Guests - Eddy Acevedo, James Rogers, Sergio Arellano, Rachel Alexander
Friday's broadcast ranged from a Caribbean island a few miles off Florida to a courtroom in Maricopa County, but Kathleen Winn tied every segment to the same argument she has pressed all season: that freedom is fragile, that elections are where it is defended, and that Arizona's is now on the line. A Cuba policy expert opened with a portrait of what communism does to a country over decades. An election attorney explained the lawsuit he filed that week over Arizona's SAVE Act ballot language. The state party chairman went after the governor's running-mate rollout. And a journalist introduced voters to the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor.
Eddy Acevedo: What Ten Blackouts Reveal About Cuba
Eddy Acevedo — vice president for policy and government relations at the Center for Free Cuba, and chief of staff and senior advisor at the National Endowment for Democracy — joined after Cuba's latest national blackout left millions without power, the tenth major outage in roughly 18 months. For Winn, the timing connected to her weekly China Watch segment and to the elections: "One of the consequences of socialism, communism, oppression is the mismanagement of resources."
Acevedo called the blackouts "another testament to the catastrophic failure of this communist regime," which he said spends its resources filling its own coffers while ordinary Cubans struggle. The outages are never truly fixed, only patched, he said, and past blackouts drove Cubans into the streets to protest — met with brute force and more than a thousand jailed. "There's no freedom of anything in Cuba," he said. "Cuba is sort of like the North Korea of Latin America." He agreed the surveillance-and-repression model parallels the CCP's, and noted China and Russia have historically used Cuba as a launching point to counter U.S. interests across Latin America — an alignment he called a national security threat.
The most harrowing stretch concerned what Acevedo described as the regime's economics. A typical Cuban on the island makes between $10 and $20 a month, he said, while the military-run conglomerate GAESA has reportedly stashed close to $20 billion. He detailed the regime's trafficking of Cuban doctors: deployed abroad with passports confiscated and families held hostage at home, while foreign governments pay the regime — not the doctors — for their labor. "It's a really sick and appalling practice," he said. Winn, drawing on her years fighting sex trafficking and finding missing children, called it "the core of evil."
Acevedo's organization, he explained, works to support civil society, political prisoners, and democratic leaders on the island, and to document the regime's growing persecution of churches and religious leaders — there is no religious freedom in Cuba, he said, only what the regime controls. He credited Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who comes from the Cuban community, with leading the U.S. effort, and said the one source of hope is the Cuban people themselves: "These folks, they are still fighting for freedom... it's our responsibility to not only support those democratic efforts, but elevate those voices." Winn's throughline was a lesson for Americans: "If you don't want to have that, then you empower the insanity and the madness that's happening in our country."
James Rogers: 'Free and Fair Elections Start With an Honest Ballot'
James Rogers — senior counsel at America First Legal and a Republican candidate for the state House in LD10, covering East Mesa and the western part of Apache Junction — joined to explain the lawsuit he filed that week over the ballot language for Proposition 144, Arizona's version of the SAVE Act.
Rogers laid out how ballot summaries work: when a proposition would amend the constitution, the secretary of state writes a summary describing the measure's effects, what a yes vote does, and what a no vote does — and by law that summary must be neutral. Proposition 144, referred to the ballot by the legislature via a resolution from Representative Alex Kolodin (now running for secretary of state), would require citizenship to register and to vote, mandate government ID for all forms of voting, prohibit foreign money from influencing Arizona elections, affirm the legislature's authority to regulate elections, and set the legal standard courts should apply to challenges — that a law be rationally connected to legitimate state interests like accurate results, election security, and public confidence. "These are things that vast majorities of Arizonans, left and right, Democrat, Republican, all support," Rogers said.
His objection was that Secretary of State Adrian Fontes — who had publicly opposed the resolution and unsuccessfully sought a competing "California-style" measure of his own, and who faces Kolodin in November — wrote a summary that fails the neutrality test on three counts. First, the summary doesn't mention citizenship at all, omitting the measure's lead provision. Second, it characterizes the foreign-money ban as similar to existing federal law, implying redundancy — but federal law, Rogers noted, does not bar foreign money from influencing ballot propositions, so the provision closes a real loophole, and enshrining it in the state constitution protects it regardless of future federal changes. Third, on the litigation-standard provision, the summary editorializes by predicting the measure will make it "harder to challenge election laws" — a prediction Rogers said isn't stated in the resolution and appears designed to scare voters. If Fontes wants to argue against the measure, Rogers said, the voter guide has a section for exactly that; the neutral summary is not the place.
America First Legal, a 501(c)(3) that takes no position on the measure's outcome, represents three Arizona voters who support Proposition 144 and are challenging the wording so voters can decide "with fair and neutral language." Rogers walked through the compressed schedule: the state's response was due that day, his reply Sunday, oral argument Monday at 8 a.m. in Maricopa County Superior Court, with a fast decision needed because ballots must reach military and overseas voters by September 19th. Fontes's team, he noted, was already eyeing the appellate process — which, Winn observed, suggests they expect to lose. Rogers also confirmed he had represented Recorder Justin Heap in his suit against the Maricopa board, a case that settled and is still being implemented, including the transfer of server images so Heap can stand up his own systems.
Winn framed the fight in the terms Rogers gave her: "Free and fair elections start with an honest ballot." Fontes, she argued, "had one job here — tell Arizona voters the truth about what's on your ballot," and his description of Proposition 144 fails Arizona's requirement that ballot language be impartial, accurate, and free from advocacy. Rogers closed on the stakes, comparing Arizona to two former purple states: Colorado, which Democrats moved toward California-style elections and policy until it became "solidly blue forevermore," and Florida, where narrow Republican wins led to fast-result elections and conservative policy that made it "solidly red." "This is our election to decide which way Arizona goes," he said. His campaign is at jamesrogersaz.com.
Sergio Arellano: 'Political Theater' From the Governor
Arizona Republican Party chairman Sergio Arellano called in on a press release he'd issued that morning, headlined that Governor Katie Hobbs's "bipartisan" lieutenant governor rollout is "nothing more than political theater." He opened, as he and Winn always do, with friendly Pima-versus-Maricopa needling over the county's primary turnout — a win Winn savored because, she said, Congresswoman Adelita Grijalva had complained that her own turnout "machine" hadn't delivered.
Arellano's central charge was that Hobbs is gaslighting voters by taking credit for policies she opposed. The Republican-led legislature, he said, passed no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, and no tax on Social Security benefits — and Hobbs vetoed the package three times before relenting once Republicans united and made clear it was a mandate. He also touted a property-tax cut for disabled veterans tied to their VA disability percentage with no income cap, calling Arizona the first state to implement Trump's tax cuts at the state level.
On the lieutenant governor question, Arellano said no official announcement had been made but the party was calling out the promotion of former Mesa mayor John Giles as a Republican. Giles, he noted, is a registered independent who backed Kamala Harris, and "his identity didn't change overnight — the paperwork caught up to him." Winn compared it to Hobbs picking Liz Cheney, and read a listener's text about Cindy McCain fundraising for Hobbs. Arellano's answer was that one McCain doesn't speak for all: he pointed to Meghan McCain publicly stating her father would not condone what Hobbs is pushing, a statement the party amplified. Both recalled the open-mic moment years ago when Giles was caught urging Jeff Flake to run against Trump. "This guy has been against the MAGA conservative part of our party for years," Winn said. Arellano's regret was that prior party leadership hadn't held such figures accountable: had he found Giles still registered Republican, "he would have had a ceremonious boot in the butt outside of our party."
Arellano also predicted Hobbs might ultimately choose her chief of staff, Chad Campbell — an outcome Winn said would "cement a lot of the pay-for-play," noting Hobbs is under criminal investigation. He ran through the Republican slate — Biggs for governor, Warren Petersen for attorney general, Elijah Norton for treasurer, Kimberly Yee for superintendent, and Kolodin against Fontes — and made the case for Ciscomani as "a living, walking, talking American dream," an immigrant who came from nothing to serve on House Appropriations. A product of TUSD and Sunnyside himself, Arellano said he graduated high school not knowing who the founding fathers were — "the resentment built into me from the liberal ideology" — and cast school choice as a core Republican offering. His closing pitch was turnout and small-dollar support at azgop.com: "Whatever you're going to spend on your Starbucks later today, just throw in a couple of that."
Between segments, Winn and Arellano returned to Supervisor Steve Christy, the board's lone Republican, and the case for Jeff Rhodes in District 5 — a write-in who made the November ballot with double the signatures he needed — to give Christy a second vote and force public debate on a board that currently runs four to one. Winn ran the down-ballot map: an outside single-shot chance in the more-Democratic LD18, and Daniel Butierez's uphill third run in CD7, where she argued Grijalva's drift to the extreme may be alienating her own voters. She reminded listeners the party holds a registration advantage of roughly 386,000 statewide — worth nothing, she stressed, without turnout.
Rachel Alexander: Introducing Sine Kerr
Rachel Alexander, a journalist with the Epoch Times Arizona, joined to introduce the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor, Sine Kerr, whom Andy Biggs would present in Pima County that evening. Winn had reached out after seeing Alexander's article on Kerr.
Alexander's summary: Kerr comes from a rural area and has spent her entire life in agriculture, representing Buckeye and surrounding rural areas west of Phoenix, along with parts of Yuma County. "She's going to be wonderful for Arizona's agricultural sector," Alexander said, describing Kerr as pleasant, agreeable, and easy to work with, with good reviews from former colleagues. Alexander added a personal reason for liking her: Kerr sponsored a heartbeat bill to ban abortions after a detectable heartbeat, with an exception for the life of the mother. Kerr's tenure in the state Senate overlapped Biggs's own, so the two would have worked together, and Winn — who was at the Attorney General's office from 2011 to 2015 — recalled positive interactions with Kerr as thoughtful and intelligent, someone who brings a rural perspective to a state that is heavily agricultural.
Alexander offered what she called a possibly controversial view: that Kerr, as the daughter of a Mexican legal immigrant, could bring significant Hispanic support, particularly in general elections. She cited Alice Lara's sweep of a hospital district board race against several progressives, which Lara attributed to her surname. Winn agreed heritage is heritage — "they didn't input that into her this week" — and shared that her own daughter-in-law was born in Mexico and became a citizen, arguing the citizenship test should be required of every junior high and high school student. On whether Republicans are losing Hispanic voters gained under Trump, Alexander was measured: she attributed any softening to normal political cycles across all demographics rather than a Hispanic-specific phenomenon.
The conversation turned to water, where Alexander noted Hobbs had released a video attacking Kerr's position on water rights — which Alexander called hypocritical, since Kerr has served on Hobbs's own water board. She said she trusts Kerr over Hobbs on the issue.
Alexander also detailed her reporting on the pay-to-play investigation facing Hobbs, which she noted is being pursued by Attorney General Kris Mayes — a genuine dispute on the Democratic side, with Hobbs declining to commit to an interview by Mayes's office. The case Alexander described involved Sunshine Acres, a residential home for children in Mesa: after being turned down for a rate increase, the provider gave a large donation to Hobbs's inaugural, and the raise was then approved at a level well above comparable homes. Winn added that John Giles was Mesa's mayor when that occurred.
The two closed on elections. Alexander argued Democrats are focused on the top three statewide races, which she tied to Hobbs's refusal to debate, and said Maricopa County is in better shape with Justin Heap as recorder. Winn returned to her recurring points — the roughly 8,900 undeliverable ballots that go out every Pima County election, the recent postal ruling seeking access to voter rolls, and the states stonewalling that access — and back to Proposition 144 as Arizona's chance to enact the SAVE Act without waiting on the U.S. Senate. She recounted again the federal court win, in Judge Michael Liburdi's courtroom, over the rule she says was written to bar ICE agents from voting in uniform but drafted broadly enough to sweep in all law enforcement and military. Her standard, as always, was turnout over registration: "Being registered and voting are two different actions."
Winn sent listeners toward the evening's event — doors at 6 p.m. at Maranatha Church, 334 West Los Reales Road — to welcome Biggs and Kerr in Biggs's first big Pima County setting since winning the primary. "We voted for Andy Biggs bigly in Pima County," she said, "and we want to celebrate that tonight, and our great voter turnout. We've got more work to do, and we're ready to do it."