Guests - Julie Hartman, State Rep. Rachel Keshel, Rachel Alexander
Kathleen Winn closed her week — and the eve of her birthday — with a show she framed as an education good-news week turned into an indictment of the governor. A federal Department of Education spokeswoman opened with the school-choice tools now flowing to states. An LD17 incumbent recounted being shut out of the signing of her own child-protection bill. And an Epoch Times journalist walked through the pay-to-play investigation shadowing Katie Hobbs's reelection. The connective argument, repeated to the point of a birthday wish, was that Arizona's roughly 400,000-vote Republican registration advantage means nothing without turnout.
Julie Hartman: Returning Education to the States
Julie Hartman, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Education, joined as part of the department's 50-state back-to-school radio tour to explain what has changed under Secretary Linda McMahon. President Trump, she said, was reelected with a mandate to sunset a 46-year-old, $3 trillion department and return authority to state leaders, local leaders, and parents — a bureaucracy that, by her accounting, has produced only three in ten students proficient in reading and math. "How can we expect to keep up our economic might, our national security, even preserve our freedom," she asked, "if we fall down on our most basic responsibility to educate our students?"
Hartman detailed two mechanisms. The first, EdFlex authority, now held by half the states including Arizona, lets state leaders waive federal requirements for local districts without first seeking department approval — removing what she called mountains of paperwork so districts can focus on student achievement. The second, a first-ever "returning education to the states" waiver held by six states so far, has freed more than $100 million from federal micromanagement, letting states spend federal dollars flexibly: Iowa on evidence-based literacy, Arkansas on career and technical education. "Bureaucrats in D.C. definitely are not as in touch with the needs of our children as the people who are right in front of them," she said.
The segment's news peg was the Education Freedom Tax Credit, a new program Hartman said 30 states across the political spectrum have embraced. It gives donors to scholarship-granting organizations a dollar-for-dollar federal tax credit of up to $1,700, with the funds helping parents pay for private-school scholarships, tutoring, after-school programs, uniforms, or equipment — usable whether a child attends public or private school. The catch in Arizona, she said, is that Governor Hobbs has not opted in, and states must formally opt in for families to benefit. "By not opting in, Governor Hobbs is not denying President Trump a victory," Hartman said. "She's denying Arizona's families the right to choose the best education for their child." Winn, who noted Arizona pioneered Empowerment Scholarship Accounts and grew the program from 11,000 to nearly 120,000 students, urged listeners to press the governor to opt in.
Rachel Keshel: Shut Out of Her Own Bill Signing
Rachel Keshel, the LD17 incumbent running for reelection to the state House alongside John Winchester, began on the same subject — the governor's refusal to opt into the tax credit — and argued it fits a pattern. Hobbs, she said, has made every move to kill Empowerment Scholarships and strip parents of the ability to educate their children as they see fit, even as school choice polls well across party lines. Keshel said she has Democratic colleagues who quietly used ESAs for their own special-needs children while continuing to vote in lockstep against the program.
The heart of her segment was HB 2995, the Alec and Lydia Act. Keshel recounted its origin: a mother named Hope reached out to her after a Maricopa County family-court judge granted her mentally ill, soon-to-be-ex-husband unsupervised overnight visitation despite her warnings — a man who had checked himself into an institution and spoken openly about his condition. During one such visit, Keshel said, he murdered the couple's two children, Alec and Lydia, roughly six and four years old, and then killed himself. Hope turned the tragedy into a legislative effort so that no other family would face the same, and Keshel, working with Representative Lisa Fink, attached the Alec and Lydia Act to Fink's domestic-violence bill and drove it through both chambers on the last day of the session.
The bill was signed — but Keshel said she was barred from the ceremonial signing, which she and the mothers present attributed to politics. The House chief of staff, she said, told her plainly it was a political move, and had never heard of a legislator being shut out of a signing they had authored. Keshel's reading was that Hobbs did not want to give visible credit to a legislator in LD17, the most targeted district in the state. She declined to make a scene at the event, she said, because the day belonged to Hope and the other mothers, who presented awards to Keshel, Fink, and Senator J.D. Mesnard. Winn, drawing on her own years working with families in the domestic-violence and family-court systems — and her own experience as a mother who once fought a custody battle — praised Keshel for doing the work without seeking acknowledgment: "It's about having the moral courage to stand up to the bureaucratic nonsense that goes on in this state."
Keshel closed on the stakes. Hobbs, she argued, has vetoed more than 500 bills, killed child-safety and family-court legislation, and rebranded herself a moderate — a "total fraud," in Keshel's words, underscored by her running mate John Giles, whom Keshel said pushed progressive policy as Mesa's mayor and is no Republican regardless of his registration. She urged voters to fill both House bubbles for herself and Winchester rather than single-shot, warning that Democrats plan to spend more than $4 million in LD17 against them, and noted the district must be held to keep the chamber and give a potential Governor Biggs a working majority. Her sites are keshel4arizona.com and donatetorachel.com.
Kathleen Winn: Family Court, and a Personal Word
Between guests, Winn made the family-court fight personal. She had, she said, been one of those mothers — in court fighting for her children, at the mercy of decisions she found arbitrary. "Family court has always been a mess," she said. In her mortgage career, she had specialized in working with divorcing couples, negotiating asset division in a way that left both spouses believing she was on their side, always steering toward what was best for the children. That experience, she said, is why Hope's case cut so deep: a court that proved "tone deaf" to a father's stated mental illness and prior hospitalization, and gave him the children anyway.
She turned the lesson toward the election. The passion some Republicans are pouring into resenting primary winners, she argued, would be better spent holding officials accountable after they're elected. "All that passion and energy you're using to hate people," she said, "use it to hold them accountable." A disliked Republican serves two years and can be voted out; a Democrat in the seat, in her framing, is the greater risk. She named the offices she considers proof of the stakes — Laura Conover, Chris Nanos, and the former county treasurer she declined to name — and cast the choice as giving Arizona back to the people.
Rachel Alexander: The Case Against Katie Hobbs
Rachel Alexander, a political reporter for the Epoch Times whom Winn introduced as "the good Rachel," joined to catalog what she has reported on the governor. Hobbs, Alexander said, is bad with her own money — she has had liens placed on her and failed to report Uber income on her taxes — which she offered as reason to doubt Hobbs's stewardship of the state's. She has written extensively, she said, about Hobbs's pay-to-play scheme, one serious enough that fellow Democrat and Attorney General Kris Mayes is investigating it. Winn's framing was that no other gubernatorial candidate under investigation for fraud would be treated as a frontrunner, and both dismissed a Mike Noble poll showing Hobbs up 13 points; Alexander, walking through polling methodology, argued that oversampling Democrats and favorable demographics can manufacture a lead, and that a fair poll would likely show Biggs ahead.
Alexander drew on her own history at the Maricopa County Attorney's Office, where, she said, tracing county supervisors' campaign-finance reports revealed donors connected to the land and building industries who later received county contracts — the court tower she cited as an example of the resulting "revolving door." Her counsel to listeners was to comb Hobbs's finance reports name by name and search each one for its business or government connection. She argued Hobbs's flood of outside advertising money is what sustains her image with older voters who rely on mainstream television news, and both agreed the persuasion battle now runs through platforms those voters don't watch. Winn pushed back gently on the generational point, defending informed older Republicans while conceding that reaching the youngest voters requires meeting them where they are — an effort she credited to Turning Point, American Majority, and other groups on the ground in Pima County.
Both praised Andy Biggs at length. Winn, who said she has known Biggs and his wife Cindy a long time and noted their daughter Miley is running for his old state Senate seat, cast him as honest, constitutionally grounded, and willing to call out his own party — citing his stand against Kevin McCarthy. She rejected the "boring" label and, more forcefully, the claim that Biggs would raise taxes 23 percent, calling it "a complete and unadulterated lie." Alexander, who said Biggs championed reform of the state bar after it came after conservatives in 2010, agreed he has "guts" that milquetoast congressmen in safe districts rarely show. Both endorsed Sine Kerr as a stable, capable running mate; Alexander recalled working with Kerr on legislation protecting vulnerable people and children.
The segment closed on the WNBA controversy, which Alexander called the final nail in the coffin for a feminist movement she said now hurts women. What made it notable, she argued, was that the feud is erupting inside a traditionally Democratic institution, a sign the issue is expanding and no longer a winning one for the left. Winn praised Sophie Cunningham for standing up on the question of biological sex in women's sports and Caitlin Clark as a phenom taking physical punishment on the court, arguing that jealousy of a straight, white star drives some of the hostility. Both tied it to Proposition 318 and Title IX, and to Winn's grandchildren — 12 girls and seven boys among her 19 — as the reason to hold the line: "There's lines in the sand that we have to stand up to."
Kathleen Winn: The Birthday Wish
Winn ended the week reflective. Fifty years earlier, a 17-year-old paying her own way, she had chosen the University of Arizona over ASU and California schools — a fee receipt she still keeps reads $250, and zero at the bottom once grants and scholarships came through. She became a Gamma Phi Beta, a KVOA intern, and then a television journalist, in a run that "seems to have gone by in a flash."
Her closing turned the reflection into an appeal. She dislikes the word "unity," she admitted, but insists on agreement about the objective: "This isn't about names and personalities. This is about who's on your ballot." She noted the flyers already arriving from Democratic candidates — Mendoza's, and a mailer from a candidate named Soto targeting Republican households on his military service — and argued a military record alone is no qualification, pointing out that Chris King, the LD17 Senate candidate, served in the Army as well. She ran the local ask one more time: raise money for the ticket, elect Jeff Rhodes to give Supervisor Steve Christy a second vote against Andrés Cano's board, and turn out rather than stay home nursing a primary grudge. "I don't want any more Arizona kids to die because we don't have the right people in those seats," she said. "My birthday wish is we all get this act together and we do what we need to do to deliver Arizona back to the Republican Party."