by AZ Free Enterprise Club | Jan 31, 2026 | Opinion
By the Arizona Free Enterprise Club |
For years, the Left has been working tirelessly to flip Arizona blue. Armed with a secret network of tax-advantaged funds, political nonprofits, and union dollars, their aim has been to turn our beloved, freedom-loving state into the next Colorado or California. In fact, many groups on the Left waged high stakes to flip Republicans’ paper-thin control of the state legislature in 2024.
And how did that turn out? A historic landslide victory for President Trump while the Left actually lost ground in Arizona’s legislature. Apparently funneling millions of dollars to liberal causes doesn’t make up for bad ideas.
Now, with the 2026 midterm election a little over nine months away, the latest voter registration numbers are in, and they show an encouraging trend. Republicans have expanded their registration advantage over Democrats to 7.64%—the largest lead in state history—while Democrats continue their free fall in party registration.
Even more impressive is that these gains are not isolated to a few particular areas of our state. Every single county in Arizona has become MORE Republican since the 2024 election. That’s right. In the counties where Democrats have larger voter registration numbers than Republicans, the gap has closed. And in counties where Republicans have larger voter registration numbers than Democrats, the gap has widened. In fact, the gap between registered Republicans and Democrats in Maricopa County has increased by more than half a percent in just the past year.
Yet perhaps the most surprising trend behind this growing Republican advantage is that while Republicans have been able to register a lot of new voters, the same cannot be said for the Democrats…
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by AZ Free Enterprise Club | Jan 27, 2026 | Opinion
By the Arizona Free Enterprise Club |
What’s being sold as a harmless planning document is actually a blueprint to fundamentally reshape how West Mesa residents live and move about their city. The MesaCONNECTED Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) Plan has been in the works since 2021. Funded by a federal grant from the Federal Transit Administration (FTA), the plan covers a five-mile “transit corridor” in West Mesa and is intended to guide future land-use decisions in that area. At first glance, it appears benign, seemingly focused on growth and beautification. City officials repeatedly emphasize that it is not a transit plan and does not initiate any specific projects. However, taken as a whole, MesaCONNECTED lays the groundwork to transform West Mesa into what is effectively a 15-minute city (or even a 5-minute city, by their own standards) without explicitly using that label.
The plan draws inspiration from communities in Oregon and California, as well as Arizona’s own Tempe Cul-De-Sac neighborhood, all of which follow planning models that prioritize density, transit-oriented development, and reduced automobile use. The stated goal is to create fully walkable areas centered around “transit nodes” while making existing transit easier to access. The section of West Mesa encompassed in the plan includes major hubs such as Mesa Riverview, the Asian District, Mesa Community College, Banner Desert Medical Center, Downtown Mesa, and surrounding areas.
A central objective of the plan is to increase density and place housing closer to employment to “reduce vehicle miles traveled” (pg. 5). This is not a neutral goal. It assumes driving is a problem to be corrected rather than a freedom to be preserved. In a city like Mesa where families rely on personal vehicles for work, school, church, medical care, and more, designing communities to deliberately discourage driving punishes the very behavior that allowed the city to grow in the first place. Rather than responding to how residents already live, the plan attempts to reshape daily habits by making driving less practical and alternative modes more “convenient…”
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by AZ Free Enterprise Club | Jan 21, 2026 | Opinion
By the Arizona Free Enterprise Club |
At a time when Arizonans are still struggling to recover from years of Biden-era inflation, Republican lawmakers acted swiftly to deliver on their Affordable Arizona agenda. On just the fourth day of the legislative session, they passed SB1106, a tax conformity package that delivered the full benefits of the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) to Arizona taxpayers, families, and businesses. The legislation provided $1.1 billion in tax relief and, just as importantly, immediate certainty for millions of Arizonans heading into tax season.
The very next day, Governor Katie Hobbs vetoed it.
That veto leaves taxpayers facing a potential $1.1 billion tax hike and widespread chaos as filing season begins. This isn’t simply the typical tax policy fight between Democrat and Republican ideologies. But a full display of Katie Hobbs’ failure to lead.
From the outset, she has mishandled this critical issue of federal tax conformity with conflicting messages, unauthorized executive actions, and zero coordination with the Legislature or even apparently her own agencies. The result has been a self-inflicted mess, and Arizona taxpayers will be the ones to suffer the price.
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by AZ Free Enterprise Club | Jan 16, 2026 | Opinion
By the Arizona Free Enterprise Club |
Over the past month, Minnesota has been hard at work to set the gold standard for jaw-dropping fraud scandals under the watch of Democrat Governor Tim Walz. The Somali daycare scandal has turned the state into a national punchline—hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars stolen in plain sight while Kamala Harris’ favorite “masculine” governor looked the other way.
Now, with Walz stepping aside from this reelection bid, a new contender for “most scandal-plagued governor on the 2026 ballot” has emerged: Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs. While Minnesota’s scandals have dominated headlines, Hobbs has been busy compiling a rap sheet that rivals what happened in the Land of 10,000 Lakes. But unlike Walz, Hobbs and her administration are under active criminal investigation.
A Pay-to-Play Scheme Engulfs the Hobbs Administration
The list of Hobbs’ scandals is a mile long and begins at the start of her tenure as governor. At that time, Hobbs set up a shady slush fund to provide donors with a conduit to buy political favor from her administration. While setting up and managing the fund, Hobbs illegally used public resources—like the state’s website—to solicit money for her inauguration. And she also tried to stop the disclosure of the names of those who donated to her inaugural fund.
After immense political pressure, Hobbs finally released the names of the donors. One of the names of the groups on the list was Sunshine Residential Homes Inc., a for-profit company that contracts with the State of Arizona. Sunshine Residential donated $100,000 to the secret fund, which was suspicious enough. But after some additional digging by local reporters, an even deeper level of corruption was revealed—an alleged pay-to-play scheme between Hobbs and the group home.
According to the report, it turns out Sunshine Residential Homes doled out $400,000 to the Arizona Democratic Party, Hobbs’ gubernatorial campaign committee, and her aforementioned inaugural fund. Hobbs and her campaign finance manager even arranged a dinner with the government contractor to meet with the CEO in private.
After making the large donations, Sunshine was granted a 30 percent increase in their rates at a time when the Arizona Department of Child Safety cut loose 16 providers! On top of that, no other standard group home provider received a rate increase. This arrangement ensured that Sunshine Residential would receive millions in additional revenue at the taxpayers’ expense.
Hobbs’ is currently under three separate criminal investigations for this pay-to-play scheme, but it’s not the only financial scandal we’ve seen during her reign as governor…
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by AZ Free Enterprise Club | Jan 8, 2026 | Opinion
By the Arizona Free Enterprise Club |
Arizona has hardly had an opportunity to recover from the aftershocks of Biden-omics. The trillions of dollars injected into the economy through the so-called Inflation Reduction Act continue to work their way through the system in the form of higher prices and eroded purchasing power. Open-border policies that expanded the labor supply at the lower and middle ends of the wage scale have depressed wages. And the Biden Administration’s unprecedented regulatory burden on industry, a nearly $2 trillion drag on the economy, will take far longer than a year to unwind and correct.
Unfortunately for Arizona, efforts to fix these problems at the federal level cannot be fully realized here at home because Katie Hobbs remains our Governor.
Hobbs has harmed Arizona’s recovery, overseeing a massive fall from 4th in the nation in job growth to 47th. She inherited a booming local economy after a Republican legislature and Governor ushered in a 2.5 percent income tax, incentivized entrepreneurs and small businesses, prioritized deregulation, and expanded choice and freedom in education. Yet Hobbs has managed to squander that opportunity. In fact, it takes a special skill set to be perfectly set up for success and then drive a working model into the ground.
And Hobbs knows she’s to blame. That’s why she’s now desperately trying to reinvent herself by pushing Trump-esque tax cut rhetoric while clinging to the same big-spending, high-tax policies that caused the damage in the first place. At her core, she remains a California-style Democrat who would rather govern Newsom-style than embrace the Republican solutions that actually work. That’s why, despite a Republican legislature that has delivered tax relief bills, more disciplined budgets, and common-sense deregulation, she has earned a reputation as the veto queen.
As a result, Arizonans are dealing with real affordability woes, and they best not hinge their hopes on Hobbs.
Despite responsible budgeting and repeated tax relief efforts by Republican lawmakers, affordability pressures continue to mount. Taxes are creeping higher at every level of government. Utility bills have surged. Housing costs are outpacing wage growth. And programs intended to help struggling families are losing billions to fraud, waste, and mismanagement.
That is why the 2026 legislative session must focus on Affordable Arizona…
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