Guests - Brenda Marts, J.L. Wittenbraker, Yvette Serino, Seth Keshel
The Andy Biggs campaign opened Kathleen Winn's Friday with news: Biggs had named former state senator Sine Kerr as his running mate, making her Arizona's first Republican nominee for the newly created office of lieutenant governor. Winn described Kerr as the daughter of an Army combat veteran and a naturalized citizen from Mexico, a Buckeye dairy farmer of more than 40 years who represented Maricopa and Yuma counties in the state Senate, married 46 years to her husband Bill, with four children and 12 grandchildren in the West Valley. "Arizona is going to win big this November with Biggs and Kerr," she said, noting she had already put in an early request to get the ticket down to Pima County, and that the praise for Kerr was coming from both sides of the aisle — "already a good sign." With that, the show turned to its dominant subject: a county spending measure Winn wants voters to reject, and the ground game she says will decide whether Pima County matters in November.
Brenda Martz: The Case Against Proposition 425
Brenda Martz, an LD18 resident who lives in Supervisor District 5 and whom Winn calls one of the hardest-working advocates in Pima County, came into the studio to break down Proposition 425 — the measure that consumed the show's entire first hour.
The mechanics, as Martz laid them out: the ballot measure asks voters to approve a large increase to the county's expenditure limit, raising a base figure of roughly $93 million by another $70 million, to about $163 million. That cap dates to the 1980s and, run through the formulas, governs annual spending she put near $760 million today — which the measure would allow to climb toward $1.4 billion. Her comparison was Maricopa County, which spends about $1.9 billion while serving a population four times Pima's, has run under its cap, and has dropped its property tax rate for six straight years. Pima, she said, has raised its rate over the same period. "What are we doing with the money? That's the frustrating part."
The reason the measure matters, Martz argued, is where the county's money comes from. "The only place Pima County can get money is in property taxes. So if you double the amount they can spend, they're going to come back and double the amount they request from the population." The measure's supporters say it carries no tax increase, and technically it doesn't this year — but, she said, it opens the door: "This will be a property tax increase. Absolutely. And it'll be a huge one. It can double the property taxes on every single property." Winn framed it as a control that has done its job: "For 45 years it's worked. Now they want to up it."
Much of the hour centered on affordable housing, which both women identified as the spending's justification and its weakest point. Martz, who has managed rentals for years, called the premise self-defeating: raising property taxes to fund affordable housing simply raises the cost landlords pass to tenants. "So what happened to affordable housing? Oh, you just raised it again and again and again." She said the county has given roughly $20 million since 2022 to builders across about 20 projects, at figures approaching a million dollars apiece, while its working definition of "affordable" tracks HUD figures — a studio pegged near $996 a month, a two-bedroom near $1,400 — that run above what she charges for comparable units without any county money. Her alternative was direct and personal: if the county wanted to help, it would work through apartment managers who already know which tenants are genuinely struggling. "The better use of money is to deal with things on a personal level."
Winn drew on her own history in the field, recalling work on homelessness in her 20s as a realtor when the Tucson Board of Realtors started Shalom House, which became New Beginnings — a program that took in single mothers with children and homeless veterans, did job training, and posted, in her telling, a better-than-90-percent rate of keeping people from returning to homelessness. She praised Gospel Rescue Mission's work but rejected the idea that government is the right vehicle, arguing it fails to reach the root cause of a high cost of living. "Affordable housing is not a good solution to homelessness."
Both returned repeatedly to accountability. Martz, who spent years in finance and lending with JPMorgan Chase, compared the county's appetite to an addiction that set in when federal COVID and immigration money flowed and now has no source but the taxpayer: "They got used to that power and spending the money and enriching NGOs in Pima County. And now they don't have that power. And we should not return it." Winn's recurring metaphor for the cap was a household one — taking the credit cards away from someone who won't stop spending. Her recurring remedy was electoral: giving Supervisor Steve Christy, whom both credited as a businessman who understands a balance sheet, a second conservative vote so his motions can be seconded and the spending debated in public.
The measure's process was itself a grievance. Martz said 425 surfaced as a single paragraph buried in a meeting agenda, with no public conversation — "they're hoping you don't notice." Winn compared the resulting regret to the RTA roads plan, where voters later felt the ballot language hadn't matched the outcome. Their shared verdict echoed the defeat of the earlier Proposition 414: "The 425 has to be a no."
Winn also tied the fight to the District 5 supervisor race, thanking outgoing Adelita Grijalva for her service on her way to Congress while arguing the appointed replacement hasn't measured up, and pointing to Republican Jeff Rhodes — confirmed the day before as officially on the November ballot after collecting more than double the write-in votes he needed — as the "one local option" to change the board's dynamic. Rhodes, she said, would give Christy an ally who understands the economics rather than a member who "always has to say, I have to go research it."
Brenda Martz: Roads, the Loop, and a Set of Corrections
The second half of Martz's visit widened into the county's broader spending habits — and, in an unusual on-air move, Winn later issued a round of corrections after Christy's office reached out during the show.
The initial exchange concerned money raised for roads that both said had been redirected toward the Chuck Huckleberry Loop, the county's 137-mile bike-and-pedestrian network. Martz put its annual maintenance near $700,000, rising toward $1.4 million once the county's newer "One Pima" cleanup and safety initiative added a further $750,000 for the trail — a doubling she attributed to the homeless encampments and safety problems along it. She also questioned a county claim of $9.40 in economic and health benefits for every dollar spent, and noted roughly $22 million in direct local funds spent building the loop since formal tracking began in 2002. Winn's objection was one of priorities: "When you prioritize a small population and don't take care of the basics for the rest of us, I get kind of frustrated." She pointed to the roads — "pothole after pothole after pothole" — and to safety incidents including a cyclist killed on the loop, a woman recently killed after being punched, and the nine wounded in the downtown shooting. "The county's gotten way too far away from their basic function."
After the break, Winn read the corrections from Christy's staff plainly. The loop, she clarified, was paid for with flood-control money. And the ballot arguments she and Martz had been urging listeners to submit do not go to the Board of Supervisors — they go into the publicity pamphlet mailed to voters. She also refined the policy point: property taxes are meant to increase with the value of property, not to fund social services and what she called pet projects, and a sales tax would only be permitted to offset a capped property tax. A reasonable board, she argued, could diversify the revenue stream with a sales tax that protected seniors by capping property taxes; the current one, in her view, is instead pursuing a straightforward increase. She cited a book given to her by her late friend Chris Sheaf, two weeks before he died, arguing that affordable housing is not the answer to homelessness — and pledged the show would host the public education meetings she says the county skipped.
Winn closed the segment on the broader fall stakes: the ESA program in court over what she hopes are enough invalid signatures to sink a repeal effort, and the fight over Secretary of State Adrian Fontes's language describing the Arizona SAVE Act, with the Oversight Project — the firm that represented her in the uniformed-voting suit — filing an amicus brief due that day.
J.L. Wittenbraker: How to Fight 425 Before the Deadline
J.L. Wittenbraker joined to turn the argument into action, with a hard deadline: 5 p.m. Wednesday, August 5th, to submit written arguments against Proposition 425 for the voter pamphlet. "If you want to have someone on your team who's going to get stuff done, she's one of those people," Winn said.
Wittenbraker's guidance was practical. The best way to get informed, she said, is to attend a Republican Party meeting, where the Pima County GOP can identify a voter's legislative district and meeting times; op-eds are already appearing, and the county's own webpage and elections page carry information, as does independent research. "I'm personally, for the record, against — against any more government spending, given the amount of waste we're seeing in their fiscal systems." She recommended studying previously approved Pima County and City of Tucson measures and their financials, where she said voters would find "your tax dollars are going for things that weren't even presented as an issue."
To submit an argument, she walked listeners through the county webpage — search "ballot measure argument," past the extreme-heat banner alert, to a portal that charges a $25 fee and limits each submission to 300 words. That word cap, she said, is exactly why volume matters: "That's why we need everyone to really research and submit an argument," populating the voter pamphlet with varied cases against the measure. The banner alert became a running joke between the two — Winn asking where the banners were for extreme crime, homelessness, drugs, and spending, Wittenbraker deadpanning that all of it was "caused by the extreme heat." Winn promised the Pima County GOP would post step-by-step instructions that weekend for anyone who wanted help framing their own comments.
Wittenbraker's closing was a call to the whole county: "We have some of the most challenging issues here in Pima County and all of Arizona. So it's all up to us to spread the word and engage with our neighbors."
Yvette Serino: Training the People Who Win Campaigns
Yvette Serino, deputy regional director and national speaker for the Leadership Institute, called in to promote two training events and to make the case that Pima County's Republican deficit can be closed by capturing independents around what Winn calls 80-20 issues.
The first event is Catalyst for Change, Thursday, August 6th, 6 to 9 p.m. at the DoubleTree by Hilton, 280 South Church in Tucson — free with promo code WIN26 (one N), registration at leadershipinstitute.org or through the Pima County GOP site. It is built, Serino said, for "candidates, campaign staff or grassroots leaders, activists, precinct committee members, community organizers — any kind of leader," and covers campaign communications, leadership and organization, and building strong local organizations, with dinner included and a panel discussion afterward on hot topics including socialism. The training normally runs about $150. A special guest, Heather Sellers, is coming from Washington — a friend of both Serino and Winn, who noted Sellers helped her during her own run for Congress and "brings information that we don't have."
The second is an Arizona Conservative Campaign School, Friday, August 8th, 9 to 4 in Mesa — free with promo code ARIZONA (all caps) — which Serino called the biggest campaign school the Institute runs in the state. It features Leadership Institute figures Ron Nehring, director of its International School of Politics, and David Reed, who oversees the battleground program for Arizona. Designed as a crash course for candidates and campaign managers, it also welcomes anyone considering a run: "This is a good way to learn about structure and how campaigns work."
Serino's pitch leaned on the Institute's own frugality as a selling point. "We could teach some people about fiscal conservatism, because we take what we have and we use it the best we can. We don't throw money at problems — we actually work hard to solve them." Winn's endorsement was about energy as much as content: for a candidate worn down by a long cycle, she said, hearing about resources they didn't know they had "gives energy to the whole county." She called Serino "a force of nature" and confirmed she'd be at the Tucson event.
Seth Keshel: Fetterman, the Senate Map, and the Midterm Math
Seth Keshel — the election analyst Winn introduces as "the first gentleman of LD17," married to House candidate Rachel Keshel — closed the show with an analysis prompted by his own Substack on Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman.
His thesis was that Fetterman is "tilling the fields" to leave the Democratic Party. The precedent Keshel offered was his own 2022 call on Tulsi Gabbard: he predicted her departure from the Democrats would be, "just like when the ocean recedes before a tsunami," the first step toward her becoming a Republican — which she did, reversing most of her positions and serving as a "fiercely pro-Trump" Director of National Intelligence. He sees the same signals around Fetterman, who he said carries a 77 percent disapproval among Democrats (per Quinnipiac) as the party fields hard-left, DSA-aligned candidates even in states like Michigan, and whose own state party has signaled it won't back him.
Keshel ruled out an independent path. Pennsylvania sits "at the heart of the two-party battle," he argued, and the Senate's only independents — Bernie Sanders and Angus King — represent small states that "enjoy their novelties." His comparison was Kyrsten Sinema, who kicked the tires on an independent Arizona run and "before you know it, she was out of the race." A Republican Fetterman, he said, would follow the model of New Jersey's Jeff Van Drew: elected as a Democrat in 2018, voting with the party 90 percent of the time and co-sponsoring the For the People Act, then switching in early 2020 to become a 90-percent Republican who now calls that same bill "socialism served on a platter." Should Fetterman make a similar transition, Keshel argued, his voting record would "far surpass 90 percent of Republicans in the Senate," outflanking the Murkowskis, Collinses, and Tillises. The catch, on the show's signature issue: Fetterman opposes the SAVE Act, which is why a Van Drew–style conversion would matter.
On the Senate map, Keshel put the current split at 53-47 and expected it to hold near there, with North Carolina — where Michael Whatley is running — the seat most likely to move to 52-48. He was unworried about the open South Carolina seat, expecting Lindsey Graham's sister to hold it in a crowded field. On the SAVE Act itself, he said the latest plan is to pass it through reconciliation, addressing its three pillars: no noncitizens registered to vote, voter ID, and a review of voter rolls for ineligible entries. Arizona, he noted, would still need to do work on mail-in ballot controls — modeled on Florida's 2022 address-verification law — which is why the state's own SAVE Act measure, referred to the November ballot with the help of Alex Kolodin and Rachel Keshel, still matters even if the federal bill passes.
The House, Keshel said, is where his pessimism concentrates. He counts only about 45 remotely playable seats and 23 genuinely up in the air. History runs against the incumbent party — it has lost House seats in 20 of 23 midterms since 1934, by an average of 27 — but redistricting, he argued, makes this "one of the best chances in that 92 years" to break the pattern. His two local concerns are CD1 and CD6. In CD1, he gave Jay Feely "a decent chance" because Democrats nominated a candidate cozy with the DSA faction, though he noted David Schweikert's own 2024 margin there was thin. CD6, where Juan Ciscomani faces JoAnna Mendoza, he called a perennial tipping-point seat complicated by a decade of suburban drift in formerly Romney and McCain strongholds like Oro Valley and SaddleBrooke. Ciscomani, he said, has voted with the president and run a stronger term than his last; Mendoza, in Keshel's blunt assessment, is running from her own record while embracing the socialist platform. "Please go beyond the commercials and see who people really are."
His larger read on the midterm was structural. A president's supporters, content that "their guy" is in the White House, are simply less motivated to turn out, and on issues like the border — where many voters feel the problem is being handled — the Democratic "shopping cart" shifts to terrain like health care and abortion where Republicans are less configured to fight. Yet he doubted the DSA travels statewide in Arizona: he pointed to 2018, when a far-less-radical David Garcia "got absolutely smoked" by Doug Ducey, and argued the socialist wing will cost Democrats in the East Valley areas that decide statewide races while pushing more of the Latino working class toward Republicans.
He ended where Winn ends every show — on unity, and on math. Pima County, he said, carries a 55,000-voter Republican deficit, "and all Republicans in this county do is fight one another based on ideological purity. We do not have the luxury of a party registration advantage to be picky about who's the most conservative of them all. I'm tired of it." Winn's answer was the one she has repeated all week: "I don't care if you like the person that got elected or not. I don't care if you even hold your nose. Because you do not want what the other party is offering." Her one addition, aimed at candidates who alienated voters in the primary: "If you've offended people and you're running for something, you might want to own up to it." Both closed on LD17, urging voters in the district to fill both House bubbles for John Winchester and Rachel Keshel so Republicans can reclaim the seat.