The coming avalanche

Prepare to be buried in ads … CD6 is going to be a doozy, too … And it's worth a quick phone call.

If you live in Congressional District 7, you might want to get a bigger mailbox.

Judging by campaign finance reports filed this week, the CD7 special election is going to break fundraising records. And that means you’re going to get swamped with campaign mailers.

That should be quite a change for CD7, which has been a relatively sleepy district for the past two decades.

But deep pockets and strange bedfellows will fuel the various Democratic campaigns as they fill our mailboxes, slip into every possible ad space and spur on-the-ground door-knocking campaigns.

It might be in our backyard, but this is really a national race to replace Raúl Grijalva.

Leading the way is former state Rep. Daniel Hernandez, who raised $320,000 in 11 days, according to his FEC file.

Our art intern, ChatGPT, believes politicians keep all their campaign donations in cash and roll around in it.

Hernandez knows how to raise money. When he ran for Congress in 2022, he brought in nearly $1.2 million as he challenged Kirsten Engel in the CD6 Democratic primary.

Here are the quick highlights of his most recent FEC filing:

• Hernandez received $36,000 from six political action committees — Equality PAC, La Bamba PAC, LGBTQ Victory Fund Federal PAC, Storm PAC, No Vote Left Behind PAC and Smart TD PAC.

• More than two-thirds of his individual donors are from Arizona: $187,540 out of the $270,700 in individual donations came from residents living in the Grand Canyon State.

• The median donation to Hernandez was $500.

For those trying to read between the lines and wondering why we’re only talking about Hernandez in a sea of serious political figures vying to represent Tucson¹ in Congress, it comes down to Federal Election Commission filing deadlines.

It would be charitable to call them Byzantine, but the upshot is that only a few candidates started campaigning before the cutoff date for reporting their finances.

Hernandez wasn’t the first² to announce he was running for the seat, but he was a serious candidate who started collecting donations in late March.

Those donations fall under the first quarter reporting period, so he had to file a report. Almost all the other candidates in the CD7 race announced after March 31 — the cutoff date for the FEC reporting window.

“Democrats know the old ways can’t continue. I’m grateful to all those who have donated and believe in a better future for Arizona with new leadership,” Hernandez said about his recent fundraising report.

The only other candidates to file a campaign finance report were both Republicans.

Daniel Butierez, who challenged then-Congressman Grijalva last year, reported raising approximately $155,000 in March.

Nearly all that money came out of his own pocket. FEC filings include $14,700 in out-of-pocket expenses he paid for and a $136,470 loan he gave to his campaign.

Last time around, he raised roughly $76,000 in the 2024 race against Grijalva, with nearly two-thirds of the funding also coming out of his own checkbook.

Jorge Rivas, reported raising $8,800 in March, and like Butierez the bulk of those donations came out of his bank account. He gave the campaign $5,625, with the rest coming from individuals.

Sure, there are a lot of things candidates can spend their campaign dollars on, from staffing to polling to get-out-the-vote ground games. But a large majority of this money is going into political ads.

And as we said earlier, the amounts reported so far are only the tip of the iceberg.

Joe — and this is true — likes to collect political mailers. We stacked them on his desk when we worked together at the Arizona Daily Star. Send pictures of your mailers, door hangers or links to ads you are seeing to Joe@TucsonAgenda.com.

Covering the CD7 race is going to be a full-time job. Luckily, we have the right guy for the job. Help Joe stay on top of it by becoming a paid subscriber today.

If you live in Congressional District 6 and thought to yourself, “Well, at least I won’t have to buy a bigger mailbox,” think again.

Last Sunday’s Town Hall with Sens. Cory Booker and Mark Kelly made it very clear — Democratic Party leaders are targeting CD6 and are going to pour a lot of money into making sure Republican U.S. Rep. Juan Ciscomani doesn’t get a third term.

The two-term congressman isn’t taking any chances, and has raised $1.5 million in just the last three months. And more importantly, he is sitting on more than $1.25 million in his campaign war chest.

One of the more notable things is Ciscomani personally raised $1.26 million of the $1.5 million figure, with the rest coming from joint fundraising committees.

But those committees muddy the waters. The Ciscomani Victory Fund, a joint fundraising committee that is a separate entity from his personal campaign committee, poured $288,000 into Ciscomani for Congress on March 31.

He also spent nearly a quarter of a million on his campaign in the last three months, suggesting the Republican congressman might be in campaign mode all the way from now until November 2026.

Democrats Joanna Mendoza and Chris Donat also started fundraising for next year’s CD6 Democratic primary.

Mendoza raised roughly $817,000 during the three-month period, and miraculously didn’t spend a penny. Donat raised $6,100.

We’ll dig into the details of these candidates more in the future, but our priority right now is the 2025 races — specifically the CD7 special election.

However, we’re loving Donat’s decision to lean into his last name in his campaign material.

Visa trouble: Two international students in Pima County are suing the Trump administration after their visas were revoked without legitimate cause or due process, the Arizona Daily Star’s Emily Bregel and Prerana Sannappanavar report. The Trump administration is going after international students as part of a broader crackdown on immigration. Lawyers across the country are dealing with a flood of calls from students whose visas were revoked suddenly, the Associated Press reported. The AP counted 901 students at 128 colleges and universities, including some students who have had some early success with their cases. Judges in New Hampshire, Wisconsin and Montana have temporarily blocked the revocation of several students’ visas already.

DEI agreement: Tucson Unified School District officials agreed to follow the Trump administration’s strict policies on DEI, KGUN’s Alex Dowd reports. Two TUSD board members said the district’s policies already comply with what the Trump administration wants. But they still needed to certify that they won’t use DEI-related criteria in their policies. If they didn’t, they’d risk losing $72 million in federal funding every year. A case in point: The Kyrene School District governing board in Tempe considered a social emotional wellness policy last week, which spurred Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne to threaten to withhold $1.5 million from the district.

Still dropping: Apprehensions of migrants in Southern Arizona continued to drop last month, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection statistics released this week. The Border Patrol reported 1,068 apprehensions in the Tucson Sector, which covers about two-thirds of Arizona’s border with Mexico. That’s a steep drop from the record high of about 80,000 in December 2023.

The view from afar (kind of): Tucson got the New York Times treatment yesterday, but with a twist. The profile of the city was written by Tucson native Abbie Kozolchyk, who started with John Lennon asking Paul McCartney “Is Tucson in Arizona?” and meandered through the city’s restaurants, an interview with Mayor Regina Romero, and all the fun local events, like the Tucson Festival of Books and the Tucson Rodeo Parade.

There’s a lot to love about Tucson, including the Tucson Agenda! Help us grow big enough to get a mention when the New York Times comes to town again.

Pot hole: Arizona’s marijuana industry is starting to shrink, after three years of hitting the $1.4 billion mark, the Arizona Mirror’s Jim Small reports. But it’s not exactly cratering. Last year’s sales of both medical and recreational marijuana topped out at $1.3 billion. Recreational marijuana continues to grow its share of sales, reaching 81% of all sales last year, while medical marijuana accounted for the other 19%.

The Tucson Agenda is just one of five sister publications in our journalist-owned, subscriber-supported family of newsletters.

Each one has its own flavor, so if you haven’t already, now’s a good time to see what they’re all about!

Have you ever wanted to be able to talk to your dog? How about a dolphin? Well, new A.I. tech means you might be able to do it sooner than you think. The A.I. Agenda explains it all in today’s edition.

School vouchers were a big deal in Arizona last year, but the noise has died down quite a bit. At least in Arizona. Other states are in the middle of heated debates as they try to follow Arizona’s example, the Education Agenda reported.

Arizona and the rest of the states dependent on the Colorado River for water better figure out how to divvy up that water soon. If they don’t, Trump will be the one who decides. Sign up now because the Water Agenda will break it down on Friday.

FEC reports are, by most accounts, painful to fill out.

They’re probably the reason why you see many major campaigns paying for treasurers every political cycle.

Especially when it comes to the requirement to report donors' occupation and employer.

Former Tucson Congresswoman Martha McSally got dinged for this by the FEC for leaving it blank, but you can essentially tell the FEC anything you like.

Campaigns often can get away with writing "best efforts" if a donor leaves the section blank, as long as they reach out and ask the donor for more information.

So when CD7 candidate Jorge Rivas loaned his campaign money, his campaign treasurer wrote “best efforts” in those two fields.

We get it — sometimes you find out who you are by running for office.

1. CD7 is vast and encompasses far more than Tucson geographically, but Tucson voters play an outsized role in deciding who will represent them in the district.

2. Fourteen people filed a statement of interest with the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office before Hernandez. Even perennial candidate Trista di Genova filed two hours before he filed.