Guests - Jeff Rhodes, Dave Smith
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Two days after Arizona's primary, with roughly 20,000 Pima County ballots still uncounted, Kathleen Winn opened with a result nobody expected her to get: for the first time in years, Republicans have fielded a candidate in Supervisor District 5. Jeff Rhodes needed 143 write-in votes to make the November ballot. He appears to have cleared it comfortably. "The good news is in November, it'll be pre-printed on the ballot," Winn said — which means voters in a district that has effectively had no choice will have one.
The rest of the morning worked outward from there: what a second conservative vote on a five-member board actually buys, why a felon with a prior aggravated assault conviction was out at two in the morning with a gun, and — with former county chair Dave Smith — the uglier question of how a party that just finished beating itself up intends to unify before October.
Jeff Rhodes: Clearing the Bar
The count as of Thursday morning stood at 230 confirmed write-in votes for Rhodes, against the 143 he needed. Beyond that sits a larger pool: roughly 400-plus ballots identified as write-ins but not yet visually reviewed for the name written on them. With 20,000 to 21,000 ballots still to be tabulated countywide, Rhodes expected the number to keep climbing.
Winn has a wager riding on it. "Jeff and I have a deal that if he gets over 500 write-in votes, I am treating him and his wife and my husband and I to a steak dinner." Rhodes negotiated her down from a thousand. "I'm always good for a good steak," he said. Verification work happens Saturday.
The composition of the outstanding ballots matters, Winn noted: these are mail ballots that arrived on time and drop-box ballots requiring additional certification. That volume is itself the good news — turnout looks healthier than expected. In some polling places, the Republican-to-Democrat ratio ran three to one, though both acknowledged the asymmetry behind it. "There's been very few competitive races on the Democrat side," Rhodes said. "There's been several on our side."
The statistic that pleased them most was one they'd learned over the weekend: Pima County's Republican turnout matched the state average, and came in slightly above it. "Because we're special," Rhodes said. Winn's interest was in what it proves. "Number one, we can do it."
What she wants fixed before November is the registration problem. Voters who believed they were on the early ballot list waited until Election Day to discover no ballot had come. Others found themselves reclassified as party not declared — which wouldn't have stopped them from voting, "but they didn't know that." Her prescription was a habit rather than a one-time fix: "Kind of like you go to your dentist twice a year. You've got to check your ballots." Party registration won't matter in the general, she noted, but people should be registered in the party they think they're registered in.
Jeff Rhodes: The Downtown Shooting, and a Plea Agreement
The nine-victim shooting in downtown Tucson gave Rhodes his sharpest argument, because the story turns entirely on decisions made before the trigger was pulled.
He walked through the record as he read it. The shooter was already a felon and a prohibited possessor. "He wasn't supposed to have a gun. He had no business having a weapon in the first place. Just having it in his possession was a felony, much less actually firing shots." The underlying conviction, Rhodes said, came from an October 2024 incident: aggravated assault with a weapon, a class three felony carrying seven and a half to fifteen years, plus a second felony charge for firing a shot at someone inside city limits. He entered a plea agreement on May 12, 2025. The sentence: four years of probation. No jail time.
"So that's a county problem," Winn said. Rhodes corrected her precisely: "It's a prosecutor problem." County Attorney Laura Conover, he noted, made a public statement afterward and pointed to the judge. Winn — who worked in the attorney general's office — wasn't buying it. "Doesn't the plea agreement come from the prosecutor's office?" Rhodes explained the mechanism: a plea agreement is negotiated between the prosecuting attorney and the defense attorney, and "if that plea agreement does not give the judge discretion, the judge is going to stick with what's there." Give a lenient judge discretion, and you get a lenient sentence. Either way the terms are written upstream.
His frustration extended to where the man was that night. "He had no business being at a bar or being out at two o'clock in the morning if he was on probation, as far as I'm concerned."
Both were emphatic about who did their jobs. Police officers on foot downtown responded within moments, Rhodes said — "very quickly and very heroically and expertly." They neutralized the threat, then began rendering aid and calming the scene. What bothers him is the response from above: "Why do we have leadership, and I use that term loosely, who are not celebrating police officers and deputies in our area that do things like that? Instead, the police and the sheriff's office is villainized." He included the sheriff himself in that leadership: "He's a political machine. He's not really a law enforcement leader."
Winn's contrast was with the mayor, who followed a mass shooting by talking about firearms rather than the responders. "Those people had every right to be there and enjoy the evening," Rhodes said. The people of the community, regardless of party, "want to be able to take their kids to the park and play on the playgrounds. We don't have that ability right now."
He also cited a statistic he'd read in an interview with a former Tucson police chief, dated September 2025: that 60 percent of felony cases the department handles go unprosecuted. He couldn't recall the chief's name, and the figure comes secondhand — but he drew the obvious inference: "I'm not surprised he's no longer the chief, because bringing that statistic out does not make the administration look good." Winn framed the fix as broken-windows policing. Rhodes made the causal case: the same population commits low-level and high-level crime, "so if we take care of them when they commit those low-level crimes, they're not given the opportunity to commit the higher level crime."
Jeff Rhodes: Why an MBA and Six Years in the Jail
Asked what qualifies him, Rhodes started with the least impressive-sounding answer. "First off, being a concerned citizen. I think that's the number one thing."
Then the résumé. He spent six years working in the jail, promoted young to shift supervisor — "I had to learn leadership very young, and how to guide people and get people to perform at their peak." Given the county's current problems, he noted dryly, jail experience is "probably not a bad thing." He later moved into business management and holds an MBA.
That combination is what Winn was fishing for. Business people see government differently, she argued, drawing on her own decades in business before four years inside the attorney general's office. "You're not a bureaucrat. You're someone who understands checks and balances, assets, liabilities. And we have a liability problem in Pima County."
Rhodes's diagnosis is administrative bloat, and he was specific about the mechanism. His tool is span of control — the number of people each supervisor manages, arranged as a pyramid. Management school taught him the ideal is six. "I disagree with that. I really do." A capable leader at the levels in question can handle eight to ten.
Then the arithmetic. The county administrator has three deputies. Each of those deputies oversees ten department heads — thirty people. The administrator has another eight reporting directly, plus an assistant with one more. "There's thirty-nine department heads." His proposal is consolidation: combine departments administratively. His estimate of the savings: "We can probably cut our budget by three to five percent right off the top without touching any public services. Just in administrative costs alone."
The point of the savings is what it funds. "If we can get the efficiency of the administration better, that frees up money for better roads, better public safety, better prosecution — put money where it belongs in the functioning areas." Winn liked one item in particular. "You had me at better roads. We should say that on your sign." Rhodes named his three: law and order, common sense spending, and fixing the roads.
He was unbothered by how the administration will receive it. "I'm not here to be liked."
His frustration with how government presents itself was the sincerest thing he said. "There's no reason that government should be as complicated as it is. It should be simple, because we're supposed to be a government of the people. So why not make it simple enough that the average person can actually understand everything that's going on?" His budget metaphor: a five-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle that ought to be the kind you hand a three-year-old.
Jeff Rhodes: What Made Him Run
Rhodes was planning to run in 2028. He walked into Winn's office with that plan and left thirty minutes later with a different one. "That was a good plan when you walked into the office," Winn said. "It just wasn't the plan when you left."
What put him in the office in the first place was noise outside his own house. Sitting in his home office, he said, he was listening to gunshots and cars drag racing on the roads, with nothing being done. Then he saw a news segment covering the same problem nearby — residents describing bullets hitting their houses and their cars, calling the sheriff's office, getting nothing. The appointed incumbent supervisor's answer, in that same segment, was to study the situation. "Why? It's very simple," Rhodes said. "You have the sheriff's office go out there, and you find somebody breaking the law, you arrest them, you charge them, and you move on."
The activity has slowed since — which is the part that bothers him most. "The fact that it became public on the news put pressure on the board of supervisors, also put pressure on the sheriff's office to do something about it." The land in question was state trust land, so the enforcement authority already existed. "So it took news media to do something about it. That was the last straw for me. We should be taking care of the community, whether it's a news story or not."
His distinction between what he is and what he's replacing became the segment's refrain. "He's not a leader, he's an activist. And that's what I want to change. I'm not an activist, I'm a leader." He extended it to both bodies: "We need to get the board of supervisors — and the city council, for that matter — to stop being activist organizations and go back to being leadership. We need common sense leadership." Winn's reaction: "Oh, stop it." Rhodes: "I know it's a lot to ask." Winn: "No, it's so boring. And don't we need some boring?"
He was equally clear that the district isn't a Republican district and he isn't running as though it were. "I don't want people to think that I'm only going to represent the Republicans. There's a whole lot of Democrats in that area, and I think if we really sit down and talk, we will find a lot of common ground. I don't know of any Democrat homeowners in District 5 that want their property taxes to go up or want their water rates to go up." Roads are the clearest example — much of District 5 sits outside city limits, making it county responsibility, and Rhodes believes it has disproportionately bad roads. He's heard of businesses that flew in to look at property and turned around on the drive from the airport. "They said, no, we're not doing this."
He described the door-knocking as unexpectedly enjoyable. One encounter stuck with him: he spotted a freedom sticker on a car, stopped to talk, and learned the driver — a registered Republican — had been mailed a Green Party ballot. She also told him she'd persuaded her lifelong-Democrat husband and his family that the party has changed. "It's just an activist organization," Rhodes relayed. Winn's response: "I love stories like that."
Jeff Rhodes: Affordable Housing Is Not the Answer
Winn wanted to end on housing, drawing on nearly forty years in real estate and development. Her structural objection is planning: dropping high-density units next to acreage is "incongruent," and development ought to follow an intelligent plan rather than a sporadic one.
Rhodes went further. Asked whether affordable housing solves homelessness, his answer was one word: "No." His reasoning: "The quote-unquote affordable housing is not affordable in the first place. It never is. Government-owned housing always fails. It's just a breeding ground for crime."
His alternative is treatment, and he was candid that it can't all be voluntary. "If someone has the option to stay out of a facility and stay high and avoid the really unpleasant detox, they're going to stay out." In many cases, he said, that means an arrest that routes into treatment — but the treatment has to be more than detox. It needs an inpatient component followed by job opportunities. "You've got to get these people the opportunity to have a life outside of the drugs. That's where people are going to have success."
Winn brought her own experience to it. In her twenties she worked in homelessness in Pima County at New Beginnings, later the Shalom House, housing single women and children. Most weren't on drugs — they were homeless from life circumstances during the housing crisis of the 1980s. Residents stayed as long as they needed, and the program did job training and family stabilization before transitioning them to apartments. "We had a 96 percent success rate." Both named Gospel Rescue Mission and Teen Challenge as the local organizations doing it right, with Rhodes explaining why: "Part of the reason they're successful is that they're doing job preparation and they're helping people learn how to live and how to be successful. It's not just about stopping the drug use. That's just step one."
Winn's complaint about county spending followed from that. She noted Gospel Rescue Mission, to her knowledge, takes no county or city money — "which tells me they're doing it right" — while millions go to organizations she considers less effective. She also argued the county has no idea what it's dealing with. "I don't think we know how many homeless people we have. I don't think there's an accurate count." She sketched the categories that would need counting: mental illness, veterans with access to benefits, the small chronically homeless population who choose it, drug addiction, and people who lost jobs or are living on the edge of the cost of living. "Who's in what category, and directing them to services" is the work. "You can't solve a problem" without quantifying it.
Rhodes's objection to the current approach was that it doesn't address anything. "We're giving them a tent to live in. We might even be giving them a portable shower. But are we taking care of the problem?" What follows is a public-health hazard neither could get past: needles in parks where children play. "Kids pick up stuff," Rhodes said. "If it looks shiny or looks different, kids are going to pick it up."
Winn's counterexample was Washington, D.C., which she said she's visited about five times in the past two years. "The area of Washington, D.C. is totally transformed. And you know what they got rid of? They got rid of the crime." The city is clean, she said, and the outgoing Democratic mayor eventually stopped resisting the help and took it. Rhodes closed the loop on the economics: "If we can take care of the crime issue, we might actually be able to bring in some businesses that bring in good high-paying jobs. And those high-paying jobs are going to go to the locals."
Jeff Rhodes: What a Second Vote Actually Buys
The obvious objection to Rhodes's candidacy is that even winning leaves conservatives at two of five. His answer was procedural, and it's the most concrete case he made all morning.
"The number one benefit right off the bat is forcing votes." With Supervisor Steve Christy currently alone, motions die for lack of a second. Two members produce a motion and a second — "which forces a vote. Now the other three supervisors have to put a public vote on the record." The value is the record itself: "So people can see what they're doing and what they're not doing. Right now, they're just hiding their four to one."
Winn framed it as restoring the body's function rather than flipping it. Not every Democrat on the board is at the same end of the spectrum, she argued, and the point is "having someone representing the people. That's what these seats are for. We seem to have lost sight of that."
The seat's history is part of Rhodes's argument. It became vacant when the sitting supervisor ran in a special congressional election after her father's death; because she had only recently been elected, the appointment couldn't run to the end of the term in 2028, so it goes to the next scheduled election. The incumbent, therefore, has never faced voters. "He was not elected. He was appointed," Winn said. "And from what I have heard, he was handpicked" — by his predecessor, whose seat it had been.
Rhodes's website is rhodesfordistrict5.com. As Winn put it, spelling the name is about to stop being necessary: "In November, it'll be pre-printed on the ballot."
Dave Smith: 'Being a Bad Winner Is a Character Flaw'
Winn brought on former Pima County Republican chair Dave Smith — calling in from Iowa, where his grandchild's baptism was set for Sunday — for a conversation she framed carefully. "I invited former chair Dave Smith on because I didn't want to be like the mean mom. But Dave, I think we need to put some people in time out."
The subject was conduct after victory. Smith reached for Ronald Reagan's eleventh commandment: "Just don't speak ill of each other. Now, you can argue, debate ideas, express your ideas. But when you start personally attacking people, that creates a schism." His own reintroduction to Arizona politics had been jarring. "When I moved back to Arizona, what shocked me was the vicious nature of some people in this county." His rule for why it's self-defeating: "You can't sling mud and not get dirty."
His complaint wasn't about disagreement but about people whose entire participation is attack. In all the years he's known certain figures, he said, he's never seen them do anything constructive for the party. His harshest characterization was that such behavior functionally serves the other side — "we don't need a Democrat party when we have Republicans like some of these people" — and he offered a psychological read he acknowledged was speculation: that it's easier to attack the people closest to you than strangers, the way dysfunction usually runs toward family. Neither he nor Winn named anyone.
Smith's problem with the unity talk now filling everyone's mouth was its timing. "The odd thing is, once again this election, we saw some mud being slung. And now everybody's calling for unity. But my problem with the unity is it's hard. It's really hard, because I don't know that I want unity — but I want you to stop being that person that I can't stand." He noted he'd absorbed name-calling and threats during his own run for chairman and never brought them up, because he was trying to follow Reagan's rule.
Winn's version was blunter and aimed at a specific behavior. "When a primary election is over, you then need to win over the people that didn't vote for you. And by jumping up and down and saying, we beat you, we beat you — really dumb. Just a dumb strategy." She noted there's a thing about being a bad loser, "there's also a thing about being a bad winner." Her particular irritation was a winning camp that celebrated by attacking Turning Point — an organization that had endorsed their own incumbent congressman. "You just attacked an organization that he went and got the endorsement from and said, we beat Turning Point. No, you didn't. Your candidate did whatever he did and he won. But he still has to get through a general election. Newsflash: you need all those voters who didn't vote for your guy."
Her instruction to the gloating was to go do the work instead. "When you think you're so much smarter than everyone out there and you're sitting behind your keyboard — you probably needed to go knock a few doors, as opposed to pontificating and sending out notes to people to intimidate them. Just knock it off." And she was explicit that the winner's record isn't spotless either: "I know for sure that the candidate that won doesn't live in a glass home. He had sins of his own. They just weren't exploited."
She also made clear the party will do its job regardless. "I've got some people that I wanted to win. They didn't win. But I'm going to do everything I can to get their opponents elected, because the thought of having Democrats in some of these high-level places in the state, including our legislature, is just unacceptable to me." Her one request of the victors: "If you won, you won. Take your victory. There's no reason to pour salt in the wound."
Smith's formulation was the one worth keeping: "Being a good winner is a character trait. Being a bad winner is a character flaw."
Both noted that the party has historically absorbed converts rather than purity-testing them. Reagan was a Democrat once, Winn pointed out, and so was the current president. "We somehow have lost sight of what's really important. What do people stand for? What do they want to get done? Is it about them and their ego?"
Winn also gave a sense of what the chair's job actually involves. Someone in her area has repeatedly left bags of dog waste at her mailbox and most recently threw them at the campaign signs in her front yard. Someone mailed sauerkraut to headquarters. "Being the chairman is a gift that keeps on giving," she said. "It's so glamorous." She has five months left and is, by her own account, not counting — "except every other second."
Dave Smith: Turning Point, and the Case for Rebuilding the PC Structure
Smith's defense of Turning Point was unqualified. "Turning Point has become a major asset in our conservative struggle. Absolutely beyond belief. They are out there on the street working, working, working. I wish our PCs would work as much."
That led to a structural argument he clearly wants taken up: "I just think that we need to revamp the PC structure at some point, and especially get younger people in. There's a certain energy."
He was careful not to let that read as a slight to the volunteers he has. His example was the flag waves during the last presidential cycle. "It was 108 degrees out there. And we had 100 people out there, and the mean age, I would guess, was 70 years old, standing in that heat. That's the kind of patriotism we want." What he won't tolerate is those people being denigrated "by some guy sitting on his couch." The distinction he drew was about investment: are these critics emotionally invested in their community, their profession, and their party — or in themselves?
Winn's defense of Turning Point separated the organization from its personnel. "There are people inside Turning Point that people don't like. Okay, imagine that." But the mission Charlie Kirk laid out — reaching college students to undo the damage of liberal universities, giving young people a path where they date, marry, and have families without being demonized for it — is one she considers essential. Her reading of the youth drift toward socialism is that it's fashion without content: "It just seems like the radical idea du jour. And it's until you experience that and what that really is that you lose your freedom. You don't get more freedom." In this country, she noted, you can say what you want without being gunned down or seeing athletes murdered by their own government. "But they don't understand that with that freedom comes a certain obligation."
Dave Smith: Reading the Results
On the governor's race, both saw the margin as settling the question. Andy Biggs took more than 70 percent, and Congressman David Schweikert had conceded in the closing weeks that he'd entered late and without the president's endorsement. "So it turned out he was a gracious loser," Winn said. She expects the two to be respectful with each other — "they've worked together in Congress for a long time." Smith's read was more optimistic than a primary margin usually warrants: "I actually think he's going to be such a unifier. I think he's going to have coattails."
In CD1, Jay Feely beat state Representative Joseph Chaplik. Winn was open about her disappointment while accepting the outcome. She credited the president's endorsement for the result and suspected less-conservative voters bypassed Chaplik. "I'm sad about that, because Joseph is a staunch conservative, and I think he would have served that well. I'm sad about losing that leadership. But Jay Feely, congratulations." The general, she noted, will be hard: "They've been trying to take this seat away from Schweikert for a long time."
CD6 got the most attention, because both live in it. Congressman Juan Ciscomani faces JoAnna Mendoza, whom Winn characterized as more extreme than the current CD7 incumbent — "which is hard to do." She noted Mendoza's military service and drew a line around it: "I appreciate her military service. But everything else she stands for is not in accordance." Her authority for the claim was door-knocking. "I live in CD6. I went out and knocked those doors — over 10,000 doors. I know who's in our district. And they don't want what she's selling."
Smith's frustration was about access to information rather than the candidate. His view is that Mendoza presents as a moderate while her statements suggest otherwise, and that no local outlet will press her on it. "If we had a media that asked tough questions — she's not going to come on your show. She's not going to face any tough questions on any of our local channels. And my frustration is, how do I get the word out to the average person who doesn't seem to be paying attention in Tucson?" His conclusion was a turnout argument: "Congress has got to be maintained controlled by the Republicans. Tucson, folks, you're ground zero."
Winn also flagged the under-vote risk in uncontested primaries, and returned to the item that has been her drumbeat for weeks: voting the entire ballot. Smith made it his closing instruction. "You've got to vote the whole ballot, folks. Don't just check the top three or four. Go all the way down. And if you have doubts, just reach out." Both know from headquarters experience that people call the day they intend to vote, still undecided. "Just call the headquarters if you have doubts."
Dave Smith: Socialism, and What He Says Is at Stake
Smith's most forceful stretch was on the Democratic Socialists of America, and it's worth setting out as his argument rather than as established fact.
His claim is one of category: "DSA, folks, is not a socialist group. It's a communist Marxist group." From there he drew a legal implication — that a serious attorney general would have to sort out whether a party carrying that stance can remain a party under Arizona statute, and that the Democratic Party might have to formally disavow it. That's his reading of the statute, not a court's.
He also invoked Barry Goldwater's line that the silent majority "can out-shout and out-shoot you if necessary," paired with a warning that "your revolution can trigger a rebellion." Smith presented this as analysis grounded in study — he has written and trained in law enforcement and says he's followed political violence research for years — and as a description of where escalation leads rather than an endorsement of it. Readers should weigh it in that light; language about shooting one's political opponents does not become less combustible for being attributed to a former senator, and the argument that only one side commits political violence is contested by the available data rather than settled by it.
His grounding for the urgency was generational and personal. He grew up with friends lost fighting communism in Vietnam, as did Winn. "We just simply can't allow it. And you cannot vote away my freedoms. Just read the Constitution, and also go back to that most important Declaration of Independence."
On the Democratic Party's internal crisis, both saw the same fracture. New York's mayor is "the golden child of the left," Smith said — but "there is no left. Which left are you talking about?" Winn's framing: "Their identity has been taken. Talk about identity theft. This is identity theft of the Democrat Party." The choice she laid out is uncomfortable for them either way: stand with the president to push back against the socialist wing, "that's the last thing they want to do, or they're going to concede the loss of their party to the socialists."
Smith's counterprogramming to the doom was the World Cup. What the tournament exposed, he argued, was America to visitors who arrived expecting worse. "The rest of the world came and judged us superior, judged us great. They were shocked. The American people are wonderful. Our grocery stores are amazing. Our freedoms are fabulous. And that's what they are taking back to their countries" — while, he said, Americans themselves continue in lamentation and complaint.
He also had a theory of who the movement recruits, drawn from a survey he'd read: the typical American Democratic socialist is highly educated and underpaid. "You can't have a degree in the social psychology of multi-ethnic genders and then think you're going to make any money. And that's what's happened. They made no money. They're angry. And they've all been taught that freedom sucks. And freedom doesn't suck."
On school boards, Smith argued the left's most consequential win was structural: non-partisan municipal and school board elections, which he said obscure candidates' politics from voters. "That's one of the great crippling things that's happened to the United States — the school boards have been taken over by the left. And they educate our kids." He recommended two books: James Clavell's short story The Children's Story, which he said warned decades ago how education could erode children's love of country, and Gad Saad's Suicidal Empathy. He also referenced Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism and its account of how a totalitarian state requires a designated enemy — "you've got to have a boogeyman."
Winn's own contribution was the economic argument. "Capitalism is my right. Property, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness implies capitalism, folks." Her historical note: Adam Smith published in 1776, the same year as the Declaration. "Free markets and free people go together. We're not going to let the left take it away." And the remedy she keeps returning to: "The first thing is, we can solve it by voting."
Dave Smith: Guns at Polling Places
A listener text prompted the morning's most direct policy exchange. The question: rather than just permitting officers to vote in uniform, why not remove gun restrictions at polling places entirely?
Smith's answer treated it as a threat assessment. Polling places are a high-liability target, he argued: "You'd only have to do a couple shootings in polling places to intimidate people out of it." His preference was unambiguous: "I want the sheriffs in there, the deputies in there. I want the officers, I want the agents. And I want them packing."
He also offered a historical aside on downtown Tucson, where he was a street cop in the 1970s. It was a rough downtown then and there were always shootings. Now it's beautifully renovated "and it still has shootings, because the judges won't punish people."
Winn tied it back to the litigation she's been describing all week. The Election Procedures Manual provision barring uniformed voting, she argued, was aimed at ICE agents but couldn't say so — "that would have been too obvious. So they did this blanket of military uniforms, of law enforcement." The federal court stayed it. Her objection to the mayor's support for the provision was about risk: "Why would you put your law enforcement officers, who are already vulnerable because they're law enforcement officers, why would you put them at risk like that?"
She credited the win to resources the party hasn't always had. The Oversight Project represented them, with Jeff Clark — who has represented the president — arguing the case, funded by a donor. "Everyone when you were chairman told you, Dave, do this, do that, we need you to do this. But there weren't resources." Her framing of the goal was even-handed on purpose: "to ensure that only registered legal voters vote, and that those that want to vote aren't impeded in their voting because somebody doesn't like people in uniforms." And she warned the fight isn't over: "By the way, they're coming back for more."
Kathleen Winn: The Debrief, and the Ninety Days
Winn's own agenda for the interval between now and October came down to three items.
A registration audit campaign. This was her most repeated instruction of the morning. Voters got wrong ballots, didn't get early ballots, or discovered their registration had changed — with the recorder's office attributing it to DMV interactions. She connected it to a race she hasn't let go of: the same category of problem, she said, cost Abe Hamadeh the attorney general's race, roughly six thousand ballots' worth. Her ask: "You go to the dentist twice a year. You need to check your voter registration and discover what it says. Check now so you get to vote in October, November. Get it cleared up now, and make sure that it stays that way." Also check whether you want to be on the early voting rolls — "a lot of Republicans like to show up on election day."
Trained poll workers. One finding from Tuesday was that workers were in place who didn't know the laws or the rules and made mistakes as a result. Winn extended the benefit of the doubt on intent — "I don't think it was intentional" — but not on consequence. Hundreds of volunteers turned out; she wants them back, better trained. "In November it's for all the marbles."
Unity that survives contact with reality. She had shout-outs for Tara Oster, Joel Strabala, Brenda Simon, and her whole board, and a message for everyone who ran. Her closing frame was about who does the reconciling: "We have to come together. And I don't care if you like each other when we do it — but that's the bottom line." The state chairman, Sergio Arellano, was coming to town that evening to start a unite message, and Winn wanted its scope widened beyond the party: "Let's unite with the community. Let's be the voice of reason. I don't think it's that hard right now. The extremism is scary. I don't think Arizona is San Francisco. I don't think Arizona is New York City."
Her reason for believing that is autobiographical. When she and her husband sold their home in Mesa, they could have gone anywhere, and they chose Pima County — a decision Charlie Kirk once teased her about in a photo they took together, both laughing that she'd left a perfectly good red county for a blue one. "It's turned out to be fortuitous."
She had one word for anyone content to criticize from a distance. "Anybody who is out there and does nothing to help other than criticize other people — just go away. I don't have time. We need people who are committed to getting stuff done." Then, as evidence of her own participation, an injury report: a yard-sign stake opened a six-inch gash in her right leg the other night while she was out in the wind. "I actually bled for my party the other night. It's what we do. And I'm not complaining."
Her last word on the primary's bitterness was a standard rather than a complaint. "You have to look at what serves the greater good. That's the difference between maturity and bombastic BS."
In Memoriam
Winn used the show's final minutes for something else entirely.
On Friday, a pickup truck hauling a trailer blew a red light in Chandler and flipped. A woman was trapped in her car and later died. She was a friend.
Pauline Gray was a single mother who adopted two daughters and a schoolteacher in Chandler. Winn came to know her through the missing-children work she has done for years, when Gray's older daughter disappeared and turned up in Texas. "I've often said that when a child goes missing, we cry — and we cry harder when we get them back," Winn said. "Pauline was one of those moms that I talked to five, seven, ten times a day until we got her daughter back." The case ran two or three weeks, which she noted is short by the standards of that work; their longest lasted five years.
The recovery, in her telling, turned on a chain of accidents. A wrong number from someone in Texas led to a connection that led to the Texas attorney general's office, whose investigator located the girl. She was recovered and flown home. "In recounting everything that happened, I know God's hand was on my shoulder the entire time, because there were too many connections and too many things that saved her daughter's life. But mostly what saved her daughter's life was her mother's love and care and concern."
Both daughters are grown now. One is married; the other is to be married in the fall. A friend of Gray's called Winn to say she had always been grateful for the work.
"Her mom kept her safe until last Friday," Winn said. "And I for one know that she got her job done as a mom. For a short time I got to be part of her life and help her family and restore her family and keep her kids safe. So all I have to say is, rest in peace, Pauline Gray. We've got it from here, and we'll make sure the girls are good."
She signed off with the instruction that followed naturally from it: "Make sure you let people know how much they mean to you, and do good wherever you can."