The following is an original production of AZPM News.

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Arizona's primary election, looking back at Tuesday's results and forecasting the match-ups for November's midterms.

And new questions are raised about safety in downtown Tucson.

The Press Room starts now.

(upbeat music) Hello and welcome to The Press Room.

I'm Tony Perkins here with our panel of journalists, Yana Kunichoff from Arizona Luminaria.

Joe Ferguson with the Tucson Agenda.

Steve Jess from AZPM News and Paul Ingram from the Tucson Sentinel.

Thanks for joining us today on The Press Room.

Let's start with the primary election and begin with the contest for governor.

Katie Hobbs, the incumbent Democrat, waiting to see which Republican she will face in November.

Steve, it's going to be Congressman Andy Biggs and by a big margin.

Oh boy, it was like watching whatever race it was, Secretariat winning the Belmont Stakes in 1973 or whatever, by 22 links, that was basically the Republican primary.

My understanding from some colleagues at KJZZ is that the last month or so David Schweikert was kind of phoning it in.

He had maybe lost funding or figured out that he wasn't getting what he was putting into the race.

And Andy Biggs won it by about a four-to- one margin over Schweikert, yeah.

So now we look at that margin and what it means for November and it was expected to be closer.

Instead, you know, Joe, it was bigger than expected, maybe, bigger margin than expected.

What's that say for the electorate and what's that mean for the Biggs campaign going forward?

Well, I think that you've got to remind yourselves that Republican politics are very different than general politics.

And so Republicans are going to show up.

We're probably going to have a better turnout than we did this time around, but independents are one third of Arizona.

And so they're not going to necessarily be where Turning Point's are going to be knocking on doors.

And so Biggs is going to need to appeal to a much larger, more moderate audience than the Republican primary voters.

And so it's going to be very competitive.

And Paul, Biggs got President Trump's endorsement earlier and he's had to live with it for month after month of high disapproval ratings for the president.

Yet his supporters still came out strong in his favor.

Well, I think naturally, I mean, you know, if he says he likes a candidate, that person often does pretty well in Republican circles.

But when that person has to go to the general election, as Joe said, I mean, all of a sudden they have to compete, show themselves as being independent, it makes it harder for that.

The president is historically unpopular and he seems to be kind of his, he just is, he's not gaining or losing votes.

He's just hanging on under 40% right now, according to most public polls.

And so for him now, you're going to have to have that anchor around your neck if you're Biggs.

But if you're Biggs, you also really need that because that's what fires up Republicans to come out and help you vote.

Now let's take a look at what's next in the gubernatorial race, which is the choice for Lieutenant Governor.

Each of the two candidates will choose a Lieutenant Governor for the first time in Arizona.

Joe, give me a little bit of background as to why now we're getting a Lieutenant Governor to run as a running mate for Andy Biggs and for Katie Hobbs.

I mean, so this was a decision by the legislature to create the title and it allows there to be a different kind of succession and order.

When we had Janet Napolitano, a Democrat who was popular, who left to go join the administration, we got Jan Brewer, who was a very different kind of Republican.

And so now we're putting in place this Lieutenant Governor position that allows a different kind of order in place.

I don't think Katie Hobbs is going anywhere, or for that matter, Mr.

Biggs, but I think that they're putting that in place and we're pretty soon getting an idea of who those people are going to be.

Steve, what are some of the names being floated around out there?

Well, I just know that there is a rumor, possibly planted by someone at this table, that Regina Romero was being considered as a running mate for Katie Hobbs, but I don't know whether that's gained any traction or not.

The question for Andy Biggs is whether now that he's won the Republican primary with the far-right MAGA crowd, if he would do well to pivot toward the center by picking a Lieutenant Governor who's got more middle-of -the-road support among Arizona voters.

As Joe pointed out, a third of Arizona voters are independent.

It's about an even split between Republicans, Democrats, and independents, and you need to attract independent voters to win a statewide office in Arizona.

Paul, that injects a new kind of energy into the general election that we haven't had before.

Certainly, I mean, it adds another person.

There's another person who can help campaign.

It's another person who, of course, also could be problematic.

I mean, we look at certain, some vice presidential candidates who have ended up kinda dragging down presidents who picked the wrong person.

It's about picking someone who's really good who adds something to your campaign.

So someone who can maybe expand Southern Arizona, who could bring Latinos might be really effective.

And also for Republicans, somebody who, yeah, who moderate the candidate might be really helpful.

On the other hand, you could see the Republicans choosing someone who's even more MAGA, just to really kind of excite the crowd and really bring them to the forefront.

You use those different strategies and we'll have to see exactly why someone ends up getting picked for lieutenant governor.

And then what do they win?

How are they going to make that job their own?

And how are they gonna use that position?

All right, that's gonna be interesting to check out.

I think the deadline is September the 4th for the candidates to choose their running mate going into November.

Yana, you were in Marana on Tuesday and residents there made the contest for mayor, John Post over Greg Johnson, one of the more interesting contests of the evening.

Spell out for us what happened in Marana on Tuesday.

Yeah, I think that whole election is really interesting.

There was a slate of sort of reform candidates that were running that had come up in the movement against both the proposed data center and the proposed immigration detention center.

So you have this town that is kind of dealing with these like big national existential questions and the election ended up being really, really close.

So only one reform candidate, Jackie McGuire, actually made it in the election.

She'll be a new city council member, but those numbers were so close.

I think some of them 1% or 1.5%.

So to me, it shows that there's a really big divide on, essentially it was a referendum on these issues and that's how I understood it.

People are concerned in the town.

And one thing I think is probably important is like these folks started running after December.

This wasn't a long-term thing.

These aren't people who have had long-term campaigns.

These people, all four of the reform candidates sort of started from scratch rea built a campaign and I mean, they were successful, winning one seat on the Marana town council is actually I think is pretty important.

It shows that there is something, there's some frustration and fury over it.

And I think there's a big question about the future of Marana.

It's a place that was historically, I mean, it was mostly a farming community and then kind of a bedroom community.

And now it's being turned into an industrial place with lots and lots of houses.

It's really changing really, really quickly.

And so then maybe there's kind of a pushback in those changes and maybe the data center becomes kind of a nice focal point for those issues.

I also, Marana is seeing a 10% rise in its water rates starting already this year and over the next few years.

So kind of these bigger questions that we're thinking about, what will that look like in Tucson?

If or when Project Blue comes online, I think Marana is actually where we should be watching to see.

And right or wrong, people in Marana who are suddenly paying higher water rates are going to associate that with the data center and its water usage.

And we're already paying through too much for water.

We would be paying even more if we have to fund or support a new data center in our community.

Joe, it's interesting that big issues over the season, immigration, detention, data centers, all got to be concentrated in Marana and how voters feel about that.

Does that sort of reflect how voters elsewhere in Arizona feel about those issues?

Oh, I think so.

I think that there's plenty of times where there are forums about the Marana data center or the prison complex and a lot of people from Tucson show up.

A lot of familiar faces, a lot of people show up that are there.

You got Jen Allen showing up to these events making it a county-wide profile kind of decision.

So I think there's a lot of interest there and people are showing up wherever they can, donating wherever they can and supporting wherever they can.

I mean, these candidates raise a lot of money and spent a lot of money in Marana.

And that didn't just come from their own piggy bank.

That didn't come just from their own constituencies.

These were people all over the place giving money because they're so passionate about these issues.

Now, Paul, a fascinating contest in the Democratic primary for LD20, Legislative District 20, a state senate battle between Alma Hernandez and Rocque Perez.

Hernandez, won there likely going to be representing that seat in LD20.

(Paul) Right.

But the challenger, Rocque Perez, represented that progressive wing and talked a bit about how the most recent momentum in the Democratic party may have been behind him, maybe in other places, but not necessarily in Arizona or not necessarily LD20.

What's the background behind that?

I think what's important is that Rocque Perez is somebody who's fairly new to politics.

He's been around him.

He was on the city council.

He got a city council seat temporarily for a bit, but he's somebody who's, he's pretty young.

He's launched his campaign against Alma Hernandez.

Alma Hernandez is somebody who's part of the Hernandez clan who have had, through all three of the siblings have had a seat at one point, two of them currently do.

And so she's someone who really is good and steeped in democratic politics and did really well in this contest.

But you see, I think we tend to kind of say, well, this is the progressive wing, all of a sudden it's changing.

She did well because she did old school democratic politics.

She had the union.

She had three of the unions that campaigned for her, the Boilermakers, the Carpenters Union, the local Teamsters, they were all there at her party.

They helped push for her.

And also they're really good at going and doing the old school door knocking of talking to people and making sure.

One thing that Rocque really did was he talked about sort of big issues.

He talked about her relationship with Israel.

He talked about how she's been taking a lot of money from corporations.

And also her relationship with the Republicans.

He said, hey, she votes too often with Republicans.

So I think there's this push.

So Alma may have been a really tough candidate to beat for someone who is more progressive, somebody with the help of DSA.

That may have not been a good contest to compare to it.

And Rocque may have been maybe kind of an imperfect candidate to do that.

For Alma, I think it's sort of a warning bell that maybe she needs to be aware that in the future, someone's gonna come up and challenge her.

And they may be more successful if they have a better campaign.

(Tony) All right.

(Joe) I think we could look to LD21 for DSA candidates doing well.

So we had Miranda winning that seat over Stephanie Stahl Hamilton just by 200 votes.

But we had somebody who was relatively unknown in Tucson politics take out an incumbent.

And part of that reason is because she was a DSA candidate.

And so I do think that there is room for a liberal candidate in Arizona legislative politics.

But Alma is just a force to be reckoned with and a bank account to match it.

(Paul) Right.

Let's switch over to the Attorney General contest over on the Republican side.

Warren Petersen got more votes than Rodney Glassman.

He will face Democratic incumbent Kris Mayes.

And this is gonna be a strong ideological contest.

Amongst all the candidates on the season, Peterson seemed to be the most, I suppose, vocal about being a Trump supporter and election denier.

He said that the DACA recipients should get ready to be deported.

Joe, let me ask you, is he going to have to moderate his opinion, his rhetoric going into the general?

I think so.

I think that you can see somebody like Kris Mayes who's got all these wins against the Trump administration.

That's a lot of momentum for a lot of people, whether they're Democrats, Republicans or independents.

Petersen's gonna have to show that he is going to be effective in representing Arizona's values in a different way.

And he's got a lot of baggage coming out of that very ugly fight with Glassman at the end of the day.

He might've won the battle, but he came out bloody.

(Steve) The Attorney General's race was one of the closest from four years ago.

I think it was decided by 500 votes statewide, something like that.

So, you know, Kris Mayes will have her work cut out for her, but when you look at things like the mobile home parks supporting Petersen to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, she's also got a lot of ammunition she can use against Petersen in negative advertising campaigns.

(Yana) And I'll just speak to, I've been to so many town halls, and I think that is just the space where I've seen people who are kind of across the political spectrum just like respond really positively to Kris Mayes and Benson, I think with the mobile home issues, like mobile home residents who I've spoken to so many, I have just like a range of political opinions, but I think that is one of the few political figures that have taken action in this space that has seen so little change for decades.

So yeah, I think it's really, really interesting space.

I think in part it's worth talking about like Mayes, is she's gotten agreements from like Hickmans Farms about like egg prices.

She's gone after like really kind of kitchen table items, and she's been really effective in those.

And then she helped like folks campaign against the aluminum smelter in Benson.

She weighed in on some of those things.

She's also weighed on lots of issues.

So she's not only weighed on some like immigration issues or things that people might kind of expect a Democrat, but she's gone for things that help regular people, and she's been pretty effective at that.

Just to add, she's fighting TEP.

And I can't imagine a more popular topic right now in the summer than fighting TEP and APS.

(Paul) Right.

All right, Kimberly Yee won the primary on the Republican side for Superintendent of Public Instruction.

That means Tom Horne is out.

Tom Horne was strong on reforming school voucher system.

What's that mean for the future of school voucher reform?

I'm not sure Horne was so much about reforming it as maintaining it and wiping out everything that he viewed as quote unquote DEI in the school system.

Didn't he set up a hotline where people could call if they thought that something a little too woke was being taught to their kids, things like that.

But I don't know if it will be, how much of a change it'll be if Yee gets in as Superintendent.

So I think the proposition 212, which would limit who can get ESAs to families making $150,000 or less, I think will do some of the work for whoever is elected.

I think, particularly the work for like the Democratic side who has campaigned on limiting ESAs.

So I think that will, that in many ways, there's not a lot of tools that I think the state superintendent has because it has to go through the legislature.

So I think that what happens with that proposition and whether limits come through there are really, really big.

I mean, if Horne has always been somebody who's fairly ideological on the question, this is like Kimberly Yee is somebody who can maybe come across as less ideological, who maybe is somebody who can help run the schools too effectively.

And that's Horne was somebody who kind of got into these ideological fights.

He kind of relished them and often really pursued them.

So especially with the ESAs, I mean, the program, there's lots of criticism of the program.

It's been come incredibly expensive.

It's really easy for parents to use, to pull money for all sorts of things that aren't necessarily related to their kids' education.

Even there are big questions of that.

So each of the candidates really are gonna have to talk about those issues.

And, but ESAs are also pretty, like they're popular.

Let's move out of the Tuesday results and move into election security in general.

President Trump last week gave a speech about having to trust or unable to trust elections.

It's been a big issue in Arizona over the past 10 years.

Steve, it seems to be a personal issue for our Secretary of State, Adrian Fontes.

Oh, well, yeah, he said something to Markwayne Mullin, the Homeland Security Secretary about "suck a salt lick" or something like that, which was I think a polite way of telling him to go take a walk.

Because of course, the Trump administration wanted Arizona and every other state that could turn over its complete voter rolls unredacted.

And the administration has now lost 17 of those cases in a row and won none of them.

But there is all, any of these people, whether it's Trump or his minions or Warren Petersen or anybody, has to do is provide some proof that any actual election fraud is going on.

Yes, there are random rare cases of people voting who are unqualified, but the sort of thing that the president is talking about has not been shown to really exist in great quantity anywhere, the kind of voter fraud that he complains about as the reason for his loss in 2020.

Let's discuss an event in Tucson that happened over the past weekend, a shooting downtown left nine people wounded and a suspect was arrested, but it generated a whole lot of online debate.

The manager of Empire Pizza, the big corner establishment downtown went online and there was a lot of, I guess, a lot of passion that went back and forth on the Internet regarding what he had to say.

Yeah, I'm gonna open this up to other folks here also have been following.

I think that it has, to me, been a big conversation about how we talk and think about safety and also who we blame when things like this happen and kind of what systemic issues come in there.

So I know Paul has been covering that a lot more closely.

Yeah, I mean, it's sort of difficult because I mean, for Empire Pizza, I mean, it's clearly the person who's running the account is furious about this event.

They're really upset.

I mean, there were two people who were on their porch who were wounded in this shooting and there was lots of kind of a sudden sort of, a kind of shotgun blast of pardon the expression, but of blame, like he kind of blamed everyone.

He blamed the cops, said at first the cops weren't there, soon they weren't there, they weren't in the right place, even though I was talking to the Tucson police chief on Thursday and she said, hey, we had officers there before the 911 calls even there.

They had 20 officers, they were on scene, they were on scene immediately, but still there was this kind of like anger about that.

There's been a lot of direct against people who are homeless about the people who are using fentanyl, for using the alleyways as kind of an outhouse because there's no other place for them to go.

There's all these sorts of problems that were all kind of compiled into this one kind of angry rant or series of angry rants about it.

But I think when we can break away from that is that there are issues in Tucson that we have to talk about, which is there was a forum on Thursday that the mayor along with Laura Conover, the Pima County attorney and some other folks talked about that these issues and then court about what the city is doing about these issues, what the Tucson police department is doing about these issues and how they can move forward in trying to interrupt violence, interrupt violent acts.

And it's a hard problem in this.

Is downtown safe, Steve?

I don't get there as often as I could, but what I do know is that none of the problems that people complain about, whether it's public drug use or people relieving themselves in public or anything else, none of those things was invented in Tucson.

They're a sign of broader economic and societal issues across the country, maybe across the Western world.

And we can't just look at Tucson politicians as those who caused this.

They have the responsibility to do things about it, but it also needs to be addressed on a national level.

Yeah, I think it's obviously an event that no one would have wanted to be around for, but there's so many, when I think about it, there's so many dynamics that are part of that.

Part of what I've been doing this last week was covering a new TPD program that's supposed to address how unhoused people who have a lot of trespassing, loitering, or public urination charges are engaged with by police officers.

And the idea is there's gonna be a list of 50 people and those people are gonna get extra attention from both outreach workers and TPD, but possibly have more harsher criminal charges or penalties as a possibility.

But I think that thinking about, I think it was just interesting came into that conversation at the time when there's an effort to have a but there was also a discussion about like, oh, if you had more bathrooms, would that solve this issue?

I think a conflation of kind of bigger crimes connected to smaller things that are things like public urination or even loitering.

I think there's not research that backs a connection between those things.

I think the broken windows theory of policing has been one that for decades has been connected to over-policing of a lot of vulnerable communities.

So I think I'm just watching for where that connection is made in a moment of high emotion after something that is genuinely scary happened in the community we live.

This was the biggest mass shooting in Tucson since the January 2011 tragedy.

And this time around, like we said, a lot of the passionate discussion happened on social media.

Is it moving into the mainstream?

Most of the stories we do about downtown Tucson have to do with economic development.

And all of a sudden we have this serious crime story.

How do we approach that?

Well, I think that's a really good question.

I mean, I think the first thing is to think about that this wasn't even the only mass shooting in the United States on Sunday.

We've had more than 300 mass shootings in the United States this year alone.

It is something that unfortunately happens and is part of our, unfortunately part of our public life.

And trying to figure out how to interrupt that is a really, really difficult problem.

One thing to keep in mind is that the person who did this was not, this is not somebody who was homeless.

This is not somebody who was using drugs.

This is not somebody who was using, who was urinating in an alleyway.

This is somebody that worked at a nearby restaurant.

This is someone who has had interactions with police before, who has actually had, fired a gun at someone, when he was a prohibited possessor, which meant that when they had the gun, they shouldn't have.

There's questions about what to do about that and how to interrupt that.

And that's gonna be the big issue about, and I think what should be the focus of this is not what do we do about acts of violence?

How do we keep people from, and we go back to the January 8th shooting.

I mean, that is the kid who shot Gabby Giffords was somebody who had a long history of mental health problems, still was able to get a gun, still is able to own that gun, commit and use it for crime and violence.

So there's lots of these things that we have to figure out how to deal with a society, in a society that's awash in guns, but also has lots of people with mental health problems, but also has people who just commit acts of violence because they're frustrated or they're angry or they're just trying to commit a crime.

And also, I mean, when I think about going back a few conversations to the superintendent of public instruction, I was an education reporter when Tom Horne kind of launched his attack on social-emotional learning, on removing some of the key ways that we're teaching young people in our society to have like impulse control or empathy or build relationships with people.

And to me, that's connected to when we see kind of chaotic acts of violence in the communities we're in.

I don't think they start in that moment.

So yeah, I think that's also a question for me.

All right, let's go around the table and ask you what stories you've been working on or looking ahead to cover in the next few weeks ahead.

Joe, let's start with you.

I'm gonna be working on a story about the Department of Economic Quality here in Pima County and concerns about whether or not they are able to police polluters and regulate businesses.

Steve?

I'm kind of interested in seeing how often and whether Donald Trump makes guest appearances in the political campaigns of both sides going forward and how much Democrats in particular are going to try to hang Donald Trump around the necks of every Republican running for office.

Paul?

Yeah, we've been working on a long-term project specifically about homelessness in Tucson, about what the city can do about it, what the county can do about it, and also what other groups are doing to help people.

What's the end of the future?

How do we improve this?

And so we'll be doing that through the fall.

Yana.

(Yana) We're collecting stories about how immigration enforcement is impacting folks in this community and sort of doing a series of vignettes about that.

And then I'm also writing about heat and the elderly, which has been really fun to hang out with some folks, but it is hard out there if you are an older person and struggling with like SNAP cuts or anything else to also deal with extreme heat.

All right, that'll do it for us for this episode of The Press Room.

Thanks to our guests and for all the staff and crew here at The Press Room.

Thanks for being with us.

We'll see you next week.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) Support comes from Banner Health, a nonprofit healthcare system with an integrative health plan committed to giving back to Arizona.

Last year, Banner reinvested $1.1 billion into the Arizona community.

Learn more at bannerhealth.com.

This has been an original production of AZPM News.