The Arizona Agenda's 2024 Rewind

Your annual reminder of everything that’s happened this year … Like a Spotify Wrapped for Arizona politics … And our intern starts a band!

Remember how a bunch of lawmakers left mid-legislative-session to go to Israel? Or when a Republican lawmaker got kicked off the ballot over allegedly fake signatures?

We kinda forgot, too. It was a busy year!

We’re taking some time off this month to plan, catch our breath and hang out with family.

But before we go, we combed our archives for some of the highlights (lowlights?) of 2024.

If you’re a Spotify user, just think of today’s edition as your annual “Agenda Wrapped.”

In fact, a year this epic deserves an epic theme song.

So we asked our art intern, ChatGPT, to turn today’s edition into a song based on Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start The Fire,” to commemorate the occasion. But their band, iLoveSong.ai, had clearly never heard the original before.

Kids these days…

We promised to include the cover of their upcoming album.

January

We started season three of the Arizona Agenda by assigning New Year’s resolutions to lawmakers — including asking legislators to focus their time on the state’s pressing issues instead of culture wars. (Spoiler alert: This was a culture wars-packed legislative session).

To kick off the 2024 legislative session, we introduced you to the power players at the state Capitol, which is kind of like a small town. We also delivered you some helpful guides on how the budget works and what “hell week” and crossover week are.

Revelations of the strange antics of former Rep. Leezah Sun also continued. After allegedly threatening a city lobbyist, among a host of other inappropriate behavior, she took to the Littleton Elementary School District and threatened to use her status as a legislator to get the superintendent fired. That tidbit was included in a House Ethics Committee investigation that found Sun violated the House Rules — but she resigned before her fellow legislators could vote on expelling her. (In November, Sun won a seat on the Tolleson Union High School District.)

Meanwhile, Gov. Katie Hobbs delivered her budget proposal, which attempted to dramatically scale back school vouchers and eliminate private school tax credits. That was an obvious nonstarter for Republicans.

But the best story of January was the bomb Kari Lake dropped on then-AZGOP Chair Jeff DeWit, releasing a secret recording of him trying to bribe her to get out of politics. After that blunder, Gina Swoboda took over the GOP chairmanship.

We also started our Drinking with Politicians series and asked then-Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer some prying questions while feeding him beer. The series turned out to be more of a hit than we thought, and it might make a comeback next year. You can see the whole series under the “Drinking with Politicians” tab on our homepage.

February

One of the biggest hurdles lawmakers faced early in the year was fixing Arizona’s election timeline to ensure votes would be tallied in time to submit presidential results to Congress. They brokered a deal in February, but each side had to make a lot of concessions.

We broke the news about 17 House lawmakers taking a junket trip to Israel mid-session, stalling pressing legislation and committee hearings in the meantime. Priorities, people!

And with the numerous criminal justice bills flowing through committees this session, we took a deep dive into the lobbyists who work for prosecutors, and how Republican Rep. Alexander Kolodin’s experience as an attorney led to a rare alignment with Democrats on bills that harshen criminal penalties.

As then-House Speaker Ben Toma’s HCR2060 came closer to being sent to voters’ ballots (and eventually passing as Prop 314 on the November ballot), opponents of the measure that makes being in Arizona illegally a state crime likened it to SB1070. So we looked at how Arizona’s changed since that now-defunct law.

March

As the legislation poured in throughout March, Sen. Ken Bennett fought off the RINO reproaches from his fellow Senators after voting against conservative priorities. Plus, we explained the act of “shenanigating” — a little tool lawmakers use to twist the convoluted legislative rules in their favor, like forcing Republicans to go on record about the right to contraception.

We asked Mark Finchem why he illegally took a picture of his ballot, and he claimed he didn’t know it was illegal. The Yavapai County Recorder’s Office said they’d look into it, but nothing ever happened to Finchem, who will return to the state Capitol as a senator in January. And we launched our first-ever Arizona Agenda March Madness tournament where we pit government officials against each other in random tasks. Rep. Judy Schwiebert didn’t win reelection this year, but she did get a pretty cool trophy.

In what might just be our favorite episode of the year, we made a Kari Lake deep fake to warn you about how deceptively good the technology is getting. She hit us with a cease and desist and ordered us to take down the videos or she would sue.

“The videos stay,” we wrote in response. “If Lake wants to continue her unblemished record of losing in court, we will oblige.”

And perhaps in perfect timing for our flashy warning using Lake’s likeness, we found a Democratic congressional candidate who almost certainly used ChatGPT to write his campaign materials.

April

We combed through lawmakers’ annual financial disclosure statements, which are annoyingly vague but do have interesting tidbits like how then-House Speaker Ben Toma took 14 out-of-state junkets in 2023, including business meetings in Romania and “Victims of Communism Events” in Washington D.C.

Candidates started submitting their signatures to qualify for the ballot, and the lawsuits came flying to disqualify opponents. Democratic Rep. Melody Hernandez lost her pretty-much-guaranteed reelection due to a signature challenge. And MAGA Republican Rep. Austin Smith also got booted from the ballot for allegedly forging a bunch of signatures. Election integrity!

Even the national headlines were Arizona-centric in April, when the state Supreme Court reinstated Arizona’s territorial-era abortion ban. That led to a series of wild events that included a shame chant and the eventual move toward overturning the ban after some House Republicans relented.

We got into the swing of election season by looking into some sham Green Party candidates.

And the insanely eventful month ended with state Attorney General Kris Mayes’ announcement that Arizona’s slate of fake electors who tried to hand the 2020 presidency to Donald Trump were indicted.

May

We went to a campaign event to ask congressional candidate and former state representative Amish Shah if he voted for Donald Trump, which like a lot of our Shah coverage, resulted in a bunch of nonanswers.

The near-total abortion ban was finally repealed, putting a 15-week ban in its stead. But Democratic lawmakers got a slap on the wrist for chanting “shame” at Republicans over the ordeal.

Meanwhile, top Republican legislators and Hobbs created a state budget behind closed doors. We broke down our favorite MAGA v. RINO races ahead of the primaries, which came with the first sign-stealing drama of the season.

June

When we heard about the lack of transparency in, of all agencies, Phoenix’s first Ethics Commission, it definitely deserved a deep dive.

Our series giving you a rundown of every single primary election candidate in a competitive race was born in June, and it was a labor of love and a surprise hit.

The state budget shenanigans continued into mid-June, and we got the leaked copy of budget documents that showed how lawmakers and the governor intended to plug a $1.3 billion budget hole. The 2024 legislative session ended around 10 a.m. on a Saturday after the budget passed with bipartisan, but near-minimum, support in both chambers.

We made the shift from legislative to election coverage with an expose on all the weird things about Sen. Justine Wadsack. She lost her primary election shortly after.

July

Our sister newsletter, the Tucson Agenda, had its one-year birthday in July.

State lawmakers fought over how the litany of propositions on your ballot should be worded, and Amish Shah faced some heat for allegedly planting signs in people’s yards without their permission.

The primary election happened, and it set the stage for 2025’s slate of lawmakers.

August

Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer was ousted by way further right Republican Justin Heap, an election skeptic. And we spoke to other “moderate” Republicans who were unseated by far-right replacements.

A PAC full of A-list donors like Steven Spielberg and Ben Affleck doled out millions to try to flip state legislatures blue, while deep-red candidates ran in county recorder races across the state.

The Arizona Agenda celebrated its third birthday! We also kicked off of a new general election series making baseball player-like cards for candidates in competitive districts.

Local cities and towns geared up their opposition to the housing laws legislators passed this year, and Republican House candidate Michael Way was hit with a residency lawsuit, seemingly backed by fellow Republicans.

September

We took a look at all the important things Arizona could have spent with $115 million of opioid settlement money if lawmakers hadn’t swept that money to plug a budget hole instead.

It was also an important month for diving into the overlooked races, including the troubled past of a Maricopa County School Superintendent candidate and the questionable pasts of both Maricopa County Sheriff candidates.

We also talked to a bunch of write-in candidates about their motivations for running doomed campaigns. Our favorite was U.S. Senate write-in candidate Sarah Williams, who used her candidacy to advertise her goat yoga and paddleboarding classes. And we showed you some of the best campaign signs we saw on a road trip across the state.

September also brought a deep dive into the judicial retention system amid a proposition that would do away with it. Like many state processes, it could use a lot of reform.

State Supreme Court Chief Justice Robert Brutinel announced his retirement, giving Hobbs the chance to influence Arizona’s highest court with a new appointment.

October

October started with the bombshell that more than 100,000 voters were improperly marked as having provided proof of citizenship in a “technical glitch” at the Motor Vehicle Division. Then that number more than doubled to an estimated 218,000 voters. Republicans sued to gain access to the names, and Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes was later forced to release the names.

As the election neared, Arizona felt like the center of the political universe. We showed you the numbers on legislative and Maricopa County campaign finances. Both Republicans and Democrats threw millions at Google for advertising this year. But there wasn’t much to show regarding Arizona’s new dark money law, which passed two years ago but doesn’t really fulfill the purpose of directing people back to the source donors. And, of course, we shamed the late campaign finance filers.

Hobbs, meanwhile, made a big move designating the Willcox Basin as an “Active Management Area.”

November

Trump won the presidency, and the Democrats are still casting a wide net of blame for the loss.

Next year’s new set of legislative leaders was decided. And Hobbs caught flak for not being as quick as other Democratic leaders to vow to not to help Trump deport people.

Republicans resurrected plans to speed up Arizona’s ballot-counting timeline, and one state Senator has already submitted a bill to get it done next year. The repercussions of the few ballot propositions voters passed started manifesting, including cities and towns beginning to pass or reinstate public camping bans in light of Prop 312.

We ended the year with a bang, breaking the news that Arizona Tourism Department Director Lisa Urias had some influence in deciding who would get paid to craft a new state logo, while her marketing agency got a $250,000 contract from the state education department. She resigned shortly after the story.