Gina Swoboda is one of the political stories that helps to define the Trump era in Arizona.
She was a political newcomer when she was endorsed by President Donald Trump to run for chair of the Arizona Republican Party in early 2024.
Full conversation
GINA SWOBODA: I was shocked when they put me on the phone with the president. I thought everyone was just saying because people were like, “Gina, the president wants you to run.” I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I said, “OK, then tell him to call me.”
“And I was being incredibly facetious because I thought I was saying like, and then you know, tell Moses to come and part the sea, and then I will, but then they put me on the phone with him.
And he was, he's just very gracious and very kind, and he said, you know, will you fight to save the country?”
Can I say h-e-l-l on the radio?
LAUREN GILGER: Yes. [LAUGHS]
SWOBODA: I said, I'll fight like hell to save the country. And then he said, “I love it, complete endorsement. I love it.”
She's a former elections official, an activist who then ushered the state party to major wins up and down the ballot in the 2024 elections, including a decisive Trump win here. But Swoboda, a Trump loyalist, GOP activist and sometimes election questioner, has not always been a Republican.
In fact, she embodies the political horse you were seeing come up so often in politics today. She grew up a Democrat and has bounced between supporting Clinton to the Tea Party, even to liking what Bernie Sanders has had to say at one point, until Trump entered the picture.
SWOBODA: You know, I'm from Queens and my parents were Republicans, but I was a Democrat. I was a Clinton Democrat. I was a DLC Democrat. I had the jacket and everything. And, yes, I love the ‘90s. It was pre-NAFTA. Gas was $0.83 a gallon. There was peace. There was prosperity. If you look at the State of the Union address, that any of them that Bill Clinton gave any close your eyes and you didn't know anything about politics, you would think that was a current populist Republican.
Our parties have evolved, and shifted, right, to such an extent that I don't, I don't know, at any given moment where, where they are on their platforms. But the platform of that party at that time in my 20s in Queens, you know, was a good place to be. Yeah, I was a Democrat.
GILGER: When did you leave?
SWOBODA: The 2008 primary.
GILGER: Why?
SWOBODA: Well, OK. So, obviously I've always been fascinated by politics and elections, and I like horse racing and boxing. These things all have things in common. Yes. And I was heavily engaged in the process and following it. And then Michigan moved up their primary earlier than the DNC wanted them to, and to punish them, they got stripped of delegates.
Barack Obama was not on the ballot in that election in Michigan. Hillary was on the ballot. Hillary won votes. She had delegates. The Rules Committee voted to just strip her of some of those delegates and award them to Obama, because if he had been on the ballot, we surmise he would have gotten X amount. It was ridiculous to me.
It was. I was really just disgusted and outraged. They had a predetermined outcome that they wanted, in my opinion, and they moved heaven and earth and literally shifted buckets of votes around to get what they wanted. And I was like, this isn't right. And I just started getting like disgusted with the whole process. It just turned me off.
GILGER: So it was inner party politics that, that shut you down from the Dems.
SWOBODA: Yeah. And, and the other part about that, like in that primary, I was very concerned about the housing crisis. And we're here in the Sunbelt and I'm watching on my block as houses are going up astronomically. And then foreclosure started to happen and there were two candidates. We had Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton.
Hillary's housing plan was like the FDR plan, where the government is just going to we were already backing a lot of these loans. We're just going to take the loans, and we're going to negotiate with the homeowners to keep them in the houses. And Barack Obama's plan was the Morgan Stanley plan. The banks got bigger, people lost their homes. People were getting foreclosed. I thought of those two candidates that were in my party at that time, that her policies were going to protect families and homeowners and the middle class and the working class and people who got put in loans that they never should have been put in because they couldn't afford it.
But everybody wanted to feel good and blow the bubble up. And the people that did it were walking away. I think that's the original sin of problems that ripple through the system for years and years after that, we should have let them fail. And as we sit here now, you know, these large equity firms own a tremendous amount of housing and our young people can't get in houses. So, yeah.
GILGER: When did you officially become a Republican?
SWOBODA: I've gone, I've bounced. I've gone back and forth. So, the Tea Party. Right. I was very angry at the Democratic Party. So when the Tea Party came, I'm like, OK, we're going to talk about working people now. We're going to have the people. And which leads us to the populism where we are now, but we're going to have the people having representation.
And then what happened? After the Tea Party, it came out later that the IRS was sent letters by sitting senators of both Republican and Democratic parties, asking them to take a look at and audit people that were in the Tea Party. And then that really mightily offended me. Again, I'm like, wow. But like, where do we go? And what do we do?
And from that point, and I still stayed Republican, I tried to. In 2012, I supported Romney.
GILGER: So you're on the Romney side of things, right? And then you swing back again, right? You supported Bernie Sanders.
SWOBODA: I, I liked what Bernie said about H-1b visas and immigration.
GILGER: Sure.
SWOBODA: I never like gave Bernie funds or voted for Bernie. But I this is again, I think he made a beautiful metaphor about a horseshoe. There is a place where if you have a concern and this today, it's described as populist. But I have a concern about unfettered immigration and whether it's through H-1b visas for STEM or, you know, people bringing in people for lower wage jobs, I think it's just a fact that it suppresses the wages of American workers. And so, Bernie, there's one issue I know of where I agree with, with Bernie Sanders. I agree with him on immigration. He, he talked about that. Like, these visas aren't good.
Then we had Trump come right. And he spoke to the working people and the middle class people. And that is, in my opinion, how he won, you know, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio. That this was you know, I'm Catholic and I'm Italian, and I was ethnic Democrats like New York, Pennsylvania right there, like all those little ethnic Democrats that keep ignoring the choice issue.
And when they're voting and then they're voting Democrat, but they're not talking about anything else. He picked up all those people because he knows how to talk to them. I believe he loves the working people. I do. And, and, and that totally resonated. And that's where I have been since.
GILGER: So tell me about that. Like when you when that shift happens for you, you're sort of lost. You're angry at one party and then the other. You like something Bernie Sanders says on one side, you vote for Romney on the other side. I mean, like an interesting evolution. And then Trump comes along. Did you immediately think, like, what, do you remember a moment where you were like, this is the guy.
SWOBODA: So first, you know, being from Queens, Trump has been literally in the landscape of my life, right? And so I'm used to reading in the New York Post, like he's pulling the limo over and saving someone from being mugged. I never watched “The Apprentice,” but I read, part of “The Deal.” I don't I was like 15 or something, right?
So I always knew who he was, but I did not know if he was serious at first. But I watched his speech where after he came down the escalator.” Beautiful. The beautiful golden, the golden …”
GILGER: The golden escalator.
SWOBODA: And I liked what he said, and I waited, you know, and I watched all the debates, and he just he had me in the debates, I was done. I was like, wow. When he talked about Iraq and what Bush did in Iraq, I was like screaming at my TV who I was. I was very excited because he just was not going to play these word fog games and just let's all pretend that that was all fine and talk neocon.
GILGER: So let me ask you about the Democratic response to Trump, right? And the criticisms of that, like whether it's personal issues, moral issues, people have allegations of sexual assault, criminal indictments, things like that, like.
Or if it's policy stuff like we're watching now, you're all about the working class. We're talking about potential big cuts to Medicaid. You know, tax cuts for billionaires is what critics are saying is h\what's happening in Washington right now, just in the first couple months of the administration.
What do you make of those criticisms? Like, is this a part of your calculation, the way you think about the president?
SWOBODA: Yes. So if tax cuts came out and the one big beautiful bill, and we didn't have no tax on tips or no tax on overtime or no tax on Social Security, then I would be reevaluating. And I think that's why he's fighting so hard for that. And I think that's why it has to be one big beautiful bill.
But I think if we go with what comes out of the Senate, we're going to be in Romney land, and that will alienate all of the people who just came together to give him the big, beautiful, sweeping victory he had up and down the line.
GILGER: Interesting. So, so a lot rides on this for you.
SWOBODA: Oh, yeah. So let's talk about what the cuts are. I need to see that. Are we talking about able bodied people at like here in Arizona? We expanded AHCCCS like over and over again to put working people on it. Are we talking about the developmentally disabled program that was supposed to sunset with COVID? What are the politicians say? Like no subsidy is temporary. Everything lasts forever and you can't cut it off.
But it's it's, it's killing us. The bureaucracy is eating everything. And I think that's the reaction that you're seeing. And I think that's, that's what's happening politically is the bureaucracy has gotten so big that strangling everything to such an extent that no matter what the people vote for, they're not seeing anything change. It just keeps going on.
And government programs are one of those things that just keep going on, and war just keeps going on and it's like, enough, what is our interest?
GILGER: So you keep talking about that theme, right? Like that the parties have shifted. And we know this from just, you know, being history students. Do you feel like your political beliefs, your core issues have changed?
SWOBODA: Somewhat. I mean, I think there's, definitely the Second Amendment for me would be a great example.
GILGER: Where you've changed your opinion.
SWOBODA: Yeah. When, when I was in my 20s, living in Queens, only cops and robbers had guns, right? Period. We had a starter pistol. AndI was not allowed to touch it, and I was very afraid of it. But now I have a lot of guns. We have. I have a lot. We have a lot of guns. We enjoy shooting.
And I have a completely different view. I think that the Constitution is just incredibly clear, and I agree with the trope that you can't have the First Amendment without the Second Amendment. I, and I think I witnessed that during COVID and I think I've witnessed that over and over. People find speech dangerous, and I find speech powerful and freeing and think that we can't exist as a free nation without free speech.
And you cannot silence people for being wrong, and you cannot say, well, your speech is dangerous because you might influence other people. And so I'm going to censor you. That is so offensive to me. It just, it overrides every other, every other thing.
GILGER: Right. So, so the, the question, the response to that right is, is about misinformation. About like, you know …
SWOBODA: See, that word itself is problematic.
GILGER: Is it? Why? I mean, like as a, as a journalist, I'm a believer in first First Amendment rights, right. But do we need to say this is true and this is not.
SWOBODA: That you're you're defining facts that are, and then we find out they weren't facts. So if the government and the media, right, which is more powerful for a reason, that's why you have that in, in number one, right. We need you to protect our ability to hear everything.
And that's my point. If the media and the government intervene because they say these people cannot possibly make their own decisions based on seeing all of the information and everyone's opinion, we have to protect them from themselves. By silencing misinformation, you are infantilizing the people. And that's not how this country is built. And once you do that now people will stop listening to you. And that's exactly what's happening now.
You know when I'm like I don't I don't censor anybody on Twitter, I unmuted everybody that got muted by the people that came before me on the AZGOP. And they're just, you know, come and call me, man. Because everybody gets to see it.
Let the people, it's no fun. But I, I answered the call and said, yes, sir. And so I will just take the hit. And it would be, it would be tempting to say, well, this is leading some Republicans to not vote because they're believing some things that I, Gina, as an election administrator, former election administrator, think are factually inaccurate. And I don't want it to suppress my turnout. That would be an easy rationalization for me to make. But that to me would be wrong. They have every right to their belief. We are watching different movies sometimes, right.
GILGER: So that is a key point because I think there's such a divide in politics now. Right? Like we have seen the civil discourse kind of disintegrate as you're talking about on Twitter there. We have seen the two sides not be able to talk to each other anymore in the culture, not even in the White House, right.
Like, but that is a big loss in this country and you are in a unique position because you've been on both sides of this. You meet at the bottom of the political horseshoe as we talked about. Right, sometimes. And you've switched. But I wonder, like, where do you think the conversation can come back together? Like, what do you want people in Arizona who voted the other way and think, you know, this is disgusting and awful and an attack on democracy to know.
SWOBODA: Yeah. We're in it together if, even if we don't want to be. But I'm sorry. I mean. But even if we don't want to be.
We are in this together. And if, if we, we need to listen to each other and try to put ourselves in the other person's shoes and then see where, where can we find a place where we agree because there's something with everybody and it makes me all emotional. If you look, you'll find it.
GILGER: Why does it make you emotional?
SWOBODA: I don't know, it's sad. Yeah. If you look, you'll find it. But you have to. Oh, that's so weird and unexpected. And …
GILGER: It’s OK.
SWOBODA: But you, you, you need to look at your fellow man and woman as people. You don't have empathy and have feelings and listen to them. What do they care about? Just because I don't agree with them politically, is no reason to shut them out or demonize them on both sides.
I think it's tragic. I think it's, it will be the death of the country if we can't move past it. Like when I look at the polling, we might not agree on immigration. To some people, it feels like families are being ripped away, right? And people are afraid.
And I can I see that? I can feel how they feel that I, you know, and to other people, it's like, I can't live, I can't work, I can't get my kid in school. We don't have resources. Schools are overwhelmed, hospitals are overwhelmed. So it's affecting people on both sides. But if we refuse to see each other as if I don't know fellow humans on a quest, you know, for, for the improvement of our lives, bad things follow that, you and I would say historically.
GILGER: It's interesting because so many people on the left would say, you know, this administration is punching down on people, like whether it's immigrants, whether it's gay people, whether it's trans people. But you're saying this is both sides.
SWOBODA: I think we have to listen to everybody. I read an article or I just saw something, and it was talking about that, like transgender people are afraid. And that's devastating. No one should be afraid in their country.
And I would tell you that from my perspective, I think some of that is they're afraid because they think people are trying to do things that they're not trying to do. I, Gina, do not think that restricting girls sports to girls is an attack on transgender people. I think it's protecting women. I think girls and women have fought very hard to even have sports. And, and I'm old enough to remember when we were fighting for women to have their own spaces. And there is no discussion about that anymore.
But this, this is a great example of that. I do not see it as an attack. I see it as a defense of this group. So we're right. This is perfect. We're looking at it completely differently, and we have to listen and talk about it. I think maybe people would hear that and go, oh, you're just trying to protect this group. You're not trying to stop these people from, from feeling safe or free to be who they are.
GILGER: So these conversations have, have stopped happening. But thank you for having it with me.
SWOBODA: Of course.
