Candidate Cards: Legislative District 23

The sneaky southwest … 7/13 was an inside job … And AirTag your signs, folks.

When new lines were drawn for Arizona’s 30 legislative districts, only five districts were statistically competitive.

But in the 2022 election, Republican Rep. Michele Peña ran a successful single-shot campaign in a Democratic-leaning district, winning an unlikely upset for Republicans.

Now, Democrats are determined to win it back.

Peña’s seat in the Yuma-based Legislative District 23 may determine which party controls the House next year.

The vast district spans four counties in the southwest corner of the state, and it contains hundreds of miles of the U.S.-Mexico border. The majority of voters here live in Yuma County.

Peña is seeking reelection as the sole Republican in the House race, which should give her some edge in fighting the district’s lopsided voter registration. Meanwhile, Democratic Rep. Mariana Sandoval and San Luis City Council Member Matias Rosales are running to turn the split district entirely blue.

In the Senate, Democratic Sen. Brian Fernandez is running again and faces Republican challenger Michelle Altherr, the district’s GOP chair and a former Latinos for Trump volunteer.

But the real race in the district is for Pena’s seat in the House.

Click here to see the full-size cards.

An inside job: Republican U.S. Rep. Eli Crane has been spewing a lot of theories about of who was behind the assassination attempt of former president Donald Trump and why, including that there may have been a second shooter and implying there’s a federal coverup. It has helped his fundraising and he’s fine with the New York Times labeling his theories “conspiracy theories.”

“He is feeding the far-right audience what they want to hear, and fund-raising off that,” his Democratic opponent, Jonathan Nez, told the Times.

What’s not to like?: Kari Lake sat for an interview that she thought was a debate with journalist Ted Simons on Arizona PBS, urging Simons to retire and join the Kamala Harris campaign, accusing him of wanting to raise taxes and dodging his questions on abortion. The Phoenix New Times’ TJ L’Heureux has a handy chronology of Lake’s evolving position on abortion. And Senate Republicans and their allies are barely spending on Lake’s flailing campaign, Politico notes.

“In Arizona, Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) alone is spending more than all the Republican advertisers, including outside groups, combined,” Politico notes.

Election integrity: Conservative activists in Arizona are filming and intimidating voter registration groups as they attempt to register new voters ahead of today’s deadline to register, Jack Healy reports in the New York Times. Stephen Miller’s organization, America First Legal, is suing Arizona to get the names of roughly 220,000 voters who didn’t have their citizenship checked due to a computer “glitch,” the Arizona Mirror’s Jerod MacDonald-Evoy writes.

Shady and shadier: After several Arizona judges, including Supreme Court Justices Bill Montgomery and Kathryn King, wore their robes to a religious event, the Judicial Ethics Advisory Committee ruled that judges can’t do that. But then the Supreme Court justices voted to repeal that decision and hide it from the public, the Capitol Times’ Kiera Riley reports.

Micro-influencers: The Arizona Republic’s editorial board is “strongly encouraging” voters to reject Prop 314, which would make it a state crime to cross the border illegally and task local police with enforcing that law without any additional funding. The editorial board said the measure would “trigger never-ending lawsuits, fill up local jails and state prisons and saddle local law enforcement with unfunded mandates they know they can’t handle.”

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Politicians knock: A Republican state House candidate in Northwest Phoenix’s competitive Legislative District 2 knocked on the door of his Democratic opponent after she refused to debate him. Democrats called Ari Bradshaw’s knock out of bounds, the Republic’s Mary Jo Pitzl reports, considering it was before 7 am and he tweeted about how her husband answered the door and said they’re getting separated and she doesn’t live there anymore. The Democratic House candidate, Stephanie Simacek, claims she still lives in the district somewhere.

Family feud: The brother-in-law of Republican U.S. Rep. Juan Ciscomani is criticizing the congressman for hypocritical and extreme border policies, and raising questions about Ciscomani’s own immigration story, the Daily Star’s Emily Bregel writes. Alexander Aviña is a Latin American history professor at Arizona State University and the brother of Laura Ciscomani, a consultant and Chamber of Commerce alumni.

“Bro, you married the daughter of proud undocumented migrants — my parents,” Aviña tweeted earlier this year.

Officially official: Your vote will count on Prop 140, which would end partisan primaries in favor of an open primary system, after the state Supreme Court rejected a final round of arguments challenging signatures that put it on the ballot, Axios Phoenix’s Jeremy Duda writes. The measure is already on the ballot, but the Free Enterprise Club was trying to get a court to invalidate the votes.

Rabid for learning: Northern Arizona University students are getting kicked out of their dorms to make room for the bats that are moving in, KJZZ’s Ignacio Ventura reports. The bats have been a problem for a while, and the university found one with rabies last month.

Whoa: AZFamily photojournalist Samuel Mena Jr. set himself on fire at a pro-Palestine rally in Washington DC. He survived with serious burns to his arm, and the news station severed ties with him, saying it expects “newsroom employees to conduct themselves with neutrality and objectivity."

Today is the deadline to register to vote.

If you need to register or update your registration, do it here.

Early voting begins on Wednesday. That’s also the day election officials will start mailing early ballots. They should arrive in your mailbox by the weekend.

And lots of politicians are visiting Arizona as early voting opens. Kamala Harris will be here Wednesday and Friday.

VP candidate Tim Walz will be here Tuesday and Wednesday, including for an event with Jimmy McCain, the son of the late senator who endorsed Harris.

Harris’ husband Doug Emhoff, will also be in Arizona Tuesday.

And don’t miss the first and final debate between Ruben Gallego and Kari Lake, which the Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission will host on Wednesday at 6 p.m.

Right-wing radio talk show host Garret Lewis has a hilarious little tale about the Marana school board members’ sign war.

The mom of school board member Hunter Holt stole the sign that school board member Tom Carlson put up criticizing them.

How’d they catch her?

It appears Carlson hid a GPS tracker in one of the signs.