Three+ weeks into my Arizona adventure

During my last few days in San Francisco, someone (actually, multiple someones) suggested that I document my time in Arizona working to elect Colonel (ret.) Felicia French to the state Senate in Legislative District 6, and then share those missives with ‘whomever would be interested.’

My original response was to pooh-pooh the idea of blogging. But recently, I got inspired by Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American. While imitation is indeed, the sincerest form of flattery, I am under absolutely no delusion that my posts will come anywhere near the import or impact of Letters. But, as Lucille Ball once said, “I’d rather regret the things I’ve done, than regret the things I haven’t done.”

And, if someone would’ve asked me in November of 2016 what I would be doing three years after that fateful election, never could I have imagined myself as a District Manager working on a senate race in the state legislature of Arizona!

Yet, on Saturday, Nov 10, I sat in the Arizona Democratic Legislative Coordinating Committee’s (bland, florescent-lit and unkempt) offices in Phoenix, with my candidate, Felicia, and her irreplaceable volunteer organizer and friend (and previously, interim campaign manager), Sharon Edgar, to attend a weekend-long, Leading for Change training.

Along with other veteran and first-time candidates, and their staff and volunteers, we focused on plans, budgets, and message framing. A bit like understanding all the ingredients and expected flavor outcomes for a particular meal, but then skipping the recipe, which tells you the amounts, sequence, and methods!

Still, the three key takeaways from the weekend (because doesn’t it always boil down to the power of threes?) were clear: write your campaign plan and budget(s) out; track, measure, and revise that plan as you go; and resist, ever so much, adopting knee-jerk progressive talking points that revolve around policies, research, and data (you know, facts)—instead, talk to people about shared values, and when you do, speak plainly and always use a narrative.

Sunday, after the weekend-long training in Phoenix, we drove two hours north through the urban-heat sink and sprawl of Valley of the Sun to encounter a rolling landscape of Saguaros in the Sonoran Desert, before arriving in Gila, the first of the four counties that make up LD 6’s vast legislative district. I spent the night in Felicia’s solar-powered cabin home in Pine. Then, the following day, from Pine we drove another two hours further north and west to Flagstaff, for a third overnight stay in Coconino County. Finally, on Tuesday afternoon, after traveling yet another hour south from Flag through the breathtaking Oak Creek Canyon, I arrived in Sedona (in Yavapai County).The landscape surrounding the city of Sedona is…breathtaking.

Sunset-hued geological treasures like Cathedral, Coffeepot, and Steamboat Rocks, Courthouse Butte, and Devil’s Bridge, stand out in sharp contrast against an insanely intense, clear and endless blue sky. You could almost forget there’s a ‘city’ here in certain neighborhoods.

And my first night sleeping in Sedona, I was actually woken by the light of the moon—it was so bright (and undiminished by urban light pollution). Turns out Sedona is one of eight communities that have a Dark Sky designation (Flagstaff was actually the first).

Sedona, is also home to the ONLY set of non-golden McDonald’s arches in the world (they’re teal). Let’s say they want to keep Sedona…Sedona.

Which brings me to an established truism: all politics is local.

And here in Sedona, and throughout the Verde Valley—the geographical region in which Sedona is the northernmost (and most well known) community, along with the towns of Camp Verde, Clarkdale, Cornville, Cottonwood, Jerome, and Lake Montezuma, and the Village of Oak Creek—the big issue for 2020 won’t be DJT and the impeachment. It will be “local control” (as in rural, northern AZ controls vs. the distant, disconnected will of Maricopa County where the majority the state’s legislators and statewide elected officials, both reside and work).

In 2016, Republican Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey signed the FIRST (and only) statewide law in the country to take away the local rights of municipalities to control short-term rentals (AirBnB and others) in their own backyards.

Despite assertions that short-term rentals would be an economic boon (hey San Franciscans, didn’t we hear that a few years ago?) to homeowners who needed extra cash, the truth is, AirBnB’s own reports showed that the majority of their hosts (71 percent) listed entire homes or apartments vs. only 29 percent who listed private/shared rooms. Entire home listings are a strong proxy for which properties are lived in or not. In Sedona, that percentage of entire home listings is a whooping 87 percent!So it was that the LD 6 Republicans, in both the state House and Senate, voted against their own, local voters’ interests, in order to back Ducey’s bill, which was actually the brainchild of the libertarian think tank and Phoenix-based Goldwater Institute.

And that brings us to the current political climate in the Verde Valley, a spot of shimmering blue in an otherwise bright red Yavapai County. But, together with the voters in Flagstaff, it is this (and a few other democratic-leaning districts in what has been a traditionally Republican, sprawling four-county area of the state), that holds the key to flipping the state of Arizona to a Democratic majority in 2020.I hope you will stay tuned…