It’s Friday, which means it’s time for the Journalists’ Roundtable where we discuss Arizona politics. This week, “Arizona Horizon” host Ted Simons was joined by Jeremy Duda from Axios Phoenix, Dennis Welch from CBS 3 and 3TV and Wayne Schutsky from KJZZ Radio.
The topic discussed this week:
- Primary election results
Jeremy Duda: “Between Trump endorsements, Turning Point Action endorsements, Freedom Caucus endorsements, it was a clean sweep. Andy Biggs, everyone knew it was going to happen, absolute blowout. Alex Kolodin, Secretary of State’s election, election deniers put out wild ideas about what he wanted to see happen with elections. Kim Yee, backed by Turning Point and the Superintendent’s race, Norton treasurer. It was clean; we even got Ralph Heap on one of the Corporation Commission races.”
Dennis Welch: “Particularly for the Governor’s race, the margin of victory was huge. You had two sitting Congressmen facing each other off in that primary, and going into it, I think all of us here would agree that Andy Biggs was the odds-on heavy favorite on this. He had the money, most importantly the Trump endorsement. We saw how important that was with the overall results of the contest. But Schweikert has been on the political landscape here in Arizona for decades, and you would have thought that he could have waged a better effort. At the end, the last total I saw was about 60 points; he was beaten by Andy Biggs. To me, that was a surprise.”
Wayne Schutsky: “That SRP was dipping their toes into something, they’ve never done before. It might be a small race, but it’s a small, peculiar race, and they tried to inject politics into something where broadly politics played a role in the past, with more pro-business Republicans versus clean energy Democrats, but they tried to get really political with it. Here, they’re going back to their bread and butter, which is partisan politics. They had a stranglehold on the hardcore Republican voter in Arizona for the better part of a decade, and that doesn’t seem to be changing.”
