The Daily Agenda: Keep an eye on LD 17

Big stakes in legislative races … And wild cards all over the place … Archive reclaims the border narrative.

At first glance, Legislative District 17 looks like it should be a slam-dunk for Republicans.

The GOP has more registered voters in the district, which was gerrymandered a few years ago to make doubly sure of that. And all three lawmakers in the district are Republican.

But here’s the thing. Democratic candidates for several statewide offices beat their Republican opponents in LD 17 in 2022. And in presidential election years, voters tend to show up a lot more. On top of that, campaign finance reports show money pouring into these races. That’s a lot of wild cards. 

The stakes are pretty high in LD 17. If Democrats pick up a seat in the House or Senate, it would create a tie between the two parties, which could give Democrats leverage and allow more of their bills to at least make it out of committee. 

It also would mean the Democrats wrested a seat or two from the three Freedom Caucus members who represent LD 17. That would be quite a victory for Tucson Democrats who’ve seethed with anger for the past two years as they’ve watched those lawmakers inevitably pop up whenever there was a hard-right bill about “groomers,” books in schools, or any number of controversial issues.

First, the basics

Voters in LD 17 will elect one state senator and two state representatives. They’ll choose among the three Republican lawmakers who are running for re-election, two Republican challengers and two Democrats, assuming all candidates meet the signature requirements by the April 1 deadline.

The voting will unfold in a district whose shape is just bizarre. Conservative power brokers pushed their ideal map through the redistricting commission and voters ended up with a district that runs around the north side of the Tucson metro area from Oro Valley, through the Santa Catalina Mountains, and then down to Vail. 

The official map of Legislative District 17.

On the Republican side, Sen. Justine Wadsack will face former Sen. Vince Leach in the Senate primary. This will be a rematch of the 2022 primary election, just like the races for the two House seats, where Reps. Rachel Jones and Cory McGarr will face Anna Orth, who they beat last time around. 

On the Democratic side, they’re using the single-shot strategy and only running one candidate for the two House seats. So Kevin Volk will take on the winners of the Republican primary for the House, while John McLean does the same for the Senate seat.

Who’s running

There’s a lot to say about the candidates, and we’ll dive into that in future stores. For now, we’re just going to briefly sketch it out for you.

• Many of you probably already are familiar with Wadsack, McGarr, and Jones. They’re the members of the Freedom Caucus we mentioned earlier.

• Leach represented the area in the Legislature from 2015 until he lost to Wadsack in 2022. He’s from Saddlebrooke and focuses mostly on business and economic growth.

• Orth talks about election integrity and “today’s brand of radical leftist that seeks to turn every state into California.”

• McLean is a longtime local businessman and environmental advocate who says he’ll “bring sanity back to state government.” 

• Volk is a property developer who worked for former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and former Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine. 

Who’s backing them

As for the people backing the candidates with their wallets, the most recent campaign finance reports, from January, show quite a bit of money coming in. 

Wadsack, Jones, and McGarr all have a lot of people backing them. They each raised at least $20,000 from dozens of individual contributors in the last few months of 2023.

Most of those contributions were small, a few hundred dollars or less, but some were big enough to catch our eye. The biggest contribution to Wadsack was $5,400 from Tatnall Hillman, an oil tycoon in Colorado. McGarr’s biggest contribution was $2,500 from Waseem Hamadeh, the brother of Abe Hamadeh. 

They also have a lot of political action committees in their corner. The Realtors of Arizona and the private prison company GEO Group backed all of them. 

Wadsack did particularly well with PACs. She had contributions from more than a dozen PACs, including the Freedom Club, Freedom Works, which also backed McGarr, and the Educational Freedom Fund, which backed McGarr, too. 

As for Leach, his campaign was funded primarily by loans he made himself. Less than 20 people made individual contributions. But one of them was Jim Click, who donated $2,500.

Volk raised about $21,000 from friends and family and another $13,000 from several dozen individual contributors, including $1,000 from former lawmaker Morgan Abraham. 

McLean and Orth entered the race after the campaign finance reporting deadline and their reports show no balance or transactions. 

That’s what the races in LD 17 look like so far. The picture should get clearer after the April 1 deadline for gathering signatures, as well as the next campaign finance deadline two weeks later. 

Once the slate of candidates is set, we’ll start reaching out to candidates to do interviews and start digging into the issues voters care about.

Preaching to the choir: Mark Funkhouser talked with Caitlin and several other industry experts about the relationship between local news and democracy for a piece in Route Fifty, which provides news and analysis for state, county and local government leaders. Funkhouser writes that the loss of local reporting jobs creates problems for the communities that rely on that information and that the trend should be concerning to local government leaders.

“A robust local media benefits local government, and it's in the best interest of local officials to support their news organizations,” Funkhouser writes.

Making its case: Tucson Unified School District officials are hosting a public forum this evening to talk about the importance of saving the 100 learning recovery specialist positions currently funded by COVID relief money, since the funding is getting ready to run out, the Arizona Daily Star’s Jessica Votipka writes. Officials will discuss the impact the math and reading interventionists and “response to intervention” professionals have had on student performance and how funding shifts to save the jobs could impact various departments. The positions were funded by $3.6 million in federal COVID relief funds, which is set to expire on Sept. 30.

Meanwhile, over in Bisbee: Former hotelier Fred Miller provides an update on February’s fire in downtown Bisbee in the latest edition of the Bisbee Wire, a newsletter about the Bisbee economy, interests, and “random items of progressive political interest.” The Main Street Fire destroyed two buildings, but left several adjacent businesses unable to open due to structural concerns. Miller also touts the return of vintage baseball to Bisbee’s historic Warren Ballpark on April 6 and 7th and highlights a $15,000 County Election Administration  Fellowship Program for current college students and recent grads.

Their side of the story: The University of Arizona launched its Reclaiming the Border Narrative digital archive Sunday, showcasing a collaboration that seeks to tell the story of the border through the eyes of the people who live there, Arizona Public Media’s Danyelle Khmara reports. UA Libraries’ Special Collections and the Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry collaborated on the project with dozens of people in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands to build a digital archive of projects intended to reclaim the narrative, advance migrant justice and address gaps in the archival record.

Fire in the sky: In case you hadn’t already taken to social media for an answer about the beaming string of light in Monday’s night sky, the Arizona Republic’s L.M. Boyd reported that the light was part of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket launch from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base. People in both Tucson and Phoenix reported seeing the rocket, with the Falcon 9 landing vertically on a droneship in the Pacific Ocean less than 10 minutes after the launch. 

Transportation transparency: Pima County transportation officials are hosting a series of public forums this week to show community members how they’ll be spending money over the next five years to improve roads, upgrade buses and rapid transit and increase safety for pedestrians and cyclists, KGUN’s Sean Newgent reports. In-person meetings are taking place today from 4 to 6 p.m. at the Abrams Public Health Center (3950 S. Country Club Rd.) and tomorrow from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Wheeler Taft Abbett Sr. Library (7800 N. Schisler Dr.)

We’re aware of an editorial in the Daily Wildcat disputing portions of the story we ran last week about the elimination of its two opinion editor positions. We’ve listened to a recording of the conversation between former Opinion Desk Editor Olivia Krupp and the DW’s advisor, editor in chief and managing editor, during which Krupp was told her position had been cut. Our interpretation of the situation has not changed and we stand by Krupp and the veracity of our reporting. Our interest in the story is the impact of the UA’s financial crisis on student media, not the rationale behind DW staffing decisions.