Betsy Brantner Smith: Rain Warnings, Michigan Fallout and a Courtroom Fight in Massachusetts
Sgt. Betsy Brantner Smith (Ret.), spokesperson for the National Police Association, joined Kathleen Winn for the Monday "Smith & Winn" segment, which this week ran on two tracks: practical advice on a soaking Southern Arizona weekend, and the political stories driving the final day before Election Day.
Respect the Road Closure
After days of rain pushed by late-season storms moving up from the Baja Peninsula, Brantner Smith urged Pima County drivers to take barricades seriously. She said she and her husband turned around on Coachline Road in Marana when they found a closure sign and flooded pavement, even in a truck. Winn, whose husband is a former Tucson police officer and Department of Public Safety trooper, said he has told her hundreds of water-rescue stories. "When it says road closed, you don't drive through it," she said. She pointed to a small red car left sitting in a culvert off Fort Lowell after its driver ignored the barricades, and reminded listeners that Arizona's stupid-motorist law can mean thousands of dollars in rescue costs. "You're not only endangering yourself, you're endangering those first responders," she said. She added a second request: don't crawl along at 18 miles an hour on a 50 mph road, and don't drive around to look at floodwater while others are trying to reach work, doctors' appointments and polling places.
The same storm system is now over the Midwest, and a photo from a small town near Des Moines showed voters lined up in the rain, many wearing red. The two predicted Iowa Republican Ashley Hinson is on her way to a Senate win.
On the Ground Tuesday
Brantner Smith and her husband, Dave Smith, will both be Republican poll observers. She will be at a church polling site on the northwest side and he at a Town of Marana location near the new aquatic center. Both urged supporters to put out yard signs Monday night, while the ground is soft, remembering the 75-foot buffer from polling places. LD17 and LD19 were both above 60 percent turnout on Monday, and Winn said the two districts are competing. Winn also praised LD17's Republican legislative slate, Rachel Keschel and John Winchester, and said the Democrats' ad showing candidates carrying water buckets through the desert is easy to mock. "They have to do that because Katie Hobbs got rid of all of our water," she joked.
Michigan and the Democratic Party
Winn and Brantner Smith spent several minutes on the Michigan Senate race between Republican Mike Rogers and Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed. They noted that Haley Stevens, who narrowly lost the Democratic primary to El-Sayed, had her fiancé say publicly that he is voting for Rogers over El-Sayed's rhetoric about Israel and Jews. Brantner Smith said the episode began with an ad that appeared to blame Jews for high grocery and gas prices, and argued that antisemitism on the left has become impossible to ignore. "The Democrat Party has left Jewish people in the dust," she said, urging undecided Jewish voters in Pima County to take a hard look at Republican candidates. Winn argued that the party punishes members who step out of line, and said Democrats who talk about democracy are the ones who demand conformity. "We make suggestions," Brantner Smith said of Republicans. "We don't toss you aside and vilify you."
ICE, Prosecutors and Congressional District 7
Brantner Smith said "abolish ICE" is the latest version of the 2020 push to defund police, and that voters who reject one should reject the other. She said the same impulse shows up in cash bail changes and in a Pima County prosecutor who she says does not want people in prison. She urged CD7 voters to support Republican Daniel Gutierrez over Democratic Congresswoman Adelita Grijalva, whom she accused of caring more for people in immigration detention than for her own constituents. Winn said a busload of about thirty people from Picture Rocks was heading out to vote for him. She also backed Jeff Rhodes in District 5 and urged a no vote on Prop 425.
The Lindsay Clancy Case
Brantner Smith followed the hearing underway Monday morning in Massachusetts, where defense attorney Kevin Reddington asked Judge William Sullivan about the private records of the lone holdout juror in the Lindsay Clancy trial. Clancy is accused of killing her three young children, and the trial ended in a mistrial. Brantner Smith said the juror has been doxxed, threatened and forced to move, and argued the defense effort is meant to intimidate future jurors. "She murdered her children," she said of Clancy, and she praised the Plymouth County prosecutor, whom she described as the only Republican prosecutor in Massachusetts. She said the judge interrupted Reddington and took the motion under advisement without ruling.
Gospel Rescue Mission
Brantner Smith closed with a tribute to Gospel Rescue Mission, which she said drew national attention when U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner toured it on Tuesday, October 27th, with Congressman Juan Ciscomani. The mission operates in a former hotel on South Alvernon and offers addiction treatment, mental health care, job training and childcare in one place, with no government money. CEO Lisa Chastain told Turner that 80 percent of the people who come through the door are homeless because of substance abuse and untreated mental illness. "They don't need a roof over their head," Brantner Smith said. "They need their mental health treated and they need their substance abuse treated." She and her husband give to the mission every year.
Joel Strabala: Emergency Voting, ID Verification and a 75 Percent Goal
Joel Strabala, chair of Legislative District 17 and a member of the Pima County Election Integrity Commission, walked listeners through the last day before Election Day. Winn opened by congratulating LD17 on passing 60 percent turnout and said Republican turnout in Pima County is where the party needs it to be. She said the target is 73 percent statewide, and Strabala said LD17 still had about 17,000 Republicans holding unreturned ballots. "I'm looking very positive of reaching 75 percent Republican returns," he said.
Emergency voting. All 17 early vote centers were open Monday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., Strabala said, and three of them, the Recorder's office downtown, the Valencia elections office and the Ward 2 site on the east side, were open until 5 p.m. Winn noted that none are in Marana or Green Valley, two strongholds for Republicans, while the mobile voting center visited District 5 three times. The party's Turning Point team made more than 900 calls over the weekend.
The ID-verified stamp. Strabala said voters who bring an early ballot to a site on Monday or Tuesday should ask poll workers to ID verify it. A poll worker checks the ID against the database, stamps and initials the affidavit envelope and drops it into the box, and those ballots go straight to the elections department and are tabulated Wednesday. Ballots without the stamp go through signature verification and may not be tabulated until Thursday, Friday or even the following Monday. "If you want your ballot tabulated with the rest of the ballots, ID verify it," he said. Winn said some voters had been told to just drop the ballot in the box and should politely insist.
Polling place basics. Polls open at 6 a.m. and close at 7 p.m., with 128 places to vote across Pima County. "There's no excuse to stay home," Strabala said.
Hand-count volunteers. The party still needed four more observers for Saturday's hand count of ballots, from 8 a.m. to noon on November 7th, paid at $75, and Strabala said volunteers can sign up at PimaGOP.org.
What Is at Stake
Strabala said a Republican governor, House and Senate could improve Arizona's standing in education, where he said the state ranks 51st even though five of its schools are in the national top ten. He cited ESAs, propositions to keep boys out of girls' sports, and more tools for law enforcement to fight cartels. He and Winn both urged a no vote on Proposition 425, which Strabala said would let the Board of Supervisors spend another $600 million, including $64 million he called slush funds for climate change, and which he described as a rehash of the measure voters turned down as Prop 414. He said Jeff Rhodes deserves District 5 votes in part because the supervisor, appointed to the seat, has said nothing about the death of a Tucson police recruit in his own district. "We can do better," Strabala said. He held up Gospel Rescue Mission as proof that private charity solves problems more cheaply than government. "The second you involve government, it becomes a thousand times more expensive," he said.
Winn closed with her own frustration over what she called the 2020 playbook, saying she wants the party to win on Election Night and not be told later it lost. "Tomorrow is Christmas," she said.
Alex Kolodin: Why Arizona's Secretary of State Race Matters
State Representative Alex Kolodin, the Scottsdale Republican running for Secretary of State, spent the last segments of the show on the ID-verification law, the case against incumbent Adrian Fontes and why he considers this a pivotal election for Arizona.
Your Right to Have Your Ballot ID Verified
Kolodin said any voter who brings an early ballot to a voting location has a legal right to have it ID verified at any site, which skips the signature verification stage and makes the ballot count faster. "The whole point of checking your signature is a very imperfect way of doing voter ID," he said. If poll workers refuse, he said, voters should politely cite the law, and Winn said she would share the statute number once she had it.
A Pivotal Election
Kolodin said every state has one pivotal election in which it permanently chooses what it will be, and he named Florida on the Republican side and California and Colorado on the Democratic side. "This is that pivotal election for Arizona," he said. He called Arizona voters the most powerful in America because the state is a swing state for the Senate, the House and the presidency, and said the chief elections officer is charged with guarding their vote. He argued that this year's vote is even more important than the 2028 presidential vote because it decides who runs that election.
The Case Against Fontes
Kolodin accused Fontes of being the Mamdani wing of his party's front man in Arizona. He said federal courts, including judges of Fontes's own party, have reprimanded him, and that one federal judge compared an effort to seize power to throw out votes from entire counties to a nuclear weapon aimed at Arizona voters. He said Fontes also tried to threaten police officers with jail if they voted in uniform, an effort Winn noted that Republicans beat in federal court. Kolodin said Fontes sided with Mi Familia Vota in a challenge to Arizona's proof-of-citizenship law, which the U.S. Supreme Court now has before it, and has argued that people could use a Social Security number to register even though noncitizens can get one. "U.S. citizens should get to vote, period," he said.
Kolodin said the elections procedure manual, which carries criminal penalties, was meant to be a technical document and has been turned into a policy weapon against political opponents while Fontes ignores broken equipment that closes polling places and leaves voters in long lines. He said he worked with Governor Hobbs to pass a bipartisan supermajority bill that shut down Fontes's attempt to let counties exclude observers.
His Record
Kolodin said his proudest accomplishment is the "timeline bill," a bipartisan law that fixed a federal deadline mistake that could have disenfranchised Arizona voters in the 2024 presidential election and sped up results in this year's primary. He also pointed to Proposition 144 on this year's ballot, which would ban foreign funding in elections, add voter ID for every ballot cast and write the citizenship requirement for registration into the constitution so it cannot be changed by the secretary of state. He said he and Republicans delivered no tax on tips and no tax on overtime.
Election Day Instructions
Kolodin urged Republicans with ballots on the counter to get them to an emergency site Monday. "That ballot is the future of Arizona in your hands," he said. Winn reminded voters that anyone in line by 7 p.m. has a right to vote, and that anyone told to leave the line should call the Pima County Republican hotline, the Arizona GOP or the RNC and lawyers will be sent. Kolodin said the extremists do not represent Arizona and that this is the last red stronghold in the West. "Arizona is worth fighting for," he said. "Arizona Republicans have delivered."