The following is an AZPM original production.

From the radio studios of AZPM, welcome to the latest edition of The Press Room.

I'm Steve Goldstein.

Coming up, there were decisive winners in both primaries in the race to grab the open seat in CD7.

Also, we learned a lot more about the massive data center projects being proposed in Tucson and Pima County.

Could that new information help help or hurt their chances?

or hurt their chances?

A panel of journalists joins me to discuss those stories and more next on The Press Room.

(upbeat music) Welcome to this edition of The Press Room.

I'm Steve Goldstein.

The special primary election at Arizona's 7th congressional district took place on Tuesday.

It's a district that is considered safely in the Democratic column, so that party primary received most of the attention and had considerably more voters take part.

Adelita Grijalva, former Pima County supervisor and daughter of the late Congressman Raul Grijalva won the race by nearly 40 points, putting her in great position to be serving in Washington by the fall.

I'll be talking with a panel of Southern Arizona journalists in a few minutes about that outcome, but first I turned to Washington Post reporter Dylan Wells who wrote about the primary to get her reaction.

Thanks for joining us on The Press Room.

Good to have you here.

Thanks so much for having me.

So you had three takeaways from the CD7 Arizona primary on the Democratic side.

Can you review for our viewers and listeners what those takeaways were, and then I'll ask you some follow-ups on that.

Of course, I think there was outsized focused on this race by national Democrats, given how badly the party fared in November, and Democrats are really eager for any indications they can get of what types of messages and candidates are connecting with voters.

And so I think following the New York City mayoral primary last month where there was this win by Zohran Mamdani, there's been this increased thought of could the same thing happen here in Arizona.

And because Deja Foxx ran a successful campaign on social media, she was younger, there were a lot of national Dems who were kind of looking to make comparisons, but these were really different races, which I think is an important takeaway for those looking to read the tea leaves on this election.

Mamdani was backed by many of the same groups who in this race backed Grijalva herself.

And while there is similarities in the fact that Grijalva and Andrew Cuomo share famous last names in their respective states of Arizona and New York, and both were perceived as the presumptive front runners in the early stages of these races, they are very different.

As you know, Grijalva is incredibly popular down there in Southern Arizona, not necessarily the case in New York with Cuomo, and Grijalva just doesn't have the baggage that Andrew Cuomo had as he is seeking this mayoral post after resigning in scandal and disgrace.

So that comparison in our view is not one that is necessarily fair to make.

I do think that this race also shows the power of social media.

It was a very different type of online presence than Mamdani had, but Deja Foxx really managed to make this race competitive and grit national attention.

She did, I want to clarify, she only got around 20% of the vote.

So she was not anywhere near Grijalva, but given how much of a power is that Grijalva is in this race, the fact that Deja was able to raise as much money as she did and get as much attention and earned media as she did, shows that she was breaking through with people online.

And I think since the election, Democrats have been looking for messengers who can authentically post things that feel real online and connect with younger voters who have left the party and to some extent in recent years.

So her experiments with social media and new media still provide a kind of blueprint for other candidates, despite the fact she lost in this race.

And I think our third main takeaway is this is the second primary, second special election primary in just two months in which the candidate who was closest to the former member of Congress Gerry Connolly here in Virginia, who passed an office in Grijalva in Arizona, the candidate who was closest to them, who had their endorsement, who had the backing of a lot of current Democratic members at Congress here in DC was the one who was successful.

So in a way, this is a win for some of those more establishment candidates over these insurgents.

It's funny, based on this conversation we're gonna have, I'm probably going to not give enough attention to Adelita Grijalva, who won by about 40 points, but you made so many interesting points about Deja Foxx.

As you said, she was not able to coalesce in the sense of turn that money into votes, but is there actual promise for the sense that could she have an impact going forward?

And the reason I ask it this way is because this was a special election.

Turnout was very low.

Arizona, I don't need to tell you, Arizona in the summer is not a place a lot of people want to be, so turnout was even less.

So do you think she has a future if she wants it at some point?

Absolutely, I mean, all of the strategists and politicos who I have discuss this race with say that the fact that she was able to raise so much money in this brief 100 days after being thought of as a long shot candidate who really had no serious chance, the fact she was able to get 20 or so percent in the final election results with this tight timeframe and going up against as mighty an opponent as Grijalva suggests that she really does have a political future.

I mean, you know, Daniel Hernandez, who came in third in this race, he at the start of this was definitely viewed more seriously than Deja was.

He's a former state legislator.

He obviously has gained some notoriety.

And as a powerful candidate in himself, so the fact that Deja as a newcomer to at least electoral politics, she's been an advocate but not run for office before, was able to do this well, has people looking at her for future races, looking at what her involvement might be in the midterms.

I think a lot of people were surprised just how much of an advantage President Trump had last fall when it came to getting younger voters, voters who were watching things online like TikTok.

In that sense, is Deja Fox someone who can be a guiding light for Democrats?

To some extent the way, I'm really blowing this out of proportion, but to some extent the way Barack Obama was when he first won his presidential race and people were like, wow, this is amazing.

The small donors, the online donors, is that something Democrats have to go back to the chalkboard for?

And can they use Deja Foxx as an example?

Well, it's funny because I cover campaigns and young voters and kind of this political online culture, how people are interacting with politics in their day-to-day, when they're scrolling on their phones.

And that's actually how I first met Deja, well over a year ago when she was doing some events with then candidate Joe Biden for the presidential.

And she was one of those creators who Democrats were already looking to, to help them reach younger audiences.

We saw throughout the last election, you had both of Arizona's senators making TikTok videos with Deja Foxx, Jill Biden, even Kamala Harris herself, which that's obviously a campaign that Deja had worked on in her first presidential bid.

And so Deja was already someone that campaigns were looking to for insights on how to reach these younger voters.

And I think that there's an increased focus on that since November, the Democrats I talked to say that they were kind of caught flat-footed.

They thought they had more of an advantage online than it ultimately became clear that they did, particularly with the shift in some young voters to the right.

And so I think particularly Foxx is not just using her own social media, but she was really leaning on new democratic media, Sub-Stack these different streaming shows.

And that is 100% something that you are looking at 2028 candidates already doing in her model.

And Adelita Grijalva in her victory speech, in some ways made a sideswipe at Deja Foxx, almost indicating, well, here's this person who was doing all these things, but didn't necessarily translate to voters, but it did seem like Adelita was looking for ways to bring in those younger voters too.

I know people get paid a lot more money than you and I do to figure this out, but what does it take to translate a good campaign, perhaps even ideas that younger voters want, but actually get them to go to the polls?

I mean, that's a million dollar question that Democrats are literally spending tens and tens of millions of dollars on now since their loss in November to try to figure out.

But I think that a lot of Democrats feel like there are room for some of these non-traditional candidates because there's so much frustration with the party right now.

And you've seen a number of these candidates launch campaigns with similar themes as Deja Foxxes about being an outsider and about being a younger candidate.

And I think when it comes to the social media front, when I talk to young voters, they really value authenticity.

And ironically, Deja got a lot of praise for her social media, but there were also people in her comments questioning if she was authentic or not.

As this race heated up, she was getting some of her own criticism as well.

So this is in some ways a new playing field for candidates.

And people aren't expecting Adelita Grijalva to go out there and do a TikTok dance.

I think people can have a somewhat reductive view of what it means to be on social media as a candidate, but anything to show that you are part of the community and are connecting directly with people who would be your constituents and engaging in ways that feel real online, because Gen Z, they're easy at sniffing out what doesn't feel authentic.

Okay, that is Dylan Wells, reporter for The Washington Post.

Dylan, thanks so much for your insights on this CD7 race.

We appreciate your time on The Press Room.

Of course, thank you so much for having me.

And we'll be back with more of The Press Room in a moment.

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Welcome back to The Press Room from AZPM.

I'm Steve Goldstein.

Joining me now are distinguished panel of Southern Arizona journalists, Dylan Smith of the Tucson Sentinel, Hannah Cree of AZPM News, and joining us for the first time, Dylan, drum roll please.

Joe Ferguson of the Tucson Agenda.

Joe, thanks for being here.

Thanks for having me.

Dylan, one of the big stories of the week was the CD7 primary special election.

Adelita Grijalva ended up winning by about 40 points, which is not a surprise except, obviously earlier in the program, we talked to a national reporter, where the publication was one of those that was saying, oh, maybe Deja Foxx is gonna make a big impact.

Turns out she really didn't, at least in terms of the numbers.

So why such an easy win for Adelita Grijalva?

Well, I think Deja Foxx maybe did a little bit better than your average first time unknown first run candidate.

But the national press is very invested in creating a narrative that some elections are going to be much closer, that they are much more competitive than they actually are.

And congressional elections take place on the ground.

They don't take place on TikTok.

They're not national elections.

It helps you a little bit if you have attention and money flowing in from out of state, but those people don't vote here.

And that's what it takes to win.

And Grijalva really kept her eye on the ball with the ground game of turning out the vote.

Yeah, and Adelita obviously had the name recognition advantage, but she also had served a lot in her own right.

How much of a difference did that make?

That people didn't just know her name, they knew her.

She gets knocked for being Raul Grijalva's daughter quite a bit.

And people criticize that, oh, this shouldn't be a legacy.

You don't automatically inherit the seat.

And certainly you don't.

And she worked for it.

And she has been an elected official for more than two decades now.

She has her own track record and her own network.

If you look at the people who donated to her, in fact, it's not just the same people who always donated to Raul Grijalva, because Raul was pretty much a she-win for many, many years and didn't have to work very hard to fundraise and win.

Hannah, speaking of donations, Deja Foxx got a lot of donations, but not that many from Southern Arizona.

What do you make ultimately of her turnout?

She had an impact, but it didn't really translate to votes.

Yeah, it really didn't.

My coworker, Paola Rodriguez deserves an accounting degree for the amount of time that she spent with that campaign finance data.

It's really tough to go through.

But she did find that three quarters of Deja's money was individual contributions.

Those are those small donations under $200 and only 16% came from Arizona.

So three quarters basically from out of state and then California is the state that donated the most.

Her campaign manager, I was at her event on Tuesday, actually kind of steered me away from a group of people that I wanted to talk to, but they were from California.

And he said, "Go over here to talk to the people from Arizona, please."

And I think she definitely has that, she has a significant social media following.

That's a fact.

And it's widespread appeal across the country with those widespread issues that young voters really connect with, but it doesn't translate, as Dylan was saying, to a specific congressional seat.

And Grijalva did a better job at connecting people with issues that are actually in this district.

But the fact is, I mean, everyone wanted to talk about Deja Foxx, that was the reality of this race.

And I think that is significant to note.

Yeah, Joe, some of us are political junkies, so even a special election gets us excited, but the electorate wasn't necessarily excited.

What did you observe from this in terms of Adelita Grijalva sort of having the advantage from the jump and then really holding onto it?

Did you ever buy the Deja Foxx narrative?

I mean, we saw the Deja Foxx narrative increase over time and people got excited about it, and there were announcements, and there was a lot of energy there.

But I must have heard, "Hi, I'm Deja Foxx so many times."

And then she explained who she was, but we never got past that level.

And Adelita was very good, especially in debates and other forums where she was able to specifically talk about issues facing CD7, and she could have the institutional memory to talk about something that happened 20 years ago.

And so I think that really worked for her when she went to places.

On election night, she talked about how when she knocked on doors, people would recognize her and they'd say, "My dad, your dad did something for my dad," or, "You read at my kid's school."

And I think those things are resonating and show what Tucsonans vote for.

Yeah, so what about the knowledge of issues?

Because a lot of us would say, that's really important when Deja Foxx was really looking at something else, energy.

Let's get some of these older folks, frankly, out of office.

What rang true about Adelita Grijalva knowing more about the issues and knowing potentially, once we presume she gets to the house, she'll know what to do once she gets there.

Yeah, Deja Foxx, to her credit, is a very, very good communicator, which comes off very well.

She's already had a ton of practice despite her relatively young age, right?

But being a lawmaker is so much about the nitty gritty of how government functions, about how laws are written very specifically to accomplish certain things.

And it's great to have a grand vision of how society should function.

And hopefully people do pursue a vision when they are in office, focusing on those nitty gritty things.

But a member of Congress or a state lawmaker, they have to know what it is that they are voting for in a law, at least hopefully.

Yeah, go ahead.

Yeah, I was gonna say that one of the biggest criticisms of Deja as a candidate is she did lack clear policy.

But it's also interesting because I was checking her social media just over the past two days, and young people did pick up on that in the fact that there is really, the concept of a plan, I think, is what we say here.

I will read a couple of them.

Someone commented, "Being 25 is not a qualification.

"Progressive policy is better "than identity politics any day."

And then again, Deja respectfully, you need to talk about policies.

So I mean, I think all the candidates really struggled in answering questions that really got at the reality of Congress right now, that the seat, if it goes to a Democrat, which it most likely will, is not gonna shift the balance in Congress at all.

But I do think her lack of actually specific policy to CD7 did end up hurting her versus Adelita in the debates, she referred to specific mining policy that she would repeal in terms of Apache Stronghold and Oak Flat to protect those communities.

And she could connect with why that's important to voters here in the district.

Joe, what about the third place in the Democratic primary, Daniel Hernandez, had the name recognition, obviously been famous for a long time.

Why didn't he get any traction?

I think that he did really well in the beginning.

He had great fundraising numbers.

He came out strong, he came out first.

I think that had good momentum.

But I think that there were a couple of issues during the campaign that really hurt him.

One of them was being on stage saying that he supported mining.

And when Deja asked if they would take a corporate pledge PAC, Daniel stood alone again.

And then finally, I think that the incident in Bisbee really hurt him.

I think that anytime you've got a video of a candidate grabbing somebody's camera forcefully and throwing it to the ground is just really bad politically, especially just a few weeks before ballots came back in.

But Dylan, one thing that showed Daniel Hernandez experience is that he conceded, congratulated Adelita Grijalva, which ultimately Deja Foxx did, took her a while and he had a really interesting photo in the Sentinel related to, she wasn't really that far from her supporters, but her initial sort of talking to her supporters was not done in person.

Explain that.

On election night, every primary candidate, they usually have their party for theirsupporters to gather and cheer when they win.

She had one at a local restaurant.

And when she first spoke to people after the initial election results were out, and we already knew she was not going to win, she didn't talk directly to them in the room.

She zoomed in and they had her up on a screen, even though she was actually a few dozen feet away in a different room in a different building in that little restaurant complex.

So our reporter Mia Kortright, when she was trying to figure out what was actually going on, because people couldn't hear the audio from the speech she was giving, that was being Zoomed in.

She went looking and found her and has a really, I think, kind of telling photo of Deja Foxx's experience in that moment, taking a picture of her sitting alone on a table through a window there.

And she did eventually come out and offer a few brief words to her supporters.

Didn't want to talk to reporters at all.

And our columnist Blake Morlock critiqued her for not really following the usual etiquette for a primary election, where you, if it's obvious you're not going to win, you concede.

You just acknowledge that basic plain fact.

And generally, you tell your supporters to go support your party's winner in the general election.

Even Daniel Hernandez, who, you know, there's some plenty of years of, you know, not very friendly relationships between the Hernandi and the Grijalvistas, bad blood, pretty much.

He, within minutes of those first results, put out a press release.

He didn't have an election night party, but he said, you know, sorry, thanks for the support.

We fought the good fight.

We didn't win.

And you should go support Adelita Grijalva.

That was his, you know, just right, right, you know, from the get.

His message, it took Deja until the middle of the next day to come out with that kind of message, I think.

Actually, to be fair, it was actually fairly early the next morning, I guess.

She put it out on social media.

Okay, so we'll watch for the general election that comes up in September.

Joe, one other massive story this week related to Project Blue.

Thanks to the city of Tucson, we know more than we did before.

People thought of it as, here are some data centers.

It turns out the project is even a lot bigger than that.

So give me the CliffsNotes version of what Project Blue was and now what we know more about the reporting that you and Dylan particularly have done.

So we first thought that Project Blue was gonna be on 290 acres near the fairgrounds.

We were expecting 10 buildings.

We were expecting some people had some estimates on terms of water use and electric.

But the reality was is that now this agreement came out from the city of Tucson.

We're talking about three separate sites.

We're talking about a lot more energy, a lot more water, and a real chance that we're gonna hurt our air quality long term.

And so the city council is choosing to weather it out to the next.

They're starting the public process next week with some meetings and we should know more about whether or not we've got buy-in from four council members or more, probably by mid-August at this rate.

But we've already had one say very loudly that he's not gonna support this.

So it's a countdown to see which side he can count to four first.

And a lot of what they're weighing is energy use, water use, we were told that it was gonna be water neutral and yet I know people have concerns about that.

And also there are, as you said, there are more projects than people thought they were gonna be.

How much of this is flowing inside people's brains to actually figure out we're in a drought and yet we need jobs.

So I'm asking a lot of questions there but balance that out in terms of what people are looking at.

Energy use, water use versus job creation.

I think there's a short term component where there's a lot of money that could come in to the city of Tucson.

And for union workers who are looking for work, I think that's great and I think three to five-- Public construction jobs.

Yeah, three to five years is great in terms of that.

But long term, we don't necessarily see a lot of numbers.

The county's agreement with Project Blue is for 75 jobs and that's not a lot of jobs at the end of the day.

For 290 acres, you could do a lot of different industries and get to 75 fairly quickly.

It's 75 jobs for a fairly limited amount of time.

Whereas the annexation deal, which is kind of hinges on because Tucson Water does not have to give water to that site unless it's actually in the city within their service area.

So if the city doesn't annex that first site, kind of the whole deal's off.

That's why this comes down to that.

But there are the jobs, there's no great enforcement mechanism for limiting water.

If they wanna pay more money, they can just use a whole lot more water under the proposed deal.

So we've got a number of members of the city council, not just Kevin Dahl who's got a background as a long time environmentalist, but which we would probably consider the more pro-business folks on the council, Paul Cunningham and Nikki Lee especially, are asking some very, very pointed questions and getting a little bit grumpy that they are not getting any kind of real specific answers to things.

We're asking plenty of questions too.

And Hannah, what about how the city council is reminiscent of something else?

Yeah, like Dylan was saying, I think the hesitancy of the pro-business council members speaks volumes about where the Democratic Party is honestly at a zoom out level.

I cannot but make a parallel to how Daniel Hernandez distinguished himself in the CD7 race as a pro-mining and pro-business Democrat that also believes that you can have good environmental policy at the same time.

And I think the city council is basically being asked to tow that same line and it's gonna be really interesting to see if they actually approve it.

So Joe, some skepticism from the council but the city manager himself has not expressed that same skepticism.

I think the only quote that I send this might've been in your story, Dolan.

Well, it's not Dr.

Evil, we know that.

But there's a lot of secrecy behind this.

Yes, there is and he's expressed his frustration.

The land use attorney that's representing Project Blue has expressed that frustration.

I think a lot of people are upset about not knowing who it is.

But there are people in the business community who've publicly signaled that they know exactly who the end user is.

So I think that only compounds the frustration for the city council that they can't know what they're voting on but somebody over at the chamber says they know exactly who it is.

But they're not telling.

And they're referring to them as their clients.

And even though Dolan and Pima County Board of Supervisors had a vote, this really rests more on what the council because talk about annexation, et cetera.

We've learned a lot more about the scope of this since the Board of Supervisors, they voted to agree to sell that one plot of land, fairly large plot by the fairgrounds, and to change the zoning on it so that it could be annexed into the city with that same level of zoning.

And then they could build it there because they get to get the water.

But now it turns out, as Joe said, there are three projects, not just the one project, which really compounds the amount of water that it would take, the massive amounts of power it would take to operate these data centers, the potential air quality impacts, all of these things are magnified because it's not just the one already very large site with 10 different buildings, but they don't even know how many buildings we're talking about, they won't say.

Yeah, Joe.

I don't think we've really investigated the amount of energy that they are talking about using.

It would eclipse by some estimates the amount of residential use right now in Tucson with just this new set of data centers.

That's TEP building a brand new plant.

That means that TEP is gonna have to go back to the county and get an air quality permit.

There's a whole process here that's going on and it seems to be going on in reverse.

And last thing, if the council were to somehow vote against this, does that destroy all of this?

I mean, that's what the developer has said, but Arizona has some very unique land use laws and so the city might be facing a lawsuit if they say no.

Okay, we'll be watching this very closely obviously.

Joe Ferguson, the Tucson Agenda, great first appearance, Joe.

Thank you so much.

Dylan Smith of the Tucson Sentinel and Hannah Cree, AZPM News.

Thank you all for being here today on The Press Room.

And thank you very much as well for joining us on this episode of The Press Room.

We'll be back next week with another edition.

I'm Steve Goldstein.

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