would be a nonverified box, there would be a verified box at each polling place.
And then that would speed up and give them the opportunity to run it through the on-site tabulation machines if they have them — which we do in Maricopa County, but they don’t have them in Pinal County. So it had different applications across the state.
I do think that it’s going to be a hotly debated topic. Florida has that Friday cut off. But we’ve also seen the governor and other Democrats saying, “No, no. We will not support that effort.” And so it has a potential to be vetoed by the governor.
BRODIE: As it was last year.
COLE: As it was last year. So then it may be referred by the Republican majority to the 2026 ballot. Interestingly enough, though, besides J.D. Mesnard and Senate President Warren Petersen supporting this continued effort, Maricopa County incoming chairman Tom Galvin from District 2, he has also said he supports the Friday cutoff. He also supports getting rid of emergency voting, which is the voting on Saturday and the Monday before, and also requiring more governmental buildings to be used as, as polling centers here in Maricopa County.
So it’s going to be front and center right off the bat in the Legislature, and it’s probably going to be the “election-related reform” that will probably have the most steam initially.
BRODIE: Do you think it will have steam among Democrats, Aaron?
AARON LIEBERMAN: It’ll be interesting to see. It’s tough when you’ve gone on record and vetoed something. You’re in the John Kerry world of “I was for it before I was against it,” which is probably one of the worst political quotes of all time. So it’s hard to get people to do a 180 on that.
My bigger question is like, well, what’s the problem you’re trying to solve for? I personally liked it when our politicians were trying to make it easy for as many people to vote as possible. Again — I mean, it’s kind of sad — in my view, one of the few good parts about Trump winning is we don’t have to hear about the fictitious “big lie.”
But that’s what this all goes back to. We never had a problem with our votes. We’ve never had a problem with voter fraud in Arizona, and we’re trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. On some level, this specific issue gets down to what’s your priority: more people being able to vote — because some people will not be able to vote if this goes through — more people, legal voters being able to vote, or finding out the results faster?
I kind of come down in the middle of that. It’s nice to know. I waited my own election, you know, seven eight days. Wasn’t the end of the world. It’s kind of discomfort for a small number of politicians to find out who wins. Nothing really changes in the outcome, and you have more people vote. That’s where I come down.
COLE: Yeah, I want to put it in context. Because of the new state law, we know exactly — and we knew election night — how many late earlies there were. And statewide, there were exactly 265,000 late earlies. A little over 200,000 of those were in Maricopa County. This never was a problem in the past, before Arizona became a swing state.
BRODIE: When the elections weren’t as close, it didn’t matter quite as much.
COLE: The elections weren’t as close. And now, for the last decade, they’ve been getting closer, closer, closer, closer. So now it’s a perceived problem. And so if you want elections faster, there’s give and take on both sides of the equation.
BRODIE: I mean, we’re not California, right? Which just finished counting in its last congressional race this week.
LIEBERMAN: I think (Democrat Adam Gray) won by 1,500 votes or something like that. Look, we are really close. It just gets down to do you value more people voting or speed of finding out the result? I always err on the side of let’s let people vote.
COLE: Right. And that California race was significant because for the Republicans now it’s 222 to what? 215?
BRODIE: 215, I think. So, Aaron, speaking of potential momentum among Democrats, a couple of bills that seem like maybe they won’t have that this year as they did not last year. Some of the “culture war bills,” the pronoun bill, a so-called bathroom bill coming back again.
This time, though, the sponsor is talking about if he can’t get them through the legislature and signed by the governor, maybe he’ll just take them to the voters and thinks, based on the results of this year’s election, he might have a decent shot. Do you think that’s accurate?
LIEBERMAN: Yeah. I mean, it was very interesting. I talked to a lot of people who were like, “If it says ‘referred by the Arizona Legislature,’ I’m opposed to it. I just went straight down the line.”
BRODIE: This past year?
LIEBERMAN: This past year. There were so many. Now, obviously, there was one notable exception to that, where there was a lot of public support for that border bill that did get passed. So people did read, they did pick one out of the crowd. They did vote for it.
This is a really tough issue. I think everybody feels for some of the kids involved in all those other things. It affects a very small number of people and has somehow become a hill that is really seeming to cost Democrats in an election time.
And so I, my personal experience, Christine Marsh, my good friend, heartbroken that she lost. Did she lose because of her lack of support for this bill last time? I don’t think so. She lost because she was caught up in a red wave, and there’s not a lot of attention to nuance in these races for state House. I think people are going to vote kind of like they did last time, and the governor is going to veto it when it gets to her desk.
COLE: One, I think they feel a little more emboldened. Two, because you ask any political consultant or professor of our trade, that probably the most effective ad in the presidential race was the Trump ad against Kamala Harris on this issue, that they played over and over and over.
LIEBERMAN: Was that the “She cares about they/them, not us” at the end?
COLE: Exactly. That ad I think was the number one ad, and all the polls show and all the focus groups show that moved the most people. So I think not only here in Arizona, we’re going to see it across the country. Because of, whether it’s true or not, how successful that ad was against Kamala Harris.
BRODIE: Does that move the needle legislatively? And to your point about Gov. Hobbs, does that change anything with her, assuming this bill makes it through a Republican controlled Legislature?
LIEBERMAN: Yeah. It would be very interesting if you had some swing district folks down there — the ones that are left — switch their vote on this. Again for the governor, it’s a lose-lose, right? Either you deal with the fact you totally flip-flopped on this issue to try to take it away. Guess what the ad says? “One year earlier, she voted for it.” You still have that, you know what I mean? Or you seem like you’re taking a principled position that may be out of step with the majority of Arizona voters.
It’s a tough situation. I personally had a very stern, like, I don’t change my mind if I’ve thought about an issue and really thought about it, it’s going to take a lot after a vote to do that. I suspect the governor will veto it again.
BRODIE: Are both of you expecting to see more bills, either prefiled or filed once the session starts this year, that are duplicates of what we’ve seen in recent years? Doug, what do you think?
COLE: Absolutely. On Nov. 6, her reelection campaign started, And as you’ve talked about on this show, the Senate is now 17-13, and the House is 33-27, which are gains in both chambers. So I think we’re going to see more of the same. She vetoed 140-some bills her first session, she vetoed 70 something bills —
BRODIE: Fewer for sure, in the second year.
COLE: Fewer. We could be back more of the 2023 session, because it’s all going to be about 2026 now. You know, the political cycles never end, do they?
LIEBERMAN: Well, the one thing I’ll say is that cuts both ways. My legislative district, LD 4, will now be all Republicans in Paradise Valley. It was the first time in over a decade that we’ve had only Republicans representing us. But those guys are on the ballot. And are they going to vote for all this, in my view, a lot of this extreme stuff that will get served up?
Guess what? It’s going to be the mailers and the — I don’t know how we got to do attack four-by-four signs in Arizona over the last two cycles, but they seem to be everywhere. Like that’s going to be Carine Werner and that’s going to be Matt Grass’s name on that stuff if they sign off on some of the stuff.
So it’ll be interesting to see how the moderates or the swing district Republicans are able to tamp some of that down.
COLE: Correct.
BRODIE: Does it affect the governor though, like is it an effective attack ad for somebody to say “She vetoed a transgender related bill twice or three times” as opposed to one? Does it matter how many times she vetoes the same bill?
COLE: It just keeps it current. Remember political cycles, voters’ memories are generally short. So you just want to keep it rolling. So even though it was in 2023 or 2024, you need to do it in 2025 and 2026 to keep it on social media, in the headlines and fresh.
LIEBERMAN: I think people get so caught up on these individual issue things. It’s really rare that there’s enough money to communicate about it that it moves the needle, that it reaches enough people. Usually there are much larger dynamics that kind of play out in elections.
Another silver lining for Gov. Hobbs is going to be there’s usually a bounce-back after the president, which it’s happened the last four or five cycles in Congress.
BRODIE: In the midterms.
LIEBERMAN: In the midterms. Look, the party that wins is complacent and feels like they kind of got everything. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say Donald Trump is going to do a few things that will antagonize many Democrats and independents in the next two years. And then they get out and motivated.
That’s honestly what got me elected in 2018 after Trump got elected in 2016. So I suspect it’ll actually be a much better cycle for Dems when a lot of Rs stay home feeling like, “Hey, we won, we got it all.” And there’s a lot of fodder to motivate Dems and some of the independents to get out and vote.
COLE: Yeah, historically Aaron is very correct, in modern American political history. And you also remember it’s a non-Presidential year, our gubernatorial cycles here in Arizona. And the voter turnout’s different. So a lot of these voters that only vote every, three elections or every four elections, they just voted, and they won’t show up in 2026.
