KJZZ’s Friday NewsCap revisits some of the biggest stories of the week from Arizona and beyond.
To talk about a difference of opinion between the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors and county recorder, a seeming difference of strategic opinion between the Trump team and a gubernatorial candidate and more, The Show sat down with Doug Cole of HighGround and Democratic strategist Tony Cani.
Conversation highlights
MARK BRODIE: So Doug, let’s start with a report that came out this week from Axios that there are some Trump campaign officials who had been working either officially or unofficially with the Karrin Taylor Robson campaign. They apparently have decided that she was not advertising on TV early enough after the president endorsed her and have decided that they are no longer part of the campaign.
Assuming that this reporting is correct — and we don’t have any reason to think that it’s not — how big of a deal could that be for Karrin Taylor Robson and her campaign?
DOUG COLE: Well, we all could see this coming along a long time ago. I mean, the Trump Organization has a history of doing double endorsements. We saw that with Blake Masters and Abe Hamadeh to replace, Congresswoman Debbie Lesko out in CD 8. In politics, it becomes an industry, especially if you have someone that’s a president or a governor and then their political consultants, then use that to go out and bring more into the fold, and — to be honest, because I’m a political consultant — to make money.
And and that’s what happened here. Trump endorsed Karrin Taylor Robson early on. But most people thought, “OK, as soon as the budget deal was made in Congress, why did Andy Biggs change his vote?” All of a sudden, he’s on the budget.
So I think this is an excuse to move away and have these folks move over to the Biggs campaign. Is it a temporary setback for Karrin Taylor Robson? Yes. But it’s not fatal, in my opinion.
BRODIE: Does this, do you think, precede the president rescinding his endorsement?
COLE: I don’t think he will do that because of the makeup of Arizona. He needs the business community, and he needs the portion of the Arizona Republican Party, like myself, that’s not raised or practices in the MAGA world but is, as you know, a cradle Republican. And Republicans are still the biggest voting base in the state, etc.
So if I was Karrin Taylor Robson, a lot of people don’t know Andy Biggs. I mean, he’s well known in the East Valley. He’s well known in his congressional district. He only had one really hard race, and that was his first primary, where he only beat Christine Jones by, I think it was nine votes, something.
BRODIE: A very small margin, yeah.
COLE: After many recounts. So he really hasn’t been tested statewide. And if I was Karrin Taylor Robson, I would take my money and start defining who Andy Biggs is — because we all know who she is because she spent a lot of money running against Kari Lake. She’s already spent a lot of money here recently. I would start defining who Andy Biggs is and talk about issues that Arizonans care about.
BRODIE: Tony, how big of a deal is this, do you think, to her campaign to lose members of Trump’s team?
TONY CANI: I’m sure she didn’t want it to happen. And I do think it is true that it almost looks like there was a commitment that was made to do some sort of advertising that would have included Trump, which was good for Trump if his face is up on TV. And then once that finally happened, even though they said it was later than it was, these consultants sort of just cut bait and left.
And so maybe they got their check. Who knows?
COLE: Oh, I’m sure they got their check.
CANI: Yeah, I’m sure they got it. Look, here’s the thing about defining Biggs and all this kind of stuff: How’s Robson going to do that? There really isn’t a ton of room ideologically between the two of them. And they have some differences on things. But she has not demonstrated a willingness to stand up to the Republican or MAGA establishment.
And what’s going to happen? She’s going to attack him for being against Medicaid? There’s no way she would do that. So I think this is a huge setback for her. Just because I think that they were very excited that they were able to get that initial endorsement. Obviously, I think what’s going to happen now is that she’s going to continue to use or start to use her wealth to just tell voters over and over again, “Hey, I’m the one that was endorsed by Trump,” and we’ll see whether or not money rolls in on the other side to support Biggs.
I think that the issue here is that she does have a bit of an authenticity problem when it comes to voters. That’s what happened last time, and I don’t know how this helped her overcome that.
COLE: Well, I hate to disagree with my friend Tony.
BRODIE: But you’ll do it anyway.
COLE: I’m going to do it anyway. On the Medicaid issue, I think, Congressman Juan Ciscomani has done a very good job about messaging, really threading the needle on Medicaid. And there’s a group of Republicans in the House that has really said, “Wait a minute here. These are important programs, especially for border state like Arizona.”
So, yeah, I think I think they’re there’s a good there’s a good message point to go after Congressman Biggs on Medicaid. And because there are there’s a huge constituency in the Republican Party that uses Medicaid.
CANI: Sure. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I mean, yes, I think so. Look, I just am not sure that Trump is going to be this strategic in thinking about how he needs to get the moderate business Republicans in Arizona. This doesn’t seen to be the way that he’s making decisions on endorsements.
I think it probably he’s not going to un-endorse because that would be admitting he made some sort of a mistake. But there’s no doubt about the fact that her campaign would have preferred if she would have stayed the sole endorsement.
COLE: I don’t disagree. On that point.
BRODIE: Doug, you had mentioned, then-Congresswoman Debbie Lesko — now, of course, a member of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors — who is having a bit of a kerfuffle with Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap over the administration of this summer’s special congressional election. This is, of course, the election to replace the late Raúl Grijalva.
Maricopa County is just a very small part of that district. It’s mostly Pima County and southern and even into western Arizona.
COLE: Santa Cruz County, Yuma.
BRODIE: Right. But there’s some questions about whether or not voters who are on the Active Early Voting List, I think is what it’s called now. Like, who should get ballots? And it seems as though Recorder Heap is proposing a plan that maybe when he was in the Legislature, he would not have been a big fan of.
COLE: Well, that’s exactly correct. What he proposed to the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors — and they voted 4-0 against him. One of the supervisors wasn’t there that day. So it’s not just Debbie Lesko. Three of our other colleagues also agreed with her.
This was offered in a presentation to the board by Sam Stone, who is who is the chief of staff to chief of staff to Recorder Heap, that in these very rural precincts that are out in the far reaches of Gila Bend, etc., out on Tohono Oʼodham Nation lands, that they would just go ahead and mail the ballots to the registered voters, whether they request them or not.
Now this is completely antithetical to what the Republicans fought. Then-Maricopa County Recorder, now Secretary of State Adrian Fontes wanted to do that during the pandemic, to mail ballots to all voters during that time, and the courts turned them down. Because what the court said — and now also has County Attorney Rachel Mitchell.
In a letter to Justin, she said, look, on election law, you have to explicitly be authorized to do an action, and mailing ballots to people that have not requested them in a congressional race is not explicitly allowed. It is in school district races. It is in city and town races and special taxing districts, but not in other elections.
So she said, no, you can’t do that. This is unlawful. So the board said, we’re not doing that.
BRODIE: How surprising is it that the county board of supervisors — which is, of course, as it has been for many years, controlled by Republicans — is having this kind of disagreement with a Republican county recorder?
COLE: Well, unfortunately, the history since the Andy Thomas days and the Joe Arpaio days, there’s been a lot of disagreements between the county board of supervisors, who controls all their budgets and county policy., and various elected row officers. And unfortunately, this is continuing with Justin Heap, being the new Maricopa County recorder.
BRODIE: Tony … this is a very Democratic leaning district, the late Raúl Grijalva’s district. So really, the primary is kind of where the action is. But are you surprised that there’s a disagreement of this nature over something that in the past, Republicans have generally been pretty unified against: sending ballots to voters who did not ask for them?
CANI: I’m not surprised that the fight is happening because this is just another example of the sort of fighting in the Republican Party along the MAGA-Turning Point USA line. And this is what’s happening. And from my outside perspective, it looks like he sort of stepped in this from a political perspective on the Republican side, and the county supervisors — who are probably very frustrated and fed up with the way that they’ve been interacting with him — just decided to pounce.
From a, a policy perspective, I want voting to be as easy as possible. I want the administration of election to be as cheap as possible. I was surprised that this decision was made, because first of all it’s a Democratic district. When Fontes made his suggestion, it was something that would have happened to all voters. This is just to a specific type of voter.
BRODIE: And not that many of them.
COLE: Yeah, it’s like 100 or so.
CANI: It made me wonder, what is their motivation? And with the history of wanting to pull people off the voter rolls and do all these kind of things that the Turning Point USA people have pushed for, I was like, “Is this some sort of a trick to get people to fall off of the active voter list? Is there something that they’re doing here?”
It really raised red flags for me because I just couldn’t figure out why they would they would do this. The issue I think that is the most concerning from the outset is that Sam Stone and Recorder Heap implied that they had gotten signoff from the county attorney, and the county attorney was like, “That’s not true.” And so there’s some shenanigans going on.
COLE: And also, we started the segment talking about Supervisor, former Congresswoman Lesko. But immediately, Gina Salado, who is the chairwoman of the Arizona Republican Party, said, “No, I don’t agree. The party does not agree with the county recorder. We are for election integrity, and this is not election integrity in our mind.”
So she immediately took the supervisor aside.
BRODIE: And Tony, this is not the first sort of disagreement, let’s say, between the county supervisors and the county recorder. This is obviously very small for Maricopa County, this election, kind of small potatoes in terms of number of voters, the responsibility it has.
But we’re not that far off from the midterms next year. It seems as though these two levels of government need to kind of get it together.
CANI: Yeah, it would be great if they got it together. But this fight has been going on, and it’s gotten aggressive. And people have chimed in in aggressive ways against the supervisors, against the recorder.
And from my perspective, I love the mess here between elected officials. This is a fight over ideology, really, and perspective. But I really would like our elections to be drama free when it comes to administration. So I do hope that they figure it out.
