With Arizona’s Democrat Governor Katie Hobbs languishing at a 36% favorability rating and her efforts to flip the state legislature blue appearing to have failed, Arizona stands poised to hover in political limbo for the next two years. In effect, Hobbs, who has vetoed 216 bills since taking office, could now be a lame-duck governor.
In an appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Hobbs confirmed her 216 vetoes to the host, proudly extolling the inaction of the log-jammed government in the most insulting terms possible.
“We have a legislature that is run by literal insurrectionists and indicted fake electors. And they didn’t get the message that voters wanted sanity over chaos, and so they kept sending extreme measures that I had to veto. But here’s the good news about our ballot. In addition to all the garbage that the legislature sent, we also had the chance to vote on a ballot measure to enshrine abortion in our state’s constitution.
Right now, the results of that are looking very good. So I’m optimistic about that passing and us being able to restore our rights here in Arizona. “
In a really awkward interview, @KatieHobbs claims that Arizona Republicans “didn’t get the message” from voters…
Hobbs currently has a 36% approval rating and Republicans in the State Legislature expanded their majorities so I have no idea what the hell she’s talking about. pic.twitter.com/Ttl6W5ZcEH
Dan Coulson of Citizens for Free Enterprise shared video of the moment on X writing, “In a really awkward interview, @KatieHobbs claims that Arizona Republicans ‘didn’t get the message’ from voters… Hobbs currently has a 36% approval rating and Republicans in the State Legislature expanded their majorities so I have no idea what the hell she’s talking about.”
Conservative Political Consultant Constantine Querard observed, “Among what Katie Hobbs calls ‘garbage’ that the Legislature sent to the ballot is border security, cracking down on those who traffic kids for sex, support for our police, and more. I see she’s in fine form as she launches Campaign 2026!”
As reported by AZCentral, unofficial election results showed Republicans poised to expand their advantage in the Arizona House. The State Senate also appears likely to remain in GOP control, as of this report.
Should these opposing forces in the legislative and executive branches of the Arizona government remain unchanged, then it is likely that even basic business of the government will be brutally fought, and no real reforms will be possible for either party, until the inevitable 2026 rematch for the Governor’s office.
On Tuesday, during the early hours of Election Day, American Majority Action (AMA) announced that with record numbers of early voters in the state of Arizona, it had exceeded 3.25 million voter contacts in its targeted voter group and conducted over 600,000 live conversations with them. In so doing, the group stated that it led the effort to encourage conservative voters to vote early.
Arizona Executive Director of American Majority Action Tracy DuCharme said in the statement:
“We focused our Arizona efforts on generating more absentee ballots and changing the voting behavior of low propensity conservative voters. We have been working with our partners to get more conservatives to vote absentee, whether through the mail or in person. We are having face-to-face conversations with voters at the doors, and through their phones with live calls and personal text messages.
Our absentee ballot generation plan was extremely successful and now 68.98% of conservatives who requested a ballot have returned them. We have engaged in nearly 3 million live contacts over phone calls, door knocks, and text messages with targeted voters. While they are tired of being bombarded through the airwaves, we have found people still appreciate personal conversations about the issues that face us all each day. We’re making a lasting impact on our state, one conversation at a time. I’m proud of the work AMA has done here in Arizona, and I know we’ll continue this mission for years to come.”
AMA credited the employment of advanced canvassing technology in its statement adding, “Face-to-face conversations are the highest form of voter engagement, and are shown to greatly increase election turnout. AMA’s activist groundswell is powered by Voter Gravity’s groundbreaking technology that allows staff to quickly and accurately get out the vote through micro-targeting voters.”
According to the Arizona Mirror, as Election Day voting commenced, 785,231 Republicans had already voted early for a turnout of 52.71% as compared to 643,450 Democrats and 466,140 independents.
Final voting data for the 2024 election is not yet available, however, President Donald Trump has been declared the winner of Arizona’s eleven electoral votes. And as of this report, in the race for the U.S. Senate, Democrat Rep. Ruben Gallego currently leads Kari Lake 1,381,684 votes to 1,348,362 votes.
The City of Glendale’s Proposition 499, the “Hotel and Event Center Minimum Wage and Wage Protection Act,” was soundly defeated on Election Day. The defeat was a rebuke to Worker Power, a California special interest group seeking “economic justice and the preservation of democracy.” Prop 499 was met with staunch opposition in Glendale from the coalition “Save Glendale Jobs,” funded by hospitality industry leaders and supported by three Glendale Councilmembers Lauren Tolmachoff, Joyce Clark, and Vice Mayor Ian Hugh.
The ballot measure would have mandated “hotel and event center workers receive a $20.00 per hour minimum wage (increases annually), service charge payments and premium pay to be enforced by a newly created city department of labor responsible for investigating employer violations involving payment of wages, reporting, recordkeeping, and overtime requirements.”
Hotel developer Chris DeRose, president of CivicGroup LLC, a firm seeking to bring a LivSmart by Hilton Hotel to downtown Glendale, was joined on a conference call prior to the vote by Clark, Hughe, Tolmachoff and Councilmember-elect Dianna Guzman. DeRose explained the serious problems that the proposition would cause for the burgeoning West Valley City, deep in an extended project of downtown revitalization as well as business owners.
“We’re in the process of taking that out to capital. Then we get a proposition that gets ballot access that threatens to upend all of our economic modeling and throw uncertainty into the whole project,” DeRose explained.
“Unfortunately, that’s frozen us in our tracks because whether you’re talking to a bank or you’re talking to investors, they want to know, ‘Hey, what’s the labor cost here?’ For a hotel, your number 1 expense, especially in a limited-service model where you don’t have F&B, it’s salary for staff. And so, this proposition has created uncertainty, and we’re not able to answer those very basic questions right now. And as a result, we’re not able to move the project forward.”
He added that the proposition appeared to be a “Trojan horse.”
“What’s really unusual about this, it’s a minimum wage that’s really – it’s a proposition that is disguised as a minimum wage. The minimum wage part is the Trojan horse.”
“The problem is that there’s actually a cap on productivity and that is unprecedented. I don’t know of another jurisdiction in America where you have a cap on productivity and in this case it’s 3,500 square feet, which is about 10 hotel rooms.”
Councilmember Clark noted the serious impact the proposal could have had on Glendale’s competitiveness in attracting businesses saying, “I think it’s important to note that Glendale will be the only city in the state to mandate $20 an hour. And overtime, it’s more than that. It’s $40 an hour, which people are not paying attention to. It puts Glendale at a competitive disadvantage with every city in the state and the Common Sense Institute says that it may cost Glendale anywhere from a million dollars on up annually just to regulate this and in lost revenue from other projects that may have considered locating in Glendale.”
Councilmember Tolmachoff expressed concerns about navigating the regulatory mandate the city would be required to assume saying, “To put the city in a position to be a regulatory authority and to have to intervene and interact between a civil disagreement between an employee and an employer is absolutely no place for a city to be.”
Save Glendale Jobs Chair Kim Grace Sabow said in a statement after the proposition’s defeat:
“I extend my sincere appreciation to Glendale voters, who chose to preserve and protect the jobs our industry creates. I want to thank the many supporters of our effort, without whom this result would not have been possible, including key business leaders, elected officials, and law enforcement. I also want to thank our dedicated campaign team, which expertly managed every aspect of this campaign, and our volunteers, who spread the word across the city about how damaging this measure would be. Together, we formed a mighty coalition.
“I am thrilled for Glendale, which I am certain will not only continue to grow and create more outstanding destinations, attractions, and experiences for visitors but will also continue to deliver more great jobs and career opportunities for Glendale residents.”
According to Maricopa County Elections, the proposition was defeated by 15.32 pts., or approximately 10,338 votes as of this report.
Top financial officers from 17 states, 13 State Treasurers, one Commissioner of Revenue, and three state auditors, came together to issue a firm rebuke to members of Congress calling upon Fortune 1000 companies to “reaffirm their commitments to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI).”
The letter, signed by Arizona Treasurer Kimberly Yee, stated, “We the undersigned are state financial officials responsible for state investment vehicles that hold ownership positions in your companies. We write concerning recent calls from Congressional members that your companies reaffirm their commitments to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). They commend DEI to you, claiming it is ‘good for business’ and ‘benefits employees, customers, and the bottom line.’ Significant evidence is mounting that precisely the opposite is true.”
DEI polices don’t prioritize the financial health or performance of a company. That’s why 17 state financial officers pushed back on woke Congressional members by encouraging Fortune 1,000 companies to remove DEI policies from their businesses.
— Arizona Treasurer Kimberly Yee (@AZTreasurerYee) October 30, 2024
Yee and her colleagues wrote in response to entreaties sent by a coalition of Democrat politicians, who wrote to the same firms in support of the radical-left DEI agenda. The Democrat coalition made unfounded claims that DEI programs create “a culture of equality” that “allows your companies to remain competitive,” as reported by the Daily Wire.
Jeremy Tedesco, Alliance Defending Freedom SVP of Corporate Engagement told the outlet:
“The divisive and discriminatory ideology at the root of DEI has caused some of our country’s most prominent companies, like Home Depot, Lowes, Ford, and Toyota, to pull back on their DEI programs. We should celebrate that and call on other companies to follow their lead. Sadly, some members of Congress have instead responded by urging companies to reaffirm their DEI commitments. Businesses should listen to their employees, customers, and shareholders, rather than politicians, and jettison DEI once and for all.”
The letter from the State Officers cites scholarly studies from Econ Journal Watch and Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance that sharply disprove the Democrats’ claims that corporate DEI efforts improve bottom line earnings and debunk the McKinsey studies upon which the agenda is based. They state, “The authors of the Econ Journal Watch article reported that they were ‘unable to quasireplicate’ the McKinsey studies’ results and admonished that ‘they should not be relied on to support the view that US publicly traded firms can expect to deliver improved financial performance if they increase the racial/ethnic diversity of their executives.’”
The state officials highlighted key takeaways from a recent New York Times article for the industry leaders to consider when addressing the continuation of the controversial DEI measures: University student reactions and the birth of a “grievance culture,” and the delivery of a divisive culture as opposed to the goal of inclusivity. In a study that examined the University of Michigan’s DEI program as an exemplar of these policies, the author found in part:
“On campus, I met students with a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives. Not one expressed any particular enthusiasm for Michigan’s D.E.I. initiative. Where some found it shallow, others found it stifling. They rolled their eyes at the profusion of course offerings that revolve around identity and oppression, the D.E.I.-themed emails they frequently received but rarely read.”
The author noted, “Michigan’s D.E.I. efforts have created a powerful conceptual framework for student and faculty grievances — and formidable bureaucratic mechanisms to pursue them. Everyday campus complaints and academic disagreements, professors and students told me, were now cast as crises of inclusion and harm, each demanding some further administrative intervention or expansion.”
“Michigan’s own data suggests that in striving to become more diverse and equitable, the school has also become less inclusive: In a survey released in late 2022, students and faculty members reported a less positive campus climate than at the program’s start and less of a sense of belonging. Students were less likely to interact with people of a different race or religion or with different politics — the exact kind of engagement D.E.I. programs, in theory, are meant to foster.”
In the letter, the financial experts concluded that employees have widely expressed the same views of DEI programs with a Freedom at Work Survey conducted by Ipsos and released by Viewpoint Diversity Score, finding that 40% of respondents said the policies divide rather than unite the workplace. They added that legal exposure is also possible as Chief Justice Roberts observed, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” Adding that the race-based theories and practices baked-into DEI programs “fly in the face of our colorblind Constitution and our Nation’s equality ideal.”
A recent release from the Northeast Arizona Native Democrats has raised concerns about the ethical and legal considerations involved with partisan operatives helping voters fill out and mail in their ballots.
According to the release from Northeast Arizona Native Democrats, the group held a “Ballots, Stew & Socks event,” in Sawmill, AZ, a village on the Navajo reservation described as “a remote, census-designated area in the Navajo Nation,” boasting a population of less than 800.
The Democrat group explained their mission writing:
“In that small town, our team was able to engage with over 50 voters, some who had traveled far distances, and helped them fill out and mail their ballots on time.
While in Sawmill, we were joined by a truck-load of Pinon Pickers who shared a bowl of stew with us, while talking about the issues they care about. After this engaging, inspiring conversation, they thanked us for the information we provided and committed to voting early.”
The question of legality for holding an event to assist in mailing ballots, such as the Sawmill effort, could be unlawful under A.R.S. 16-1005(H), which states: “A person who knowingly collects voted or unvoted early ballots from another person is guilty of a class 6 felony. An election official, a United States postal service worker or any other person who is allowed by law to transmit United States mail is deemed not to have collected an early ballot if the official, worker or other person is engaged in official duties.”
As the event appeared on Facebook, it advertised: “Free Meal, Warm Socks, Voter Info.” This could potentially run afoul of A.R.S. 16-1005(C), which states, “It is unlawful to receive or agree to receive any consideration in exchange for a voted or unvoted ballot. A person who violates this subsection is guilty of a class 5 felony.”
Recent legal battles have been fought pertaining to everything from providing food and water to voters as they wait in line, to Elon Musk’s efforts to forward a petition by offering a $1 million giveaway each day until the election with winners chosen from the signatories.
However, specifically in Arizona and under Arizona law, these electioneering efforts carried out in the Navajo community by the Democratic party could prove to be illegal if challenged.
