Journalists’ Roundtable on GOP Convention and more
July 19
On this week’s Journalists’ Roundtable, three local journalists, Howie Fischer of Capitol Media Services, Laurie Roberts and Ronald Hansen of “The Arizona Republic” and azcentral.com, discussed the following topics:
- Arizonans at GOP Convention
- Contentious week for Kari Lake
- Lamb accuses Lake of offer to leave race
- Kelly outpolls Biden among Democrats
- Fight over wording of Open Primaries Measure
- Michael Grant and Jana Bommersbach deaths
Kari Lake spoke at the 2024 Republican National Convention and endorsed former President Donald Trump, however, the speech did not go well.
“At every level attack, attack, attack, fake news, fake news, but if you really get to the bottom of it, every time a journalist does their job and asks her questions and holds her accountable for what she does and what she says, she turns it around on them, attacks them, and I think her hope is no one will notice that she never answers the hard questions, the challenging questions,” said Roberts.
Currently, Mark Kelly has slightly better polling than President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in swing states including Arizona.
“I think that Mark Kelly is actually fairly prominent. He may not be someone who is a fixture of Sunday morning talk shows, he may not be the person who is jumping up and down holding pressers every day, but there are so many different elements of his life story that have been very broadly known and understood on some level, whether it’s the shooting of his wife, whether it’s an astronaut, whether it is someone who is seen as someone who can make deals and move forward in the Senate. He is not someone who is jumping up and down clamoring for attention, he is someone who can present the record of achievement, and I think the most important thing that he might bring to a possible Democratic ticket [is] he projects strength,” said Hansen.
Across Arizona, people aren’t happy with the rank choice voting system.
“To a certain extent, they’re not happy with the order that things were placed. The measure does two things: The big thing it does is it creates a wide open primary. Every candidate from every party, independents all run in the same primary. Anybody who’s a registered voter, Republican, Independent, votes in the primary. The controversial part [is] this option of rank choice voting, and that confuses people because it says that if the legislature were to decide or Secretary of State decides, [in] rank choice voting, then you have the system where you rank the candidates one through five, and whoever is the lowest, you drop off their votes and give them to the next person,” said Fischer.