KJZZ's Friday NewsCap: Is anti-Trump sentiment enough to flip Arizona Legislature?

KJZZ’s Friday NewsCap revisits some of the biggest stories of the week from Arizona and beyond.

Doug Cole of HighGround and Democratic strategist Tony Cani joined The Show to talk about lawsuit challenging the number of signatures independent candidates need to collect to make the ballot, a renewed national effort to flip the state Legislature and more.

Conversation highlights

MARK BRODIE: Down to southern Arizona where a new congresswoman, Adelita Grijalva, was at an ICE raid in Tucson. I think this was late last week. And she says that an ICE agent pepper sprayed her.

ICE and Department of Homeland Security has denied this, saying that she's making it up.

Tony, I'm curious what you, what you make of all this. I mean, absent, I guess, eyewitness or body camera footage. We really don't know exactly what happened. And even with that, maybe we don't know exactly what happened.

But Congresswoman Grijalva, you know, we heard her just say, you know, there's sort of a cloud of smoke and an agent looked right at her as they were firing.

TONY CANI: Yeah. And there's some, you know, and there's some video footage from, you know, people who are at the event. I think that shows what the congresswoman is claiming took place. And, you know, historically — historically meaning like the last — boy, it feels like this term has been a really long time.

Trump has only been in office at 11 months, but over the last 11 months, ICE has not been, you know, in their public statements, very honest about the situations that they're facing. And the number of times that they've claimed one thing and then when it came to a court filing or something, they had to claim something else is very, very high.

And so I would take the congresswoman at her word here because I don't know what she gains from making this up. And it is, you know, it's just, it's this kind of thing where those aggressive tactics are really backfiring. And I think that the public is very frustrated with it.

DOUG COLE: Mark, I would have been surprised if Congresswoman Grijalva was not there. I mean, this is her father. Her father, this was his brand when he was the longtime serving congressman and Pima County supervisor down in southern Arizona.

This is their family brand. And this type of demonstration, supporting her community, it's not gonna stop. That's what she's going to do. And she does it well. And that's how she's been on the, the school boards down in Tucson and followed her father on the Pima County Board of Supervisors.

So she's gonna continue this and fight back, especially as long as Donald Trump is in the White House. But even if he wasn't in the White House, I would expect in a similar circumstance that she would be there. That's just her brand.

BRODIE: Is there anything, I mean, to Toy's point, does she gain anything? And not to suggest that what she says happened didn't happen, but is there anything to gain from her to embellish this?

DOUG COLE: Look, everyone has their corners in the boxing ring. I mean, this situation with the Trump administration and with immigration enforcement and ICE, we're gonna see this time and time again over the years remaining in the Trump administration, which are many years left.

CANI: Three years left.

Politics

Arizona Rep. Adelita Grijalva denies accusation of 'faking outrage' over ICE raid protest

Fatima Gabir

Officials at the Department of Homeland Security have accused Arizona Congresswoman Adelita Grijalva of “faking outrage” over her protest at an ICE raid west of downtown Tucson last week.

BRODIE: Tony, we saw this week the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, a national organization, added both the Arizona House and Senate to its list of immediate battleground flip opportunities.

This has come after a number of special elections around the country where Democrats have done pretty darn well in many cases flipping seats or at least outperforming what they did last year.

I have to say, though, this is a song we've heard before, right, that this is the year that the Democrats are gonna flip the Arizona Legislature. I'm curious what you make of this investment, this effort by this national group here coming up in 2026.

CANI: Well, I wish it was a bigger investment. Not that it's a bad investment, but I think that it's going to cost a decent amount of money in order for us to flip one of these chambers. I think that it comes down to, I don't think it's a wrong label. I don't think that it's overly optimistic. I think that now it comes down to us here in the state as Democrats.

It's about candidate recruitment, it's about how much money the candidates raise and it's about whether or not our candidates can run robust modern campaigns. And I think in the recent past a handful of the campaigns on the legislative side from Democrats, I think they fell short sort of tactically, not that the candidates did.

And so that's really the question this year, which is: Are they going to be able to run an aggressive enough campaign to overcome some really smart Republican legislative tactics? That's been the challenge because when you have a party-switch election, where the governor needs Republicans to vote for in order to win, it gets much harder the farther you go down the ballot to convince those people who typically vote for Republicans to vote for Democrats.

So you have to make the case directly to them. And, you know, that's really what it takes.

BRODIE: Well, Doug, I wonder, you know, this is obviously a big election for Democrats and Republicans, of course, in Arizona. But Democrats are defending three statewide seats and it feels like that is where a lot of the oxygen would go, kind of to Tony's point, that by the time you down the ballot, are people maybe paying as much attention or does it become harder for Democrats to maintain that down the ballot?

COLE: Well, you are correct about the three statewide elections that are currently held by Democrats, that being the governor, the secretary of state and the attorney general. But what's not on the ballot this time is U.S. Senate we've had for ...

BRODIE: The first time in a long time.

COLE: It's because it all started with John McCain's death and it created musical chairs. So we do not have a U.S. Senate candidate, which draws in millions and millions and millions of national dollars.

Tony's correct. Down ballot, people tend to stay with their own party once they get off the marquee races. We're in a midterm cycle. Also, we don't have Donald Trump on the ballot like we had in ‘24. Democrats tried to counter that by having Prop. 139, which is the abortion access. In ’24, they put Democrat aligned groups in, the ADLCC and the DLCC, put in roughly $10 million in ’24, and they lost seats.

The two chambers got more Republican. And historically, on midterm elections, if a party controls both the White House and both chambers of Congress, it tends to be a banner year for the opposite, for the opposite party. And I think that they're trying to, to maybe try to ride that coattail in here.

But historically in Arizona, midterm elections, because of the voter registration and alignment with the non-affiliated voters, tend to vote more Republican no matter who's in the White House or who controls Congress.

So it's going to be, I agree with Tony, it's going to be a steep hill decline. I think they've announced $50 million, but they're going to, they said they want to play in 42 states.

CANI: I would say, the one thing I'd say is that we can't forget how wildly unpopular Trump is right now and how very closely aligned these legislative candidates are going to be on the Republican side to Trump.

And that's what it comes down to, is that don't forget, like I said, it's about branding. This will be a nationalized race, even though it's at the local level. And the Democrats just won a district that Trump won by 12 points in Georgia. And so I do think that compared to previous years, the wind is at our backs, but still, it's gonna be tough.

BRODIE: So do you think then that legislative Democratic candidates will be trying to make themselves the anti-Trump? Does it, do legislative races on the Democratic side become nationalized as well, do you think?

CANI: I think so. But I think it's probably a better strategy for us to frame the Republican candidates as pro-Trump. I think that that's more likely what'll make sense and then for our candidates to continue, continue to focus on issues of affordability and things that make sense.

I mean, don't forget the president recently said that the affordability stuff is a hoax, a Democratic-invented hoax. He's getting a lot of attention for a lot of really wild things that he's saying. And I don't think it's gonna get better. So, yeah, so I think the Democrats do have a chance here. Sure.

COLE: But again, as I stated previously, Arizona has a long history of midterm elections that the Republicans do better than the Democratic Party. So if Tony's prediction is going to become true, then it's all going to have to be a very, very good ground game and get those voters out. Because I can tell you, we do a lot of polling at our firm, you know, I can tell you Republicans turn out, and conservative non-affiliated voters turn out time and time again.

BRODIE: Doug, do you think any of the Democrats at the top of the ticket, Katie Hobbs, Adrian Fontes, Kris Mayes, do they have enough coattails, do you think to bring Democrats down ballot over the finish line?

COLE: Well, it depends. You know in Arizona we have very few competitive legislative districts. We have 30 legislative districts, and roughly four to five are considered truly competitive.

BRODIE: Right.

COLE: So I mean we have some marquee Democrats that have just decided they're not going to run an LD9 … which is in west Mesa, that's a swing district. So that right there puts him behind the eight ball.

But then you have Aaron Lieberman, a longtime …

BRODIE: State representative.

COLE: State representative, yeah, who ran for governor. He's back and he's going to challenge Sen. Werner in LD4. So I think that there are some quality candidate.

Quality counts. It really does. So but I gotta tell you, it's gonna be an uphill battle even with this outside money coming in in this off cycle, even with Donald Trump's unpopularity with a broad, broad swath of the electorate.

BRODIE: Toni, very quickly before we move on, do you think there's one chamber where Democrats have a better chance to flip than the other or do you think it's sort of an equal, equal opportunity here?

CANI: I can't say that in a way that's educated because I don't know the candidates that are recruited because I still, I, I think, I don't like making an assessment just based on like the math of the districts because I do think that candidate quality is wildly underestimated in a lot of this, the sort of punditry that happens around this.