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Campaign advertising picks up the pace ahead of the midterms.

A high-profile donor pours money into one of Arizona's most competitive congressional contests.

And one last look at polling before Election Day.

The Press Room starts now.

(upbeat music) Hello and welcome to The Press Room.

I'm Tony Perkins, joined by our panel of Southern Arizona journalists, Steve Jess from AZPM News, Jim Nintzel from the Tucson Sentinel, Joe Ferguson from Tucson Agenda, and Tim Steller with the Arizona Daily Star.

Thanks for being with us on The Press Room on this pre-election edition.

The midterm elections are finally here and the talk is over, well, except for people like us, I suppose.

So we're gonna talk first about the Congressional District Six Contest.

JoAnna Mendoza and Juan Ciscomani delivering the campaign's closing arguments while the polling results are coming in as far as what the predictions are concerned.

Jim: Ciscomani, the Republican, is using his status as the incumbent member of Congress to bring in special guests, like say Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.

But trying to track down Ciscomani is sort of difficult.

It can be challenging.

The congressman does not really enjoy talking to the press.

He has not spoken to the Sentinel in some time.

To get an interview for the Arizona Daily Star, Hannah Cree had to chase him up and down the steps at the University of Arizona Football Stadium during a 9-11 commemoration.

And it's quite the opposite with JoAnna Mendoza.

Their team is constantly reaching out and trying to get a little more ink for their candidate.

I do think this is gonna be one of the tightest races I don't think we'll have the results on election night.

It has shifted slightly with the national prognosticators saying that it now leans Democrat, but this is gonna be a tough one.

What about those closing arguments and how they're bringing those closing arguments to voters in the 6th?

Well, I mean, it's coming via the airwaves and every other venue you can get ads in.

I mean, so we've had massive billionaire donations.

We know about Elon Musk.

He donated about 500- and-some- thousand, if I'm not mistaken.

That is his PAC did in supporting Juan Ciscomani.

There's also Michael Bloomberg, whose Everytown PAC put more than a billion dollars, I'm sorry, a million toward supporting Mendoza.

There's other ones that aren't supported by billionaires or aren't directly supported by billionaires that are also putting in lots of money.

Americans for Prosperity has put in 100 in supporting Ciscomani.

The House Majority PAC, which is of course a Democratic Party organization, has also contributed mightily to Mendoza.

So if you turn on the TV, as I did for a while last night watching the World Series, you are gonna get ads for or against Mendoza and Ciscomani.

And of course, it's more than about one congressional race in Southern Arizona.

It's about the fact that this is a race that either party could win with the right outcome, and that could change control of Congress.

And I might add, at the risk of repeating old news, this high spending that we're seeing in Congressional District Six is a direct result of the Citizens United decision in 2010, which basically blew out any limits on PAC or corporate spending and politics.

And Steve, we talk about and write about campaign spending through most of the season, but what happens in these later months, it tends to direct the interest from one place to the other.

And that's how we can sort of tell which candidate feels that he needs more support in one area or might be in trouble in another one.

That's true geographically and even issue-wise, I suppose.

I heard a very dog whistly ad against Joanna Mendoza that never even mentioned Juan Ciscomani, but did mention the word 'trans' about six times in 30 seconds in an attempt to get me to dislike JoAnna Mendoza because she was for trans people, somehow.

I don't know.

But it gets crazy in the last few days.

And Mendoza has sort of countered with her own campaigns.

Yeah, and she has.

She's begun to fact check Ciscomani's fact checks online.

And so we are regaining to the naval gazing for this two zones, a very small media market.

And I'm just gonna remind you that the millions and millions of dollars was spent for people that couldn't have voted in the CD6 election.

So I think, you know, a lot of this money is probably being thrown away in the last area of it.

We see the ballot return rates, they're really high for Democrats in CD6 right now.

I think that's a pretty good indicator that this is gonna be a tight race, but at the same time, Democrats are showing up for this race.

Here's something interesting.

Last year, Juan Ciscomani joined the DOGE Caucus, talking about how to cut back on federal spending.

Elon Musk's cuts drilled to federal spending and led to people with little government experience in charge of making these decisions.

A lot of people lost their jobs.

Cuts happened in healthcare and food assistance programs.

Jim, you reported that Ciscomani stopped talking about DOGE cuts for a while.

He's not talking about them now.

And you can't even get his campaign strategist to answer any questions about it.

Yeah, and that's pretty typical of the Ciscomani campaign.

They really don't get back to you.

But the DOGE thing, he joined the DOGE Caucus in the House that had two meetings and then stopped somewhere in 2025.

But he was very excited from the jump on that, "We're gonna go after this spending."

And I don't think it really ended up to very much at the end of the day, other than, there were claims that they were gonna save $2 billion and, or $2 trillion.

To make a difference, it would have to be $2 trillion.

$2 trillion, and I think their own wall of receipts came out to about $200 billion.

And even those were questioned by the inspector general.

And the other thing that happened is the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was passed, which cut extended tax cuts and increased spending on a lot of things like immigrat enforcement.

So, saving money on one hand, even if it's a small amount, and then spending it by greater amounts on the other hand is not gonna save you money in the long run.

It ends up, we get a bigger deficit, and that's what happened.

Yeah, there was all this, economizing on things like Medicaid and SNAP benefits, and the country spent far more than that on the war with Iran.

So, where's the savings?

But the DOGE people won't talk about those things now.

Tim, your article last week revealed that Musk's political action committee spent about $85,000 on digital ads, and against Mendoza in October alone, I think that was.

And we talk about campaign spending, and here's where the impact is easy to see in these last few weeks.

Yeah, I mean, we all get these ads on social media, on our phones, that may not account for phone text ads, but I don't know, you guys may know more about how the division is, but those are some of the cheaper ads.

The TV ads are a little more expensive, but you can get a lot of bang for your buck with the digital ones.

You should probably mention that.

When he is buying digital ads, he's paying them to his company, X. So, I bet he gets a good rate.

So, let's bottom line this.

Is money going to decide who gets elected in Congressional District Six?

I don't think so.

I think both sides have had enough money to get their messages out.

More than enough.

More than enough.

And at some point, I think people just get tired of seeing the ads.

Especially the negative ads.

They all tend to look the same after all, regardless of who they're negative about.

There's a black and white picture of the person you're supposed to not like, and then they say bad things about them, and they move on.

And I think after a while, a lot of audience members basically sort of just defocus their eyes and say la, la, la, la, la, through all that, and don't pay a whole lot of attention.

I will say my nine-year-old and my 13-year-old have said they don't understand why Juan Ciscomani cut taxes for billionaires.

And I think that just shows how much of this, how much my kids watch YouTube, but also how it has sunk in across the board.

Yeah, they pound, yeah, certain messages.

I mean, you will have heard JoAnna Mendoza said she is from a family of farm workers and a marine veteran.

I mean, that's essentially her main message.

And so when you pound a message like that, it does hit home finally with people.

And we spent a year with the same two candidates.

We haven't had a primary, this wasn't a competitive primary.

We've seen these two people for the last year.

If you don't know anything about these two people, you've successfully hidden from all the political campaigning.

Now, let's take a look at some down ballot contests, some interesting predictions in the state legislature once Election Day is over and the new Arizona legislative session begins.

Jim, you wrote about recent history in District 17, it's got part of Pima County, part of Pinal County, Democrat Kevin Volk took an upset victory there in 2024.

He's looking for reelection next week.

Holly Lyon is another Democrat trying to win the second seat there.

Will a "blue wave" give them good news on election night?

Well, that's what we're waiting to see, right?

I think this is a really interesting district in that it was really drawn to be a Republican district.

It was gerrymandered to include districts or precincts up in Pinal County, as you said, Saddlebrooke and then going into Oro Valley and Marana and then it goes through the mountains essentially and comes back out on Vail and Cochise County area.

So I think what you've got going on there is a district that was drawn to be Republican but Kevin Volk did win an upset victory last time because he was running against two very MAGA candidates.

One of those candidates, Rachel Jones, is the incumbent.

She's still there, but fighting for her political life, John Winchester, political newcomers, the other Republican in that race.

And I think the Democrats are certainly hoping a blue wave will carry their candidates across the top.

What about some of the other legislative district races in the state?

And in a lot of cases, these contests are being influenced by issues like water and data centers, that kind of thing.

How much of a difference is that making in how voters are deciding on Tuesday?

On LD17, everybody's against data centers.

Up and down the ballot, all of them said to us in clean elections debate, they don't like data centers.

Can't speak to the set side as much as I would like to, but that's another race that's closely competitive.

It's an open seat in terms of the Senate side in LD17.

We're not sure who's gonna be, but they're both political newcomers with Vince Leach retiring.

So that could be an opportunity for the Democrats to pick up a seat, which is what they're really working on, on very small margins.

Yeah, so essentially there's a handful of seats, excuse me, a handful of districts in the state that will decide control of the legislature.

And in Southern Arizona, the one, principle one is LD17.

Democrats gained one out of three legislative seats last time, they're hoping to gain at least one more.

In the Senate and in the House side, Rachel Keshel has a chance to retain her seat and then there's John Winchester.

On the Senate side, it's a massively expensive race pitting Chris King on the Republican side versus Edgar Soto on the Democratic side.

King is a former Vail School Board member.

I just wrote down some of the independent spending, not the campaign spending.

It's about $616,000 for Chris King, $329,000 against him and $173,000 for Edgar Soto and $340,000 against him.

I don't know what those all add up to, but it's well over a million, almost $2 million.

And that's just the outside spending, not to mention their campaigns.

So now we look at what the makeup of the legislature is going to be after election day and whether or not there's really gonna be any change.

The pattern in the legislature, of course, over the past few years is that Republicans send up measures to Hobbs and Hobbs vetoes them in record fashion.

This election season, do you think that voters are going to look at that and say, there's gotta be some sort of change?

Do we steal one of the Democrats in the governor's office and all Republicans in the legislature, nothing gets done?

I think you've got a very tight split in the legislature, I think it's 32-28 in the House.

And what's the Senate 32?

17-13, the 17-13 split in the Senate.

So the Democrats have to win, at least flip at least three seats and hang on to like Kevin Volk's seat.

They can't lose any.

Last election, they were pretty confident going in and they ended up losing ground in both chambers.

So voters are unpredictable as you get into these down ballot races, even if they're like crossing over to vote for a congressman or a governor, a lot of times they'll move back into their home party as they move further down the ballot.

But I think another race to watch is LD23, which includes the Yuma area and a little bit of Pima County on the Tohono O'odham reservation, primarily.

And that's one where Democrats control the, Democrats are the largest voting block in that district, but Republican Michelle Peña has managed to hang on to a seat out there in the last two election cycles.

Democrats would love to knock her out.

Okay, what is the possibility, at least one part of the legislature could change?

It sounds like flipping seats, sounds like a simple thing is harder, easier said than done.

It's control of the Arizona House, a possible outcome for Democrats.

I think it's possible, but it's a tough climb.

And the thing I'm really curious about is what happens if you end up with a tie in one chamber or the other, which is also conceivable.

So at that point, there's gonna be some interesting deal making happening up at the Arizona legislature.

Okay, now let's take a look at the ballot initiatives.

In this case, let's focus on Proposition 425.

It's received some attention.

It's a yes vote would raise Pima County's expenditure limit.

Joe, you and Curt Prendergast did a profile in the Tucson Agenda on this issue.

What surprised you about the interest in Proposition 425?

I think that there is still a group of people that don't trust Pima County with how they spend their money.

And so even though the early years, they're saying no new taxes, no new tax increases from this, there is a vocal skeptical group of people willing to put time and effort in just to say, we don't trust Pima County.

And so this has been a refrain we've heard for the last 10 years.

I mean, it's been quite some time since the county's put out a bond, specifically because of the sentiment.

I think one of the areas that I've highlighted that I think points to maybe why people are like that is that this year there was a surplus.

They spent 13 and change, $1 million of a surplus right in the middle of this campaign to raise their spending limit, which the two aren't truly connected, but it shows that they already, at least this year, have extra money.

So it raises the question, why do they need to raise their spending limit by 610 million?

Now there's answers to that.

Go ahead, Joe.

$20 million of that came from the sale of property to Project Blue that they had to spend on something.

So surplus is a bit of a fuzzy math at the end of the day.

But one of the things I think where the county has failed to uphold its burden of proof is by, the argument is we need to spend money on new kinds of things for you, but I don't think the county's been very specific about what we're supposed to be getting for nearly doubling the county's spending authority.

Are we going to get better roads?

Are we going to get cleaner air, better, you know, cleaner water or something that's worth the potentially adding 75% to our overall property or county tax bills in the future?

And I think it's worth saying, and as Joe pointed out, there's certainly concern among people that this will be a opportunity to, for the supervisors to raise taxes.

Part of the county's argument is that they're going to have money through various sources and be unable to spend it because it's not, this is about the limits of how much they can spend.

And they're saying, well, we'll be just sitting on this money if we're not allowed to spend it.

Prop 425 is only one of several for state and for county voters to decide on.

What are some of the other propositions that you think are kind of interesting?

And are any of them really going to affect policy or are they just stuff that connects with me?

Culture wars or feel good issues?

There's a lot of the culture war issues in the state propositions.

There are eight state propositions.

They, I think most, if not all of them literally came out of Katie Hobbs' wastebasket.

They were things that the legislature, the Republican controlled legislature passed and the governor said no thanks and vetoed a lot of them.

But there are some culture war things there, particularly the no, what am I trying to say?

The no trans girls on girls sports teams bill, which could affect maybe a dozen people in the entire state.

But it's a hot button issue for a certain group of people in the legislature and in the body politic.

I would be surprised to see more than a couple of them pass but we'll see.

All right.

There's, on the culture war side, there's the one that I can't remember the proper number that would declare drug cartels to be terrorist organizations, which sounds strong and all that.

But then it assigns the Arizona Department of Homeland Security, which does not have a police force.

It has granting authority and that sort of thing to enforce this idea that drug cartels are terrorists.

It also would make any small drug transaction or even human smuggling a terrorist act under state law.

Okay, go ahead, Joe.

I went to Sahuarita High School as a kid and it would be profoundly impacted if the 60% spend on classrooms was an issue with approved by voters.

It's a big district.

They trucked people from Arivaca to Sahuarita every single day and Vail and a lot of other small communities that were served by that rural school district.

It would be exceedingly punishing to punish them for providing bus service for students so they could go to school by hearing to this proposition of the past.

Yeah, do you remember which number that is?

I think it's 320.

Okay, 320 is the one that would set a minimum, you'd have to spend a minimum of 60%.

Every school district over 7,500 students on classroom spending.

And I don't think any district in the state is at that 60% level now.

And you're seeing, you look at the publicity pamphlet that came out, there were two arguments in favor of this from the Goldwater Institute and they concerned women of Arizona and then there were dozens and dozens from school teachers and school boards that are concerned.

All right, all this, we haven't gotten to the governor's race yet.

Most recent polling in Democratic incumbent Katie Hobbs seems to have a growing lead over Andy Biggs.

So the question now is whether or not that's going to impact down ballots contests.

Will Republicans find an issue with declining interest and motivation from the governor's race that's going to make a difference in their contests?

I mean, the atmosphere, I think the biggest, if you could just take one more step backward and look at the country as a whole, as opposed to just the governor's race, which is at the top of our ballot.

I mean, I think it's more the atmosphere of the country as a whole that will affect the governor's race, which will affect all the races further down the line.

And that's the more dominant factor.

Yeah, I think a HighGround poll showed that the Republican candidates were gaining a little bit of ground, but they were still losing by significant margins.

And that was in the big three, the governor's race, the attorney general's race, the secretary of state's race.

I think all signs point to a blue wave, an unpopular president is dragging down the rest of the ticket.

And I think, certainly when you look at who people want to have control of Congress, it's Democrats at this point, even though the Democratic Party isn't that much more popular than the Republican Party.

All right, let's go around the table for last question.

Election night, all of us are going to be busy.

Biggest night of the year in a lot of cases and a lot of newsrooms.

Where will you likely be and what Arizona contests will keep you up late for the results?

Tim, let's start with you.

Oh, I'll be looking at some of the ones we've talked about, CD6 and LD17, of course.

And then the propositions are very meaningful.

The one we discussed, Prop 320, I think, is going to have a really significant impact if it passes.

And I will be probably in our newsroom first and then out on the streets, maybe this or that election event.

I'll be at the Tucson Agenda's Decision Desk, watching all the results come in.

We'll be paying attention to CD6, is probably our highest priority.

But I think we're going to try to find room to make sure we have a good sense on where all the propositions land.

Yeah, and CD6, I don't think, will be decided on election night.

It wasn't two years ago.

They were counting votes for several days afterwards as a very tight race there.

I mean, Juan Ciscomani won by fewer than three percentage points, which is why I think he's in trouble this year.

And where will I be?

JoAnna Mendoza is having one party.

Adelita Grijalva is having another party.

I doubt we're invited to the Ciscomani party.

And we'll see where the Arizona Republican Party lands.

On election night, I plan to be in this very building upstairs in a padded room talking to myself, doing the live coverage on NPR 89.1.

I'll primarily be watching propositions more than personalities.

I want to see how all those eight or so state propositions do and whether 425 passes.

I think that will tell us a lot about the mood of the voters.

And that's Tuesday night.

Wednesday may be a different story and a lot of contests, maybe too close to call, or contested in some reason, way or another.

What do you expect is going to be happening post-election day, like a week from Tuesday, two weeks from Tuesday?

Wouldn't be surprised to see some contested outcomes.

Of course, depends on how close they are.

But yeah, I don't know.

I think it's going to shake out pretty normally.

That's my hope and prayer.

It'll be interesting to see how the Superintendent of Public Instruction race turns out since there is no incumbent in that.

But we've got that one to look forward to.

All right.

Well, thank you very much.

That's all the time we have for The Press Room on this pre-election edition for all our guests, staff, and crew.

Thanks for being with us.

We'll see you next week.

(upbeat music) (dramatic music) Support comes from Pyramid Federal Credit Union, serving Southern Arizona for more than 96 years, offering personalized solutions to help members reach financial goals.

More information is available at pyramidfcu.com.

This has been an original production of AZPM News.

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