Strike Everything

With nearly half the state’s precincts reporting vote totals, Republicans looked poised to sweep Arizona’s statewide offices for the first time since 1994.

By 9:15 p.m., the Republicans’ statewide slate took the stage at the Arizona GOP’s election night party at the downtown Hyatt to rousing cheers. Meanwhile, attorney general hopeful Felecia Rotellini was the only statewide Democratic candidate still walking around at the Democrats’ party at the Wyndham.

The attorney general’s race was the most competitive of the bunch in the early totals, with Republican Tom Horne holding a 5-point lead over Rotellini. Rotellini remained hopeful and said trends were moving in her favor. Horne’s lead, however, hadn’t diminished much since the first results came in from Maricopa County.

A Horne win would dash many Democrats’ best hope for winning statewide office and would give Republicans control of the only statewide office currently held by a Democrat.

That Democrat, Attorney General Terry Goddard was aiming for a promotion to the governor’s office, but trailed 150,000 votes behind incumbent Gov. Jan Brewer.

Shortly before 9 p.m., 12 News called the race for Brewer. Not long after, the Republican Governor’s Association sent out a press release congratulating Brewer on her victory.

“Governor Brewer’s victory sends two important messages,” RGA chairman Haley Barbour said in the press release. “First, it shows that she has done great work focusing on issues important to Arizona like jobs and the economy.  Second, it sends a resounding message to Washington that America wants secure borders and we want them now.”

Further down the ballot, Republican Doug Ducey led Democrat Andrei Cherny by about 130,000 votes in the state treasurer’s race, while Republican John Huppenthal held a similar lead over Democrat Penny Kotterman in the race for superintendent of public instruction.

In the secretary of state’s race, incumbent Ken Bennett appeared to be running away with the race early. The Republican led Democrat Chris Deschene, a first-term legislator, by about 190,000 votes.

–Jeremy Duda

A condemned inmate asked the Arizona Supreme Court Oct. 13 to postpone his execution until after the gubernatorial election.

Jeffrey Landrigan argues in legal briefs that Gov. Jan Brewer has political incentive to go forward with the Oct. 26 execution even if the Arizona Board of Executive Clemency recommends against it.

Landrigan is scheduled to go before the clemency board Oct. 22 in a last-ditch effort to save his life.

Landrigan argues that Brewer’s opponent, Democrat Terry Goddard, has made an issue out of recent prison escapes and she can repair any political damage he has caused by not appearing weak on the death sentence, especially since Landrigan committed his murder in Arizona after escaping from an Oklahoma prison.

“For Landrigan, the issue of prison security has arisen in a contentious political campaign at a most inopportune time,” wrote Sylvia Lett, Landrigan’s federal public defender.

Lett pointed out that Goddard as Attorney General is also aggressively trying to kill Landrigan in his representation of the state in the capital case.

The prison break has been a hot topic in the governor’s race.

Goddard pointed out that Brewer cut the corrections budget by $67 million and he has been critical of her ties to the private prison industry. Some of her closest aides have ties to the industry.

Goddard has also hammered Brewer on the issue in campaign ads.
Three convicted murderers escaped from a privately run state prison near Kingman July 30.

Two of them were captured within days, but the third, John McKluskey, stands accused of killing an Oklahoma couple during his 19 days on the lam.

An investigation found that the state was lax on its oversight of the prison and a series of failures, including a broken alarm system and two unobservant detention officers, led to the escape.

“. . . Governor Brewer will confront the question of whether to show mercy to a prison escapee after prison escapes have exposed a weakness in Governor Brewer’s record as governor,” Lett wrote.

Landrigan, now 48, was sentenced to death in Maricopa County for the 1989 stabbing and strangling of Chester Dyer of Phoenix. The killing occurred a month after Landrigan escaped from an Oklahoma prison where he was serving terms for a 1982 murder and a 1986 prison stabbing.

When Landrigan goes before the Board of Executive Clemency, he will present an affidavit from the Maricopa County Superior Court judge who sentenced him to death.
Judge Cheryl Hendrix, who retired in 2001, said if she knew now what she didn’t know in 1990, then she would have spared his life.

Hendrix said that Landrigan’s outbursts during the sentencing, his criminal record and paucity of mitigating evidence presented by his attorney left her no choice but to sentence him to death.

Hendrix said she has since learned that Landrigan has evidence of organic brain damage from fetal alcohol syndrome, she has learned about his genetic predispositions and his birth mother’s abandonment. Those circumstances would have outweighed the aggravating factors in the case, Hendrix said.

- Gary Grado

For every Tom Horne, Felecia Rotellini and Jesse Kelly of the election cycle, there’s an Andrew Thomas, David Lujan and Jonathan Paton.

Although the primary winners (Horne, Rotellini and Kelly) move on to face another foe, the losers (Thomas, Lujan and Paton) still have the ability to affect the general election race, depending on how – or even if – they concede.

And there’s definitely a right way and a wrong way to do it.

“If you look at Jonathan Paton, and the way that he behaved when he conceded, it was brilliant,” said Kyler Moyer, a GOP political consultant and owner of Kyle Moyer & Company. “He did it with heartfelt thanks to his supporters, and encouraged all of them to get behind Jesse Kelly.”

Moyer, whose candidates went two-for-two this primary season, said concession speeches need to be sincere to bring the party back together. “We call it ‘coming home,’” he said. “After the primary, Republicans need to come home and support the nominee, whether they like the guy or not.”

This ‘coming home’ has definitely not happened in the primary for Arizona’s 3rd Congressional District, which Moyer said will be a problem for GOP primary winner Ben Quayle.

“Look at the CD3 race. That has not happened and that is going to hurt Quayle considerably. You don’t have Vernon (Parker) saying ‘Hey I’m out, everybody be excited about Ben.’ Same thing with (Jim) Waring and with Paulina Morris,” Moyer said. “It’s just the nature of campaigns. There’s a right way and a wrong way to concede.”

Moyer said he advises any candidates whose campaigns he runs to “concede with honor and integrity and when the time is right.”

Sometimes candidates aren’t sure what constitutes the right time to concede, or they will concede and then un-concede. Ultimately, whether a candidate concedes has no bearing on the actual results.

“It has no practical legal effect from our perspective. If a candidate like David Lujan concedes the race for attorney general, and then we complete the vote count and find that in fact, he had more votes than Felecia Rotellini, guess what, he wins the race, his concession notwithstanding,” said Matt Benson, director of communications for the Secretary of State’s Office.

Concession speeches may hold even more weight in primary elections because the speech tells a candidate’s supporters what to do next.

“When a candidate concedes, although not a legal concession, it is a personal concession,” Moyer said. “They’ve given up the fight. It clears a path for their supporters, who may be hanging on to hope, to move on.”

This year’s primary concession speeches featured a bit of everything.

J.D. Hayworth conceded his race, which was a blowout, to John McCain around 9:30 p.m. on primary night with a speech urging his supporters to “continue the fight for conservative principles,” but he stopped far short of throwing his support behind Arizona’s senior senator.

David Lujan conceded the Democratic primary for attorney general to Felecia Rotellini with a phone call and a pledge of support, as did Jim Ward to David Schweikert in the Republican primary for Arizona’s 5th Congressional District.

In Arizona’s most heated and closely contested primary – the Republican nomination for attorney general – concessions are like an Arizona monsoon. It could look like one is coming all day, but then when the time comes, nothing.

However, it seems Tom Horne and Andrew Thomas, the two seasoned politicians who spent a large part of their campaigns attacking each other in “he’s-worse-than-I-am-mode,” still observe the golden rule of primaries.

Early in the primary evening, Horne was down and said he’d support Thomas. Later in the evening, Thomas was trailing and said he’d support Horne. Thomas’ chief campaign adviser Jason Rose even tweeted that the race was over. But it wasn’t – at least not to Thomas.

As the night wore on and the race stayed close, neither conceded. Then as Wednesday and Thursday and most of Friday passed with Horne holding steady margins of 400 to 1,000 votes, a concession was expected Friday evening, but it never came. Then Monday rolls around, and Horne was told to expect a concession call from Thomas.

It would take another day for Thomas to realize the race was over. His concession today (Aug. 31) and an accompanying endorsement of Horne was clearly an attempt at gracefulness by a politician who exemplifies anything but that.

The tardiness reveals Thomas’ stubbornness, and the endorsement is likely to ring hollow in the ears of anyone who heard Thomas trash-talk Horne on the campaign trail.

But the whole situation is probably most awkward for Thomas, who is now supposedly supporting a candidate whom he had accused of being a con artist and a fraud.

-Josh Coddington

It seemed like a sign of the times that Attorney General Terry Goddard was in Congress to talk about Arizona’s efforts to crack down on money laundering by drug cartels, but the only thing the congressmen wanted to talk about was S1070.

Goddard on July 22 testified at a U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security hearing on how to stop illegal immigration, and Goddard said he was there to discuss the steps the Arizona Attorney General’s Office has taken to stop the flow of money of Mexican cartels and human-smuggling groups. But members of the committee were far more interested in discussing Arizona’s strict new illegal immigration law and sanctuary city policies, and denouncing the U.S. Department of Justice’s lawsuit against Arizona over S1070.

Goddard said he outlined Arizona’s six year-old program, but was surprised that committee members kept straying from the topic. He urged the committee to approve $50 million for anti-money laundering programs to Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas.

“It just went into … sort of unconnected statements about immigration. And the congressmen would come in, get in their seat, make their statement, ask a question and then leave,” Goddard said. “It was fascinating, but I’m not sure how productive.”

One committee member thought every city in Arizona was a so-called sanctuary city, Goddard said, and pondered whether the federal government should prosecute them. Another wondered aloud whether cartel leaders should be deemed enemy combatants, the same status given to many international terrorist leaders. Others simply wanted to make general denunciations of the federal government’s lawsuit against Arizona.

“I would say on both sides that was a bipartisan affliction,” he said.

Goddard said he was more interested in discussing Arizona’s anti-money laundering program and other efforts against drug cartels, and the ways those programs could be applied on a nationwide level. He suggested that greater cooperation on such issues between the four border states and the federal government could be a boon to the fight against violent drug cartels.

If Goddard had trouble diverting people’s attention away from S1070 in Washington, D.C., things don’t look like they’ll get any better once he’s back in Arizona. Goddard, the Democrats’ candidate for governor, has been taking a pounding in the polls since Gov. Jan Brewer signed the popular law.

S1070 has put Goddard in a tough spot. He opposed the law, but said he believes it is constitutional. He also tried to defend Arizona in the Justice Department lawsuit, but was removed from the case by Brewer, whom he will face in the November election.

Goddard’s campaign has focused largely on the economy and jobs, but the furor over S1070 has kept the attention of the public on illegal immigration. As Brewer’s erstwhile challengers for the Republican nomination learned – before they dropped out of the race – illegal immigration is a winner for Brewer, and anyone hoping to hit her on other issues may have a tough road ahead.

-Jeremy Duda

Attorney General Terry Goddard said he will support Proposition 100, ending months of fence-sitting on the temporary sales tax increase.

Goddard, the presumptive Democratic nominee for governor, announced his support in a Mother’s Day email blast to his supporters.

“It’s a day for making sure that kids, all kids, are treated right. In our household, Monica makes it clear that means pushing to pass Prop 100 on May 18,” Goddard wrote in the email, referring to his wife.

In February, Goddard told the ~Arizona Capitol Times~ that he did not know how he would vote on the issue, and the following month he said he could not support Prop 100 without an assurance from Gov. Jan Brewer that she would veto H2250, which included a host of corporate tax cuts that would have started phasing in while the three-year sales tax hike was still on the books.

H2250, referred to by supporters as the “jobs bill,” passed in the House but died in the Senate, where President Bob Burns expressed concerns about passing tax cuts while the state was still experience massive revenue shortfalls. Brewer had also said she did not want the tax cuts to go into effect until the sales tax hike expired, and she released a separate “jobs package” that did not included any tax cuts.

“Since the governor has capitulated to the attorney general’s call that we not tax working families and then shovel that money to corporations, he’s decided to support Prop 100,” said Goddard campaign manager Rodd McLeod. “It’s not the best choice for dealing with Arizona’s deficit, but it’s the only choice we’ve got in the short term.”

Voters will decide on Prop 100 in a May 18 special election. The temporary sales tax increase is expected to raise about $900 million per year, nearly half of which will go to K-12 education.

-Jeremy Duda

After 10 months of debate on the issue, Attorney General Terry Goddard, the presumptive Democratic nominee for the governor’s race, said he doesn’t know whether he’ll vote for the temporary one-cent sales tax increase that will go before voters on May 18.

Goddard said he hadn’t made up his mind yet on the tax vote Feb. 5 while attending Arizona StandDown 2010, an event held to benefit homeless veterans. The comments came one day after the House followed the Senate in approving a special election and a ballot measure on the proposed tax hike. Goddard said he is trying to find out what other options may exist for closing the state’s massive budget shortfalls, which are estimated to be $1.4 billion for the current fiscal year and $3.3 billion in 2011.

“That’s been one that’s sort of been crammed down our throats, isn’t it?” Goddard asked. “(The Democrats who voted for it) did so with real concern that is probably the worst possible option.”

The attorney general filed his paperwork in January to officially become a candidate for governor, but said he will not release his plan for balancing the budget until he makes his official candidacy announcement in March. “We’ll do that in due course,” he said.

The issue could put Goddard in a tight spot. The ballot measure passed on a bipartisan vote, with support and opposition spread out pretty evenly among both Republicans and Democrats, so no party consensus on the issue existed on either side of the aisle. Furthermore, publicly supporting the tax hike would force Goddard to give a de facto endorsement of its biggest advocate, Gov. Jan Brewer, whom Goddard may face in the November election.

Though both chambers of the Legislature approved the special election, Goddard said there were questions as to whether the special election could be held on May 18 because neither chamber could must the two-thirds vote needed to give the bills an emergency clause, which would allow them to take effect immediately.

- By Jeremy Duda