About those CD7 ads

Those look familiar … Sabino Canyon is safe … And that doesn’t look like anyone we know.

A glossy campaign mailer landed in mailboxes across Congressional District 7 a few weeks ago featuring a photo of then-President Barack Obama touching Democrat Daniel Hernandez’s arm and calling him “a hero.”

This was one of the first mailers sent out as part of the CD7 special election, the first sign that this race was going to see an influx of outside funding from third-parties vying to put their chosen candidate in the U.S. House.

Today, we want to talk about “redboxing,” a campaign tactic that candidates use to help those outside PACs without delving into illegal coordination. But first, we have to briefly explain the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United.

Citizens United fundamentally reshaped American politics, unleashing a torrent of outside spending from corporations and labor groups. The court justified allowing outside groups to spend unlimited campaign cash, in part, by reiterating that those groups cannot coordinate with candidates.

If they could coordinate with campaigns and still spend unlimited amounts of money, then laws limiting donations to candidates would be meaningless.

“Redboxing” is how candidates get around that anti-coordination rule.

And it has rendered the meager protections provided under Citizens United almost laughably unenforceable and completely meaningless.

The quote in the mailer calling Hernandez a “hero” comes directly from Obama’s 2011 speech at McKale Center following the Jan. 8 mass shooting in Tucson.

It wasn’t an endorsement for this year’s race — but the mailer certainly gives that impression.

The Save America Fund, a political action committee, paid for and distributed the ad.¹

Obama’s speech is public, it’s even in the national archives.

But the photo? It likely came from a publicly accessible Google Drive folder filled with professional photos and b-roll video of Hernandez — the same one linked directly on his campaign’s media resources page.

That’s likely where the PAC found it. And the Hernandez campaign isn’t the only campaign doing this.

Former Pima County Supervisor and fellow CD7 candidate Adelita Grijalva’s campaign is doing the same thing.

And yes, it’s completely legal.

Candidates want to control the message about their campaigns, and they want to make sure their allies stay on message.

But calling them up and telling them what to say would be illegal.

Redboxing is how they get around that rule.

Candidates post photos, videos, talking points, and suggested messaging in a public space, often in a literal red box, effectively signaling to outside groups: “Here’s what we want you to run with.”

This red box of text outlines what outside groups should focus on if they want to support the Hernandez campaign.

Based on public records filed by local TV stations, one thing is already obvious: Super PACs are far outspending the campaigns themselves.²

Federal Communications Commission rules require political TV commercials to be publicly disclosed — down to the date, airtime, and dollar amount. And according to our review, four PACs — Congressional Progressive Caucus, League of Conservation Voters, Progressive Promise, and Working Families Party PAC — have dropped at least $250,000 on local TV ads in June.

All four PACs are supporting Grijalva, spending a combined six figures to support her campaign.

Combined, the campaigns of Hernandez, Grijalva, and social media strategist Deja Foxx have spent an estimated $130,000 on TV spots — slightly more than half of what PACs have shelled out. Of that group, Foxx is spending the most on ads — almost more than her two rivals combined.

Meanwhile, the other candidates — Jose Malvido and Patrick Harris — haven’t run any TV ads that we’ve seen.

As for how these red-box strategies are shaping the race? Look no further than the attack ads.

We fact-checked a recent mailer from Tucson Families Fed Up last week and gave it three out of five chupacabras. They just released a new video attacking Grijalva, spending a total of $94,000 in the race.

It echoed the bullet points in Hernandez’s red box — criticizing Grijalva for “slashing watchdog positions,” “silencing constituents,” and blaming her for school closures and overcrowded classrooms while serving on the Tucson Unified School District board.

Notably, the mailer avoids personal attacks — just like the red box on Hernandez’s campaign site advises. (The page was last updated June 16. A previous version even included references to the 2011 mass shooting mentioned in the Save America Fund PAC.)

Another red box from the Grijalva campaign tells outside groups that digital and streaming ads should contain specific messaging.

Grijalva’s campaign site also includes a media section — complete with downloadable b-roll.

Some of that footage shows up in a recent YouTube ad by the “Friends of Bernie Sanders” PAC. The Vermont Senator endorsed her in late April.

Those same shots in his video appear in a six-minute video hosted on Vimeo and linked directly from her site.

Citizens United was built on a promise: Unlimited spending wouldn’t corrupt campaigns, because outside groups wouldn’t coordinate with candidates.

Redboxing makes a mockery of that promise — not by violating the rules, but by following them exactly as written.

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Stranger danger: Border Patrol agents raided a 73-year-old woman’s home in midtown Tucson, the Tucson Sentinel’s Paul Ingram reports. The agents were looking for a man who fled a checkpoint on Highway 82 near Patagonia hours earlier. The owner of the home, who is a former photographer for the Tucson Citizen, hesitated to open the door, but the agents kept banging on the door and eventually she allowed them to search her home near North Country Club and East Grant. The arrival of a dozen heavily armed federal agents at her house shows that Tucsonans should be prepared for the “era of extreme immigration enforcement,” Arizona Daily Star columnist Tim Steller writes.

"I didn't know if I should open the door because I've watched how federal agents have treated people," the woman said. "Some of those arrests have been really violent, and who knows what was going to happen?”

Not for sale: The threat of selling off federal lands — including Sabino Canyon, Mount Lemmon, and Madera Canyon — has been shelved, Outside Magazine columnist, and adventure/travel writer Wes Siler writes in his Substack newsletter. Utah Senator Mike Lee made an 11th hour decision to withdraw his latest attempt to sell off federal lands for “housing” from the Senate budget bill in order to get more Senate Republicans to agree to the larger budget bill. Lee said he will work with Trump in the future to find uses for “underutilized federal land.”

Boring movie: When the first Trump administration was building hundreds of miles of border wall in Arizona, the Sky Island Alliance set up dozens of wildlife cameras to measure the impact of the wall. Now, the current Trump administration is preparing to build a wall across the San Rafael Valley, those cameras are showing barely any people crossing in that area. An average of five people per month, including hikers and Border Patrol agents, were seen on the cameras in the valley, the Star’s Emily Bregel reports.

End of an era: South Tucsonans watched a piece of history turn into rubble as the former Greyhound Park was demolished, KVOA’s Chorus Nylander reports. Residents shared their memories of going to the track, which was closed down in 2016 after the mistreatment of racing dogs became clear. New soccer fields will be built on the site of the racetrack.

Learning new tricks: An instrument that was partially built at the University of Arizona and now rides aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is using a new maneuver to search under the planet’s surface for signs of water, the Sentinel’s Adrian O’Farrill reports. The mission took a $1 million financial hit from the Trump administration’s funding cuts, but that pales in comparison to much larger cuts to other scientific missions.

You can support our mission of seeing below the surface by clicking this button.

Inside the courtroom: The Nogales International added more details from the federal court hearing in Tucson that ended with a 10-year prison sentence for former Santa Cruz County Treasurer Elizabeth Gutfahr. That includes County Supervisor Rudy Molera calling Gutfahr’s expression of remorse “a performance” that is part of a “pattern of deception.” Gutfahr was convicted of embezzling $38 million in public money over the course of a decade.

Too bad this faceless YouTube news channel missed the redboxing content readily available on certain campaign web sites — it might’ve spared us the weird stock images pretending to cover the Congressional District 7 primary.

The nearly three-minute video leans so heavily on stock footage, we had to rewatch it just to spot a cactus.

Click if you want to white knuckle your way through what it looks like when you hand the news coverage completely over to AI.

1. Not to be confused with Donald Trump’s PAC with a very similar name called “Save America.” All PACs sound the same.

2. Our ad-spending estimates are based on Federal Communications Commission data specific to the Tucson TV market and doesn’t include digital spending on platforms like YouTube or streaming services — which follow different disclosure rules. We’ll have a better idea of the totality of campaign spending when the next round of campaign finance reports come out in July.