The morning after Arizona's primary, Kathleen Winn opened with the scoreboard and moved quickly to the harder question: what the results mean, and what still has to be fixed before November. Andy Biggs took the Republican nomination for governor with something north of 70 percent, setting up a general election against Katie Hobbs, who had no primary opponent. "Two very different forms of leadership and government," Winn said. "Katie Hobbs is running as the candidate for all Arizonans. I would argue that Andy Biggs is that person — but they're going to have to make their case to the people of Arizona."
Down the ballot, Alex Kolodin advanced to face Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a matchup Winn expects to be "one of the most contentious and interesting races that we have in the state," noting the two have met in court repeatedly with Kolodin coming out ahead. Elijah Norton won the Republican nod for state treasurer, the seat Kimberly Yee is vacating, and will face an unopposed Democratic nominee. Yee, meanwhile, appears to have defeated Tom Horne for superintendent of public instruction, setting up a race between two women — with the future of Arizona's ESA program riding on it. And Senate President Warren Petersen will take on Attorney General Kris Mayes, who Winn argued "has pretty much spent her whole four years suing Donald Trump. I don't think there's an appetite for just that."
The Republican registration advantage is real, Winn said, but it doesn't help if those voters stay home — which made the rest of the morning a post-mortem on why some of them couldn't.
It’s Election Day in Arizona! Kathleen Winn's phone started before dawn. By the time the microphones opened on primary morning in Pima County, the reports were already stacking up — the most urgent one out of Marana, where voters were being handed ballots printed on ordinary copy paper rather than the heavier stock the tabulators require. Sixty-odd calls would come in before the show ended. Against that backdrop, the morning ran on two tracks at once: the long-horizon questions of what Arizona's utilities, water, and legislature will look like for the next decade, and the immediate, unglamorous work of getting a legally cast ballot into a machine that will read it.
The day before Arizona's primary opened with news from 2,400 miles away: an explosion at the Manhattan federal building housing ICE, the FBI, and other federal offices. Kathleen Winn scrapped her planned opening and called the National Police Association's Betsy Brantner Smith, who traced a line from that attack to the rhetoric being used in Pima County's own races. From there, the morning ranged across a downtown Tucson mass shooting, the Canadian smoke drifting over half a continent, the science being invoked to explain it, an Air Force reflagging at Luke, the attorney general's race, and — running underneath all of it — the mechanics of getting a ballot counted before polls close Tuesday night.
Four days out from Arizona's primary, with the president's overnight address on election security still echoing, Kathleen Winn built her Friday broadcast around the one issue she and both of her guests treat as the foundation of everything else: whether the vote can be trusted. First a reminder for listeners caught off guard — last year's five mail-in elections left many assuming they were still on the early-ballot list when they were not. "You still can vote," Winn said. Go to a voting center today, or vote in person Tuesday. "We need your vote." From there she turned to two men who have spent years inside the mechanics of Arizona elections: a data analyst and Army veteran who forecasts vote trends, and a retired Master Sergeant who investigates election process.
A single number framed the entire Thursday broadcast: less than half of Americans now say they believe in capitalism. On a rainy morning in Tucson, days before Arizona's primary, host Kathleen Winn built her show around that statistic and its consequences — a country where a rising generation is drawn to socialism without understanding its costs, and a state where the mechanics of voting itself are on the ballot. Four guests worked the theme from different angles: a veteran financial journalist, an economic historian from the John Birch Society, a state legislator running for Secretary of State, and a Pima County Republican organizer. What follows is their case, in their words.
Ava Chen opens China Watch Wednesday with a four-pronged breakdown of how the CCP is targeting American elections — from ideological capture through private equity proxies, to voting machine supply chain contamination traced through Huawei-controlled Serbia, to a 2020 NFSC intelligence disclosure alleging a CCP plot to kill President Trump using COVID-19 — and closes with breaking intel on Xi Jinping's coming purge of 1,200 CCP financial system insiders who she says have been looting China with Wall Street's help. Terri Jo Neff drives up from Sierra Vista to tell the story of Aluminum Dynamics — a company that followed every rule, got every permit, had ADEQ, the EPA, and Kris Mayes's own office sign off on its project, then watched Mayes reverse course under political pressure, threaten a public nuisance lawsuit before any nuisance existed, and drive 90 jobs and a promised fire station out of Cochise County — triggering a county-level investigation into whether the Attorney General overstepped her authority that rural boards across Arizona are now watching closely.
Retired Brigadier General Steve Mundt opens the week with a wide-ranging geopolitical briefing — honoring Lindsey Graham's legacy while assessing the diplomatic void his death leaves in Ukraine negotiations, breaking down Iran's last-stand calculus in the Strait of Hormuz, and raising an under-discussed Taiwan warning that has nothing to do with a military invasion. Joel Strabala calls in from the road on his way to observe the mobile voting center's first deployment with one urgent message: today is the last day to mail your ballot, 50,000 Republican ballots are still sitting on countertops across Pima County, and the deadline to sign up as an election day observer is tomorrow at five. And Rodney Glassman walks into the studio in person for his closing argument — 44 Kris Mayes lawsuits, nine prosecuted trials, a Trump repost from Sonny Borrelli on Flag Day, and one question he says every voter should be asking: who would you actually hire to protect your own family?
Chad Connelly opens the week with a firsthand portrait of Lindsey Graham — the kid who grew up above a pool hall, raised his orphaned sister while serving in the Air Force, built the relationships behind the Abraham Accords, and came home from his final meeting with Zelensky confident a path forward existed — before anyone knew it would be his last trip. Rick Shafton breaks down the South Carolina succession chess match, explains why Graham Plattner's exit torched the Democratic field on his way out, and makes the case that the era of personality politics is over — every Democrat is the same now and Republicans need to start acting like it. Stephen Moore delivers the Ukraine briefing the media isn't giving you: drone kill ratios, Russian recruitment math, the Shahed-versus-Patriot cost problem, and why Senator Graham's sudden death fits a documented pattern of Putin-linked eliminations that declassified Soviet records have confirmed go back to 1921. And Tara Oster closes with the number that should alarm every Pima County Republican — 16.6% ballot return with eleven days left and 100,000 ballots still sitting on kitchen counters across the county.
Kathleen Winn calls in from Al's birthday celebration to announce a federal court victory — Judge Liburdi has enjoined Fontes and Kris Mayes from enforcing the provision that let poll workers remove uniformed officers and military personnel from voting centers, capping a legal fight that included a Tucson cop literally turned away at the polls the day after testimony ended. Dave Smith fills the rest of the two hours with a wide-ranging indictment of learned helplessness in the Republican base, the psychology of entitlement that makes free bus rides and free housing counterproductive by design, and a closing argument that the FIFA World Cup just handed conservatives the most powerful pro-America advertisement money can't buy — if they're smart enough to use it. Betsy Brantner Smith drops in between Newsmax hits to reframe teen takeovers as what they actually are — riots — and connect a mother's stabbing death to a culture that has systematically removed consequences from young people's lives. And Jeff Rhodes makes his final write-in pitch for Pima County Supervisor District 5 with eleven days left on the clock.
Graham Plattner's exit from the Maine Senate race opens the week — and Winn argues he didn't just drop out, he poisoned the well for whoever Democrats scramble to replace him with by July 27th. Jon Riches of the Goldwater Institute explains how Kris Mayes's two-year campaign to bury Arizona's ESA program in paperwork — requiring curriculum documentation for pencil purchases — finally collapsed when her legal justification turned out to be as thin as the paper she was demanding. Joel Strabala delivers the final ballot deadline alert with a paid ballot-chasing opportunity attached. James Rogers breaks down the Arizona Supreme Court's total victory for Justin Heap, reveals that Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell was filing amicus briefs against the recorder she was supposed to represent, and announces his own LD10 candidacy as the legislature's next election law expert. And Michael Letts closes the week with a sobering intelligence briefing on teen takeovers, coordinated criminal networks, a black market weapons pipeline traced back to Ukraine aid, and the endgame he says is already in motion.
