Guests - Joel Strabala, Mark Lewis, Jack Dona
Joel Strabala: The Clock Is Running on National Voter Registration Day
Joel Strabala, LD17 chair and Pima County Election Integrity Commission member, joined the show on National Voter Registration Day with a straightforward message: the window to participate in November is closing fast, and Pima County can't afford to sit this one out.
Strabala walked through the mechanics for anyone not yet registered. Voters can go to the Pima County Recorder's website, click into the new voter registration dashboard, and enter their name and either their driver's license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number to register or update existing information. Arizona's National Voter Registration Day tools, including a check-registration feature available through Instagram, offer the same shortcut. The deadline is firm: Monday, October 5th, is the last day to register in order to vote in the November general election. Early ballots begin mailing October 7th, with most Pima County voters receiving theirs by October 9th.
Strabala also addressed a Supreme Court action from the day before the interview, which he said paused a separate matter involving the voter registration list and the U.S. Postal Service, while leaving the active early voting list fully functional — meaning ballot mailing to registered voters proceeds normally regardless of that litigation. For anyone interested in serving as an election observer or inspector, Strabala pointed listeners to the Pima County GOP's Election 2026 page for training sign-ups, covering early voting observation, ballot processing, signature verification, tabulation, and Election Day polling sites.
The turnout numbers, Strabala said, tell their own story. Pima County hit just under 50% turnout in this year's primary — a number Strabala and Kathleen both called unheard of for a summer midterm primary — and the goal now is 70% for the general. With billions of dollars in potential bond initiatives and local government spending increases on the ballot alongside candidates, Strabala emphasized that voters need to study what's actually being asked of them financially, not just who's running. "It's extremely important that you as a voter become informed on the ballot initiatives that affect your precinct and your districts," he said, framing an informed vote as the mechanism that keeps local, state, and national government accountable.
Mark Lewis: Katie Hobbs, the CAP Canal, and a Water Deal Arizona Didn't Agree To
Mark Lewis, a 48-year precinct committeeman and former 24-year member of the Central Arizona Project board, returned to the show to break down what he calls an illegally negotiated water settlement that could leave Arizona's most important water canal running dry within a decade.
Lewis opened on a different note — celebrating SRP's approval of a $2.2 billion power plant in Pinal County aimed at modernizing and reducing the carbon footprint of the state's power grid, a plan he said drew opposition from Tempe-area lawmakers pushing power and water alternatives Lewis characterized as dependent on Chinese-manufactured components rather than domestically sourced natural gas. He extended the same skepticism to opposition against data centers, including a proposed Blue Owl facility in Marana, arguing that converting farmland to data center use represents a dramatic net water savings — citing a shift from roughly 4,000 acre-feet a year for irrigating cotton or alfalfa down to around 80 acre-feet for equivalent data center operations, a 99% reduction. "Why wouldn't you want to do that in Pima County," Lewis said, framing Board of Supervisors resistance to the project as shortsighted given the county's water constraints.
The heart of the conversation was Governor Katie Hobbs's water settlement agreement with the U.S. Department of the Interior, which Lewis argues is both bad policy and legally invalid. Under Arizona law, Lewis said, any water agreement the governor signs with the federal government requires legislative authorization — a check Hobbs bypassed. "She didn't get the Senate to approve it, and so it's no longer valid," Lewis said. The underlying deal calls for a 50% cut to Arizona's Central Arizona Project water allocation over the first two years, escalating to a full loss of renewable CAP supplies by year ten — a trajectory that would leave the $4 billion CAP canal, which still carries roughly $1 billion in outstanding debt, running empty.
Lewis said the CAP board has already authorized general counsel to pursue legal action against the Department of the Interior, joining Nevada, which has separately sued the federal government over what both states argue is a breach of the 1922 Colorado River Compact — the agreement dividing water rights between upper basin states (led by Colorado) and lower basin states (Arizona, California, and Nevada). Arizona lawmakers have set aside funding and engaged a law firm to pursue a parallel suit. Board president and former Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard, a Democrat, backed the board's unanimous vote to sue, a fact Lewis and Kathleen both noted as evidence the issue transcends party lines. CAP counsel Brenda Burman — a water attorney who previously served as Bureau of Reclamation commissioner under the first Trump administration — is leading the board's legal strategy alongside Goddard and water attorney Alexandra Arboleda.
The math, Lewis said, is stark. Pima County draws more than 70% of its renewable water supply from CAP; cities including Scottsdale and Peoria draw more than 72%. Roughly 81% of Arizona's population — 5.3 million people — depends on CAP-delivered water. Over his 24-year tenure on the CAP board, Lewis said he helped bank roughly 4 million acre-feet of water underground during wetter years, creating what amounts to a decade-long buffer the state can draw on now — but he warned that buffer isn't a long-term solution and that Hobbs's agreement effectively squanders the advantage. "Two years isn't 20," Kathleen noted, pressing Lewis on the deal's back half. Lewis's read: the state needs new supply, not just conservation, including expanded rainwater harvesting, desalination investment, and moving groundwater wells to align with actual water tables rather than historical drilling locations — the same technical fix Lewis said he presented to a legislative focus group when Hobbs initially declared a water moratorium the administration's own hydrogeologists hadn't fully modeled.
Lewis is now drafting ballot legislation, potentially for 2027 or 2028, that would ask voters to approve a quarter-cent sales tax dedicated to new water infrastructure — modeled on how the state funds roads and highways — to pay for desalination, rainwater harvesting, and other supply projects. He's also pushing Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to renegotiate the deal's debt terms, arguing that if Arizona takes a 50% cut in water, it should receive a proportional reduction in its CAP debt obligations. On the upcoming CAP Water Board election, Lewis endorsed incumbents Karen Cesar and engineer Mark Taylor, both up for reelection this cycle, calling them the kind of technically grounded leadership the state needs steering water policy rather than politics. "You've got to have technical people," Lewis said. "Katie Hobbs and, you know, the folks at Pima County are not that class of people."
Jack Dona: What His Father's Escape From Communist Nicaragua Taught Him About the DSA
Retired Army Master Sergeant Jack Dona, whose father fled Nicaragua when the country fell to the Sandinistas, closed the show with a warning about the growing footprint of the Democratic Socialists of America in American politics — and the pattern he said his father taught him to recognize before it's too late.
Dona placed the DSA's rise inside a broader historical pattern of authoritarian movements exploiting mainstream political tolerance. "The Democrat Party decided, you know, maybe 10, 15, 20 years ago, we're going to tolerate Bernie Sanders and his ilk," Dona said, arguing establishment Democrats believed they could control the party's socialist wing rather than being absorbed by it — a dynamic he compared to the early Bolsheviks temporarily working with, then ultimately eliminating, moderate figures who'd gone along with the revolution. Citing figures relayed on the show, Dona said the DSA's ranks of elected officials have grown from roughly 207 in August 2023 to more than 200 across all levels of government as of 2024, describing the trend as clear evidence of organized political infiltration rather than a fringe phenomenon. He pointed to Democratic Socialists of America-aligned candidates in local Arizona races, including Joanna Mendoza's campaign against Congressman Juan Ciscomani, which has drawn public backing from Tucson Mayor Regina Romero and a campaign appearance from former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
Dona argued the movement's appeal to younger voters rests on a message that blames economic hardship on capitalism broadly, rather than on what he characterizes as the actual drivers of recent economic strain — mass illegal immigration and policy choices made during the Biden administration. He drew a direct line from that messaging to the DSA's stated policy goals: abolishing ICE, ending the current two-party structure of the Senate and presidency, pursuing a new Green New Deal, and extending blanket amnesty to undocumented immigrants regardless of criminal history. "You have to ask the question," Dona said, "who in the world does that benefit?" His answer, previewing the show's regular China Watch Wednesday segment: the Chinese Communist Party, which he argued benefits directly from a weakened, internally divided United States.
Dona's central argument, rooted in what his father told him growing up, is that authoritarian movements require three specific conditions to take hold: generational poverty, a corrupted education system, and — the piece he emphasized most — good people who remain silent out of fear, hopelessness, or plain indifference. He was blunt about who he believes is most at risk of falling into that last category. "Your gated communities are not going to save you from this," Dona said, addressing residents of wealthier enclaves like Oro Valley, Paradise Valley, and Scottsdale directly. "Your private security is [not going to save you] if this thing takes over," he added, pointing to firsthand accounts from immigrants who fled authoritarian takeovers in Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea as evidence that no community is insulated once a shift like this occurs.
Dona closed by tying the DSA's momentum to Arizona's declining cost-of-living ranking — 45th among all states, according to a recent New York Post report, a steep fall from years he said the state ranked among the best under prior Republican leadership across the governorship, attorney general's office, secretary of state, and legislature. His message on the show's National Voter Registration Day theme was unambiguous: silence and non-participation function as consent. "If you don't turn out to vote," Dona said, "you're saying yes to all this."