Misleading campaign signs have been popping up around metro Phoenix. Are they working?

LAUREN GILGER: There’s been a lot of hubbub this election cycle about the “Democrats for Biggs” campaign signs being posted around the Valley in the lead-up to November’s midterm elections.

Andy Biggs is challenging Democrat Katie Hobbs for governor, of course. But no, there doesn’t seem to be any organized group of Democrats who are supporting the Republican congressman.

The signs are, in fact, funded by Turning Point PAC, the Arizona Republic reports, the political arm of the conservative advocacy organization Turning Point USA.

The organization has gone so far as to post deepfake images of Democratic state Rep. Lorena Austin putting up the signs. Austin did no such thing, they assured us.

But our next guest this morning reports the “Democrats for Biggs” signs are just the tip of the iceberg this campaign season. TJ L’Heureux has the story for the Arizona Agenda, and he’s here in studio now to tell us more. Good morning, TJ. Thanks for coming in.

TJ L’HEUREUX: Good morning. Thanks for having me.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, so you start this piece with an example of these kind of misleading campaign signs that seems to have maybe worked, right? This was when former Democratic state Sen. Christine Marsh was running for re-election just two years ago. What did those signs attacking her say?

TJ L’HEUREUX: Yeah, those signs had pictures of Jeffrey Epstein on them and said that Marsh had basically voted to protect pedophiles. I did some reporting on that one two years ago, and the sign didn’t have any mention of particular legislation that was being referenced. So, I asked the actual teenager who created the PAC, Nico Delgado, who’s involved in kind of the MAGA movement.

LAUREN GILGER: Right.

TJ L’HEUREUX: And he gave me a particular piece of legislation, and I looked it up, and she actually hadn’t voted for that. And so, you know, that seemed more like an aberration back in 2024 —

LAUREN GILGER: Just a few years ago, yeah.

TJ L’HEUREUX: Yeah, just two years ago. And this year, what I noticed was there are a lot of signs that play on more, you know, misleading tactics, whether it’s the Democrats for Biggs sign or some we’re seeing in Congressional District 1 with Amish Shah and Jay Feely.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. So, let’s talk about some of those, right? We should say Sen. Christine Marsh at the time — she was a senator — she lost that re-election campaign. Who knows why, but those signs were up.

TJ L’HEUREUX: Right. It’s a swing district, too. It was a pretty close race.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, it is. Yeah. Let me ask you about these Democrats for Biggs signs, which were also being printed in Spanish, we should say. Turning Point PAC is behind them. And we know that, right, because state law requires signs to have language at the bottom saying who’s paying for them, right? Like, it even has to be a certain size. That’s written into the statute.

Jean Clare Sarmiento

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TJ L’HEUREUX: Indeed. Yeah, it has to be 10% of the sign. And while actually there’s no problem legally with Turning Point doing that kind of thing, there has been a complaint filed against them for not making those disclosures at the bottom of the campaign signs large enough. And that’s pending, so it could be that the technicality gets them in that regard.

LAUREN GILGER: That’s interesting, right? Because the complaint that’s being filed here is not about the fact that the sign is misleading or wrong, it’s about the fact that, you know, this technicality about the size of the font that says who paid for it.

TJ L’HEUREUX: Yeah, yeah.

LAUREN GILGER: Because it’s a First Amendment issue essentially, you found.

TJ L’HEUREUX: Indeed, yeah. There are strong protections in the First Amendment when it comes to political speech. And what experts in the legal field, especially when it comes to the First Amendment, will say is you don’t want the government getting in the business of regulating political speech. And that’s — I think, you know, we have different times throughout our political history where people are saying or printing or making signs or whatever when it comes to political campaigns things that are less than true or misleading. And that’s a part of the system that we’re in.

But it certainly does feel like — and I think there may be a number of reasons that those kind of tactics have bubbled up again here as we run into the 2026 elections.

LAUREN GILGER: You called it, I think, a post-truth era. Let’s talk about CD1, a highly competitive district, right? We have Democrat Dr. Amish Shah, a former Democratic state lawmaker, running against former NFL kicker Jay Feely, who’s backed by the president. What signs are we seeing there?

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TJ L’HEUREUX: Yeah, so one of them that the Feely campaign, based on the disclosure at the bottom, is putting out is one that looks as though it were a sign that the Shah campaign was making, but it closely mimics the color and text scheme of the Zohran Mamdani campaign last year in New York City, which, as a self-proclaimed Democratic socialist, he ran a very successful campaign in New York City. The signs say, “Support your local socialist, Amish Shah.” And so that whole tactic also takes us to another angle where it actually gives the appearance that it’s like a Shah-funded campaign sign.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. You might assume that looking at this, but Shah is pretty far from Zohran Mamdani, right?

TJ L’HEUREUX: Yeah, I think the Feely campaign has tried to pounce on this idea of Amish Shah being kind of a far-left radical. And pretty much the only thing to point to like a leftward lean with Amish Shah is he did support kind of a Medicare for All system back some time ago based on his experience as an emergency physician. But when he was at the Legislature, he had a reputation as a kind of center-of-the-aisle, happy to work with Republicans type of lawmaker. And so actually in the primary, his Democratic opponents in the district were saying he was way too far right. Now we’re seeing the opposite.

LAUREN GILGER: Now we’re seeing the opposite. All right. So, lots of these signs to watch out for now. That is TJ L’Heureux with the Arizona Agenda joining us. TJ, thanks so much for coming in. Appreciate it very much.

TJ L’HEUREUX: Thank you. It’s a pleasure.