Republican candidates for Arizona Governor David Schweikert, Ken Miceli and Scott Neely joined Ted Simons as part of “Candidates in Conversation” to discuss the financial and economic issues in Arizona.
Schweikert, who has served in Congress as a representative for Arizona’s first district, said he is leaving his position to run for governor in part because of his “level of frustration” with policy making in the nation’s capitol.
“I can’t even get fellow Republicans to sponsor these bills with me, and you hit this level of frustration. If you function and can’t save Washington, maybe you can save Arizona,” Schweikert said.
Miceli shared why he decided to run for governor and bit about his vision for the office.
“I wanted to make a few changes. I’m a businessman, I’m not a politician, and what I wanted to do is approach things a little bit differently. One is that I have plans, I’ve made many of them. I have plans for veterans, plans for water,” Miceli.
Neely previously ran for governor in 2022. He said that he is back in the race this year because he does not give up and compared his journey to the likeness of politicians like Ronald Regan and Abraham Lincoln.
“They made structural differences in America and I want to make structural changes in Arizona for the betterment of Arizona. I want to put Arizona first. I want to make Arizona the number one business friendly state in America. And we have to work on tax policy to make that possible. But in order to grow Arizona, we have to fix the water problem in Arizona,” Neely said.
Looking at the topic of education in Arizona, Schweikert shared why he believes that fundamental markers are lacking in the state.
“I actually think it’s a combination of a couple technical things. One has always been our inbound migration, how often you have a child that they’re actually new to the school district. And you’ve seen if you look at the statistics from the department of education, how many of the children that actually have very poor test scores are often inbound. But I would argue also, it’s, we haven’t fixated on the basics,” Schweikert said.
Miceli shared a plan for education in Arizona that focuses on more access to training for trade careers. He went on to say why he believes that this plan will benefit areas beyond education as well.
“These types of approaches get people out in the workforce and also have a plan where they’re going to get paid to go to the school as well,” Miceli said.
Cuts in the structure of leadership is one of changes Neely believes needs to happen for the betterment of the education landscape in the state.
“We need to cut out administrators so that we can fund teachers. Shut down administrative buildings so that we can open up more tutoring centers, we need to get back to phonics and arithmetic. That is number one. We can’t even go and do ESA for the trades if these people can’t read and they can’t do math,” Neely said.
When looking at affordability and the economy in Arizona, Schweikert believes that the downturn is due in part to the decline in back office jobs and the lack of replacement for it
“So if the economy does rotation to different types of technology and work, have you actually recruited the new rotation? The new businesses that will absorb these workers? We haven’t been doing that,” Schweikert said.
Miceli noted how the economy and the workforce needs to grow with the population of Arizona.
“There’s been approximately 80,000 new residents last year in Arizona. And what do we need to do with them? We need to give them jobs. We need to give them something in medical, something working in a hospital. Something that they can really bite into and make a living,” Miceli said.
When asked if Arizona can handle this growth in infrastructure, Neely talked about how he believes the state can grow to be able to withstand the economic and population growth.
“Arizona had some of the biggest contracting companies in the nation. As far as infrastructure goes, we can build the infrastructure here in Arizona. We do need to build desalination plants, that’s part of the infrastructure package. I propose we build three strategic national border guard barracks,” Neely said.
Warren Petersen, a Republican candidate for Arizona attorney general, recently made comments saying he would deport undocumented residents and those who are DACA recipients. Schweikert believes that this idea doesn’t work out “mathematically”.
“The fact of the matter is, so if you actually look at our wage suppression we’ve had here, go back to the Biden years where the massive amount of amnesty requests, and we brought in so many people. We can actually see it in our data of the lower quartiles, wage suppression. So the fact of the matter is what values, what actually helps us, what grows the state and what actually is dragging us,” Schweikert said.
For Neely, the conversation regarding DACA is personal.
“Listen, my son-in-law is a DACA, ok. My grandbaby’s father is DACA. He’s contributed to society, he’s been here all of his life, it’s of no fault of his own.I don’t believe he should be deported, absolutely not,” Neely said.
When asked if they would support the winner of the primary, all three candidates said that they would.
