Starting a new year in Arizona

After a most memorable birthday trip to the surprise destination of Copenhagen, I’ve returned home to roll up my sleeves again for the 2020 election campaign for Arizona’s state legislative district 6.

In normal times, I would wish you a “Happy New Year,” but I imagine that you, like me, feel a bi-polar sort of giddy apprehension about the coming year and its electoral prospects. On the one hand, there is so much progress that’s been hard won by so many people. Everyday people who have become part of an informal, but steeled resistance—many for the first time in their lives. That progress portends significant wins.

A short, but by no means exhaustive, tally of important victories resulting from the resistance follows:

1. There are now a record 100+ women serving in Congress, including the first two indigenous women to ever serve!

2. In 2018, all those women were part of the blue wave that swept 40 seats in the House of Representatives, giving Democratic members the majority.

3. Since 2017, 435 state legislative races flipped from #redtoblue, leading to democratic control of chambers in CT, CO, ME, MN, NH, NY, and WA, in addition to Virginia’s victories in 2019, that clawed back seats from the Republican’s REDMAP gerrymandering.

4. Moreover, Democrats have won control of Governorships in red states like AL, KY, and LA, and added eight trifectas.

5. Finally, 35 million more people voted in 2018, than in the prior midterm. This represents the largest share of eligible voters to turn out in a midterm since 1914. All told, 14 million new people (who hadn’t voted in 2016) turned out, and those voters favored Democratic candidates by roughly 20-percentage-points!

These significant wins are worth a moment of pause and reflection (and gratitude to the countless volunteers in grassroots groups like Sister District Project and Swing Left who made these successes possible). Without these wins, today would be a much, much darker one.

But here, my giddiness dissolves into apprehension.

I returned home, not only to restart my campaign work in earnest, but also to be confronted with the news of DJT’s unilateral decision to assassinate General Soleimani, a high-ranking, government official of Iran. The gravity of this act of war can’t be overstated. Soleimani was not Bin Laden or Al-Bagdadi; he was a state, government official.

Even as the media careens like a punch-drunk boxer from their relentless, 24-hour coverage of each oversaturated DJT news story to the next, with the Iowa Caucuses just around the corner, much of that media oxygen will soon be sucked up by the democratic presidential primaries (basically, a proxy topic for DJT’s next election).

Getting caught up in that media maelstrom, would be repeating a monumental mistake the democratic party (writ large) has foolishly made before. Regardless of which Presidential candidate wins the primary, and even when that candidate defeats DJT and his Russian-backed campaign surrogates, she (or he) will need a Democratic House majority. So, we simply can’t afford to let Republicans sweep state-level contests and gerrymander themselves into power again by ceding ground on strategic local races before the 2020 census!Ignoring the importance of state legislative races has allowed radical, out-of-touch individuals like Sylvia Allen (the current Republican candidate, a lobbyist turned politician, who’s held a legislative seat since her first appointment in 2008), to be able to hold public office for multiple terms. These legislators are neither qualified, experienced, nor committed to their roles and responsibilities as public servants. In Allen’s case in particular, we have an avowed creationist who is on record stating that the earth “has been here 6,000 years, long before anybody had environmental laws, and somehow it hasn’t been done away with.” This anti-science worldview underpins her support for legislation that would threaten the well-being of her own constituents, by allowing uranium mining in northern Arizona, including in the watershed of the Grand Canyon itself! The same worldview shapes her positions on education issues. Despite the fact that education spending in Arizona has been cut more than in any other state, leaving the state ranked 49th lowest in the nation, as a lawmaker (and prior owner of an F-ranked charter school), Allen has done little to nothing to address this issue. Rather than pass laws to increase teacher pay to retain quality staff, fix crumbling infrastructure, and improve education, she has introduced legislation to ban the term “homosexuality” from all sex education classes, and eliminate any sex education before the 7th grade—even though ALL sex ed courses in Arizona both require parents to opt-in and are age-appropriate (i.e., focus on teaching students about potential sexual abuse dangers and dating violence).Allen, is in fact, the state legislator that Colonel (ret.) Felicia French met on a lobbying visit to Phoenix in 2016, when she was advocating as a local constituent and Sierra Club member for stronger protections of the endangered Mexican gray wolf.

Allen stated that wolves should not be protected, because they were human killers. When Felicia attempted to address this misconception, Allen angrily leapt from her seat, circled her desk, and began shouting denials directly at Felicia’s face. It was after that meeting, that Felicia first considered the idea of running for office. Felicia now running for office a second time, and as fate would have it, her opponent is none other than Sylvia Allen.Coming within 577 votes of winning in 2018 (the narrowest margin for any Democrat in LD 6), I know the only reason that a candidate as qualified, experienced and committed (and simply amazing) as Felicia is, didn’t flip the district, was because the majority of voters here (and across the country) have, for too long, focused only on the top of the ballot.

In 2020, through the support of countless volunteers though, that will change in Arizona—and across the country.I hope you will stay tuned…