Phoenix, Arizona — Pain at the pump seems to be punishing the Grand Canyon state.
While the national average for a gallon of regular was $3.63 Friday, according to daily numbers released by AAA, in Arizona it was $1 more, at $4.70. In the Phoenix metro area, the average is just over $5 a gallon.
“Before, it used to cost us probably $80 to fill up, and now it’s almost double that,” Phoenix driver John Baker told CBS News.
Baker said his family is cutting back elsewhere, fearing $5 gas could be here to stay.
“We don’t really go out nearly as much as we used to,” Baker said. “We used to go to the movies on the weekends as a family. Now we just stick to the swimming pool.”
Two hours south of Phoenix, in Tucson, gas prices jumped more than 80 cents per gallon in just the last month, now averaging $4.73 a gallon.
Experts said the rapid spike amounts to bad timing.
“They get their gas primarily from a refinery in El Paso,” AAA national spokesperson Andrew Gross said. “That refinery is down for maintenance. So, they’re having to bring in more expensive gas from other places.”
This also comes as refineries switch to more expensive summer blends, while OPEC cuts oil production globally. That is on top of increased driver demand for fuel during the summer months.
While still expensive, AAA predicts the rest of the U.S. won’t see prices climb quite as high as last summer’s record.
“For the national average, I don’t think we’re going to see it reach $4 (per gallon),” Gross said.
But for Arizona drivers, $4 a gallon would be a summer dream come true.
NEW YORK (AP) — Days after Fox News agreed to pay nearly $800 million to settle a lawsuit over its airing of 2020 election lies, you’d be hard-pressed to notice anything had changed there.
Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham led their shows Thursday talking about Hunter Biden, the president’s son. Ingraham’s show warned, “The left wants the government to be your only family.” Hannity targeted familiar villains — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Vice President Kamala Harris. Carlson mocked a speech on racial equity, saying it meant “that straight white men are bad.”
Experts doubt the settlement will lead to much of a course correction in conservative media, save for a little less specificity to avoid future lawsuits.
So far, that’s been the chief result of a Connecticut jury’s verdict last year that Alex Jones must pay $965 million to parents of Sandy Hook school shooting victims, after claiming the 2012 massacre was a hoax and that grieving parents were actors. Now Jones is more likely to keep names out of it, said Nicole Hemmer, a Vanderbilt University professor and author of “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s.”
“It hasn’t changed his conspiracy theories,” Hemmer said. “He’s just a little more careful about not saying legally actionable things.”
Heading into the 2024 election, radio host Erick Erickson predicted more hesitancy in conservative media to embrace claims by former President Donald Trump or anybody in politics preaching election denialism. Fox’s response will be most watched.
If anything, Fox is just as dominant among conservatives today as it was in the aftermath of the 2020 election, the period addressed by the Dominion lawsuit. That’s when Fox aired false claims that Dominion Voting Systems helped rig the election against Trump, despite many at the network knowing the allegations were bogus.
Documents in the case exposed the fear within Fox that it would lose viewers if the network didn’t tell Trump fans what they wanted to hear.
A former Fox personality, Bill O’Reilly, wrote after the settlement: “This is what happens when money becomes more important than honest information.” His own experience, though, shows there was reason to be afraid. O’Reilly said he lost more than 1,000 premium subscribers to his website after telling them the election results wouldn’t be overturned.
Fox’s followers, it seems, were more upset with the election reporting than with revelations in the lawsuit about those at the network who didn’t believe the fraud charges and expressed private disdain for Trump.
There’s been little noticeable change in Fox’s television ratings in the past few months, certainly none attributable to the lawsuit. In March, Fox’s website had 88.7 million unique visitors, marking its fourth straight month of double-digit gains, said Howard Polskin, whose website The Righting monitors conservative media.
Most conservative websites either ignored the Dominion lawsuit or gave it cursory coverage, he said.
“The coverage on the right would not support at all that some landmark settlement had been reached,” Polskin said. “It was completely misaligned with the magnitude of the news event itself.”
While Fox acknowledged in the settlement the judge’s conclusion that the network had spread false material about Dominion, Fox offered no apology. That likely would have meant more to Fox’s critics than its fans, anyway, said Megan Duncan, a Virginia Tech communications professor who studies news audiences.
To Fox’s followers, criticism of the network wouldn’t matter much unless it was made by someone who shared their ideology. For the bulk of Fox’s audience, the settlement will be quickly forgotten — if it was followed at all, she said.
For Fox, that’s all an argument for the importance of keeping its audience happy.
That audience is what has made Fox the leading cable television network for several years, so profitable that it is able to absorb the $787 million Dominion settlement as a cost of doing business.
Fox still has legal challenges, with a pending defamation lawsuit by Smartmatic, another elections technology company. But Dominion also has a case against Newsmax, Fox’s chief television rival for a conservative audience. Newsmax insists its case is different and that it has better protections against defamation than Fox did.
But as a smaller company, if Newsmax is wrong, a financial judgment could cripple or kill it, to Fox’s benefit, Hemmer said.
“Fox would absolutely go after that audience,” she said.
Fox soon faces crucial negotiations with three large cable companies — Comcast, Spectrum and Cox — over carriage fees, the amount they will pay to Fox for the right to offer the network on their systems, said Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America, a left-leaning media watchdog group.
Ever since an advertiser boycott against former Fox personality Glenn Beck, largely orchestrated by Media Matters, Fox has concentrated on boosting carriage fees. It has succeeded to the point where Fox would have a 35% profit margin even if it had no advertising revenue, he said.
That makes it important for Fox to illustrate to these companies that it has a large, valuable audience that can be counted on to be loyal at a time people are cutting cable service.
Fox could use the conclusion of the lawsuit to build up its news operation, which has lost personalities such as Chris Wallace and Shepard Smith in recent years, said Chris Stirewalt, an executive fired by Fox after the quick, although ultimately correct, decision on election night 2020 to call Arizona for Democrat Joe Biden in the presidential race.
Fox said that it is doing just that, saying this past week that it has increased its investment in journalism by more than 50%.
“Being a news organization is expensive and dangerous,” said Stirewalt, now political editor at NewsNation. “Not just expensive because you have to pay to get news but also, expensive because you can lose your audience because sometimes you have to tell them what they don’t want to hear.”
It could be easier, and good business, to double down on programming that appeals to the attitudes and emotions of viewers, he said. Fox wouldn’t be alone in following that direction.
“I don’t envy their choices,” he said.
Erickson, the radio host, said he would expect to see greater management control of Fox’s personalities, although this wouldn’t necessarily be something that viewers would notice. That would revert back to the days of the late Fox leader Roger Ailes, drummed out of the network in a sexual misconduct scandal in 2016.
“Whether you liked Roger Ailes or not, he did understand that you should not lie to your audience,” Erickson said.
The ovations delivered on Thursday night by an audience crowded into Hannity’s studio — for him and for Carlson and Ingraham at the beginning and end of their shows — illustrated an enduring point.
Fox has several solid journalists on its payroll but its stars, the chief reason viewers tune in, are those that offer tough talk and opinion.
“I think they’ve backed themselves into a corner, and that corner is full of Trump supporters,” said Hemmer, the Vanderbilt professor. “That is the business model.”
Farms in western Arizona are growing alfalfa – one of the most water-intensive crops – in an area where there’s a shortage of water. Some farms are foreign-owned and are shipping the crop to Saudi Arabia, where it’s illegal to grow because it takes too much water.
It’s a growing controversy that could lead to a reckoning over scarce water supplies. Amid a backlash, the state legislature is considering a ban on most foreign-owned farms.
“Pumps are pumping water out of the ground that belongs to the State of Arizona, and essentially it’s being exported to Saudi Arabia,” said Kris Mayes, Arizona’s newly elected attorney general.
Fondomonte, which is owned by one of the largest dairy companies in Saudi Arabia, bought vast tracts of desert in western Arizona on top of a massive groundwater aquifer in part because there are no regulations on how much water can be pumped out of the ground. Anyone who buys or leases land there can put in a well and draw water.
It’s a challenge for the state. As climate change fuels devastating droughts, Arizona and its rapidly growing cities are facing drastic cuts to their surface water supply from the critically low Colorado River system.
“We cannot afford to give our water away frankly to anyone, let alone the Saudis, for free,” said Mayes.
La Paz County supervisor Holly Irwin, who has been sounding the alarm about foreign-owned farms since they began operating there in 2015, said Fondomonte is growing alfalfa in the Arizona desert “because they’ve depleted their natural resource” back home.
Fondomonte trucks haul dried alfalfa off the property it uses and ships it back to the Middle East to feed cattle. According to Mayes, cows in Saudi Arabia are essentially drinking Arizona water.
Fondomonte declined CBS News’ request for an interview or statement. But what it’s doing in Arizona is not illegal. In fact, the state rents some land to Fondomonte for $25 an acre. The company can then pump unlimited amounts of groundwater for essentially no cost.
“There’s nothing to say except, that’s insane,” said Mayes.
For some, the question is: how did this happen?
CBS News obtained copies of several land leases dating back to 2014 that give Fondomonte rights to more than 6,000 acres of state-owned land and the groundwater that comes with it. The leases are signed by Arizona’s State Land Department.
CBS News asked the department why it granted the leases, but it did not respond to our multiple requests for comment. Most state officials in charge when the leases were signed are no longer in office.
“It is a scandal that the State of Arizona allowed this to happen,” said Mayes, a Democrat, who made canceling these leases a centerpiece of her recent campaign.
She said canceling the leases is an urgent concern because groundwater in the valley is supposed to be the state’s emergency water supply during a water crisis. The state doesn’t even know exactly how much water the foreign farms are using.
“We are on the cusp of a potential water disaster in the state of Arizona,” Mayes said.
Just outside of a western Arizona town called Hope, cattle rancher Brad Mead is finding it hard not to lose his. He claims his neighbors, Fondomonte, used so much water that his well went dry.
He said that when he looks onto his neighbor’s property, he sees money leaving America.
Peoria, Arizona — San Diego Padres players often visit pediatric patients at Rady Children’s Hospital.
But this year, it was the children who made the trip to visit the players at spring training in Peoria, Arizona, thanks to an invite from their hometown heroes.
“We’re not just, you know, caged up in a hospital…we can actually have fun,” 15-year-old Nayleen Griffith told CBS News. Griffith was diagnosed with a brain tumor about two years ago, and continues to battle its impact.
The children were treated like VIPs, with a behind-the-scenes tour, autographs and selfies with star players like slugger Manny Machado.
“Meeting Manny, it was so cool,” said 17-year-old Damien Lopez, who has battled a blood disorder since birth, a condition which requires constant treatment.
However, it was pitcher Tim Hill who may have hit the biggest home run with the group, speaking candidly about his own battle with cancer.
“I dealt with the same, similar things that y’all dealt with,” Hill told the kids. “In 2015, I had colon cancer, stage 3 colon cancer.”
“It’s, like, really inspiring,” Lopez said. “He beat cancer, and he still continues doing what he loves.”
Getting the major-league treatment provided a chance for these kids to just be kids.
“We’ve all gone through a lot,” Griffith said. “So I think, being able to come out here and take a break from everything, is really exciting.”
Janet Shamlian is a CBS News correspondent based in Houston, Texas. Shamlian’s reporting is featured on all CBS News broadcasts and platforms including “CBS Mornings,” the “CBS Evening News” and the CBS News Streaming Network, CBS News’ premier 24/7 anchored streaming news service.
CHICAGO (AP) — For many progressives, the past decade has been littered with disappointments. But recent down-ballot victories are providing hope of reshaping the Democratic Party from the bottom up, rather than from Washington.
In Chicago earlier this month, a former teacher’s union organizer unexpectedly won the mayor’s race. In St. Louis, progressives secured a majority on the municipal board. The next opportunities could lie in Philadelphia and Houston, which also hold mayoral elections this year.
The focus on lower-level contests already has helped progressives gain power and influence policy at a local level, organizers say, shaping issues such as the minimum wage. It also may help the movement find future stars, with today’s city and county officials becoming tomorrow’s breakout members of Congress and only moving further up the political ladder.
“Progressives have taken a look at how to be strategic and how to build power,” said Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants who was a leading national voice for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders ’ 2016 and 2020 presidential bids. “If you look around and you say, ‘Who is ready to run for president?’ If your field is shallow, what do you have to do? You’ve got to build the bench.”
This year’s focus on state and local races follows years of incremental progress and some stinging setbacks. Sanders electrified the left with 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns that centered on bold calls for universal, government-funded health care. But he lost each time to rivals aligned with the Democratic establishment who advocated for a more cautious approach.
On Capitol Hill, progressive candidates successfully defeated several high-profile incumbents during the 2018 midterms and the election of candidates like New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But from New York to Michigan and Ohio and Texas, prominent progressives were defeated during primary campaigns last year. And, as President Joe Biden now gears up for reelection, he faces no serious challenge from the left.
Still, Sanders and others have left their mark, pushing mainstream Democrats to the left on key issues like combating climate change and forgiveness of student loan debt while inspiring some of those at the forefront of today’s movement.
That includes Chicago Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson, who appealed to a diverse and young electorate as he campaigned with Sanders and other top congressional progressives.
“Let’s take this bold progressive movement around these United States of America,” Johnson said in his victory speech.
Our Revolution, an activist group which grew out of Sanders’ 2016 White House bid, endorsed Johnson and progressive candidates who recently won three of four seats on the St. Louis City Board of Aldermen. That gave progressives a slim majority in a city where the mayor, Tishaura Jones, is also a self-described progressive.
Our Revolution said it activated its 90,000 members in Chicago an average of three times each to urge them to vote for Johnson, and made 100,000 phone calls in St. Louis. The group is also backing Helen Gym, a progressive former Philadelphia City Council member who is among roughly a dozen candidates competing in next month’s Democratic mayoral primary.
“When we win on the ground in our cities, that’s actually the blueprint, because we cannot wait for Congress,” Gym said during a recent call with Our Revolution volunteers.
Our Revolution’s executive director, Joseph Geevarghese, said local progressive organizing, including for races like school board, is more effective now than it has been in decades.
“We’re building power, bottom up, city by city,” Geevarghese said, adding that ”in major metropolitan areas you’ve got credible progressive slates vying for power against the Democratic establishment.”
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers and a Democratic National Committee member, countered that there doesn’t have to be tension between the party’s left and moderate wings. She said Johnson called for addressing “quality of life issues” such as homelessness through consensus-building, rather than ideological confrontation.
“Every one of these cities are complicated places and you have to work together to get things done,” Weingarten said. “You have to work with people you don’t always agree with. And that is a strength and not a weakness.”
It hasn’t all been rosy for progressives. Moderate candidates topped progressive alternatives in last week’s Denver City Council races.
But there are more opportunities ahead. In the nation’s fourth-largest city of Houston, Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, who has been an outspoken progressive in Congress since she got there in 1995, is running for mayor.
And the left isn’t abandoning congressional races.
Progressive champion Rep. Barbara Lee and fellow Democratic Rep. Katie Porter, who was a vocal supporter of Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren ’s progressive campaign for president in 2020, are among those running to replace retiring California Sen. Dianne Feinstein next year.
In Arizona, Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego, a progressive 43-year-old Iraq war veteran and Spanish speaker who represents much of downtown Phoenix, is trying to unseat Sen. Kyrsten Sinema. She left the Democratic Party last year and, if she seeks reelection, would run as an independent.
“Working-class Democrats are getting elected, and corporate Democrats are not,” said Chuck Rocha, a key architect of Sanders’ 2016 campaign who heads Nuestro PAC, which has endorsed Gallego. But Rocha was quick to caution that Gallego isn’t running as “a progressive or liberal savior.”
“He’s going to run as ‘I was an enlisted Marine who had to sleep on my mama’s couch until I got a bed in college’ and has been a champion of working-class folks in the state of Arizona,” Rocha said.
Questions about a resurgent Democratic left come as Biden prepares to formally kickoff his reelection campaign and will have to decide how to frame his political vision and ideology to appeal to swing voters. After besting Sanders and Warren in the 2020 primary, Biden embraced major progressive goals, promoting expanding social programs and climate-change fighting green energy.
On other issues, however, Biden has been more moderate. After major legislation to curb police brutality and institutional racism stalled in Congress, the president signed an executive order to make modest reforms. He also has said repeatedly that, rather than heed calls by some progressives to cut funding for law enforcement, the answer should be more police funding.
Biden campaign aides say he’s shown flexibility to best respond to ongoing political and policy challenges. And Rocha said that Gallego will benefit from Biden’s 2024 campaign, which should rely heavily on promoting his administration’s legislative accomplishments and how they benefited working-class families in swing states like Arizona.
But some progressives say the White House should take notice of the movement’s down-ballot wins.
“I hope he’s paying attention,” said Hannah Riddle, director of candidate services for the activist group the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. “Running on economic populism is a winning strategy. And that model can be replicated all over the country.”
Several states in the Southwest are bracing for potential flooding as rising temperatures this spring begin to melt snow from a historic season of snowfall. Elise Preston has more.
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The Biden administration released an environmental analysis Tuesday of competing plans for how seven Western states and tribes reliant on the dwindling water supply from the Colorado River should cut their use but declined to publicly take a side on the best option.
On one side is California and some tribes along the river that want to protect their high-priority rights to the river’s water, which they use for drinking and farming. On the other side are the other six states — Colorado, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico — who say it’s time to come up with an approach that more fairly shares the river.
The Interior Department did not say how states should get to deeper water cuts but defended its authority to make sure basic needs such as drinking water and hydropower generated from the river are met — even if it means setting aside the priority system.
“Failure is not an option,” Interior Deputy Secretary Tommy Beaudreau told The Associated Press.
The 1,450-mile (2,334-kilometer) powerhouse of the West serves 40 million people across seven states, which span tribal land and Mexico, generates hydroelectric power for regional markets, and irrigates nearly 6 million acres (2,428 hectares) of farmland.
Water from the Colorado River diverted through the Central Arizona Project fills an irrigation canal on Aug. 18, 2022, in Maricopa, Ariz.
Matt York / AP
A multi-decade drought in the West intensified by climate change, rising demand and overuse have sent water levels at key reservoirs along the river to unprecedented lows. That’s forced the federal government to cut some water allocations and to offer up billions of dollars to pay farmers and cities to cut back.
Officials expect some relief this year from a series of powerful storms that blanketed California and the Western Rocky Mountains, the main source of the Colorado River’s water. But it’s not clear how that amount of precipitation is affecting negotiations. On Monday, Beaudreau denied that a sense of urgency had gone away after the winter storms, but gave no indication as to how the seven states should reach an agreement before August when the agency typically announces water availability for the following year.
“The snow is great. It’s a godsend. But we’re in the midst of a 23-year drought,” Beaudreau said. He said states, Native American tribes and other water users recognized that it would be in no one’s interest to stall talks because of the winter’s healthy snowpack — which stands at 160% of the median in the Upper Colorado River Basin.
In January, six of the seven U.S. states that rely on the Colorado River — Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming and Colorado — outlined how they would conserve significantly more water, but California disagreed with the approach and released its own ideas a day later.
Both plans heeded a call last year from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which operates the major dams in the river system, for states to propose how they would cut their water use by roughly 15% and 30% — in addition to existing water cuts agreed upon in recent years. Each achieves about 2 million acre-feet of cuts, which is at the low end of the requested cuts.
An acre-foot of water is roughly enough to serve 2 to 3 U.S. households annually.
The lengthy environmental analysis released by the Biden administration explores both options, as well as a third that includes taking no action. States, tribes and other water users now have until May 30 to comment before federal officials announce their formal decision.
Beaudreau gave no indication of whether the department prefers one approach over the other.
“Some of the commentary has depicted an us-versus-them dynamic in the basin,” Beaudreau said. “I don’t see that at all.”
A formerly sunken boat sits high and dry along the shoreline of Lake Mead at the Lake Mead National Recreation Area on May 10, 2022, near Boulder City, Nev.
John Locher / AP
Arizona and California — on opposite sides of the divergent plans — are looking at how to develop “a true seven-state consensus in the coming months,” said JB Hamby, who chairs the Colorado River Board of California. “Ideally in this next 45-day period, if at all possible.”
Among the main differences between the two plans is whether states should account for the vast amount of water lost along the Colorado River basin to evaporation and leaky infrastructure as it flows through the region’s behemoth dams and waterways.
Federal officials say more than 10% of river water evaporates, leaks, and spills — yet Arizona, California, Nevada and Mexico have never accounted for that loss.
California disagreed with that approach. That’s because the state has senior rights to Colorado River water and because of its location, would lose a significant amount of water if such losses were counted. The further south the river travels, more water evaporates — meaning that if evaporation losses were counted, California, Arizona, and Mexico would stand to lose more than states further north.
The Quechan tribe along the Arizona-California border also opposes that plan because of its priority water rights.
“We’ve got senior water rights and last we checked, we still live in a priority-based system,” said Jay Weiner, the tribe’s attorney.
The six states and California also disagree about when more water cuts should be triggered at Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the largest human-made reservoirs in the U.S. that serve as barometers of the river’s health.
Arizona and Nevada have more junior water rights than California and supported a plan that shared water cuts amid worsening drought on a pro-rata basis. California has offered to voluntarily cut its use by 400,000 acre-feet, but the state wants bigger cuts from Arizona and Nevada. California officials have indicated they’ll pursue legal challenges if the federal government ignores its priority right to water.
Reclamation also didn’t say how Mexico might contribute to the savings, but that discussions are ongoing. The country is entitled to 1.5 million acre-feet of water each year under a treaty reached with the U.S. in 1944. In recent years, Mexico has participated in water savings plans with the U.S. amid worsening drought in both countries.
Kari Lake – the unapologetic supporter of former President Donald Trump and vanquished candidate for Arizona governor – privately made a trip to National Republican Senatorial Committee headquarters in February where she discussed the prospects of shaking up the map and running for Senate.
But Lake, who has faced blowback over pushing baseless accusations of election fraud, was given this suggestion from NRSC officials: Shift to more effective messaging and away from claims about a stolen election, according to sources familiar with the matter.
The meeting, which was described as a positive one, focused on how Senate bids often turn on issues that are different than governor’s races, multiple sources said. Top Republicans quietly acknowledge Lake could become a frontrunner if she runs in the primary, hoping to steer her towards a viable campaign if she mounts one, even as Arizona’s Pinal County sheriff is expected to soon jump into the race while independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema actively prepares a reelection bid herself.
And that’s just one state.
The Arizona race is one of several landmines that Republican leaders are navigating as they work behind the scenes to avoid a repeat of the 2022 debacle that saw weaker candidates emerge from contested primaries – only to peter out and collapse in the general election and hand Democrats a 51-49 Senate majority. Several of those candidates were backed by Trump as the NRSC – run at the time by Florida Sen. Rick Scott – opted to stay away from Republican primaries.
Now, the NRSC – run by Sen. Steve Daines of Montana – has taken a much more hands-on approach to primaries, actively working on candidate recruitment and vetting. And the committee is weighing whether to spend big bucks in primaries to help root out weaker candidates, a move that risks setting up a clash with hard-right candidates aligning themselves with Trump.
“You need to learn from your past mistakes,” South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a close Trump ally, told CNN. “If you don’t make adjustments, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome, it’s insanity.”
Privately, Daines has spoken multiple times with Trump and has been in touch with his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., while national Republicans point to the NRSC’s early endorsement and fundraising for Rep. Jim Banks in the Indiana Senate race as an example of how the party’s warring wings can try to avoid messy primaries.
The goal, GOP sources say, is to keep Trump aligned with Republican leadership – even as the former president has furiously attacked Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in the aftermath of the Capitol attack on January 6, 2021, and as the Senate GOP leader has stayed silent amid the former president’s indictment on 34 felony charges in New York. Daines, however, has been vocal in his defense of Trump.
“I have a very good relationship with the president. We talk, and it’s no secret we’ve been friends for a long time,” Daines told CNN when asked about the Senate races. “And he provides great insights. And I also provide my thoughts as well. And we have open lines of communication.”
Daines added: “Wherever we can find common ground is a good thing.”
That relationship could be put to the test in key battleground states. In West Virginia, Republican leaders are preparing to close ranks behind Gov. Jim Justice, who is seriously weighing a run for the seat occupied by Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin. A Justice bid would put him against Rep. Alex Mooney, who had won Trump’s backing in a competitive House race in the last cycle but now has the support of the conservative Club for Growth’s political arm.
In Pennsylvania, Doug Mastriano – the controversial candidate who lost a bid for governor last fall but had the support of Trump in the primary – says he’s “still praying” on whether to mount a bid for the Senate, something Republicans in Washington fear. The NRSC plans to put its muscle behind the potential candidacy of David McCormick, the hedge fund executive who narrowly lost the Pennsylvania Senate GOP primary in 2022, according to Republican sources who view him as their best bet at picking up the seat next year.
“I haven’t decided yet on 2024. I’m thinking about it,” McCormick told CNN. “You run for office … because you think you have something to contribute. You think it’s a moment where you might be able to serve, and if you lose, that motivation doesn’t necessarily go away.”
And in Montana, Rep. Matt Rosendale, a member of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, is weighing a run in a race that could put him up against two other potential candidates viewed by senior Republicans as more electable – Montana attorney general Austin Knudsen and businessman Tim Sheehy – against Democratic Sen. Jon Tester. Rosendale attended an event last Tuesday in Mar-a-Lago following Trump’s arraignment in New York, a sign one Trump adviser saw as an effort to secure an endorsement ahead of a potential bid.
Rosendale told CNN he’s in no rush to make a decision.
“We’re just taking a nice slow time to let the people in Montana decide who they want to replace him with,” Rosendale said of Tester. “I feel very sure he will be replaced.” He added that Daines “is my senator” and that “I see him regularly.”
Tester contended that the Republican nominee makes little difference to him.
“I think the person who runs against me is the person McConnell chooses,” Tester said. “Whoever that is, I don’t think it matters much: Same election.”
Top Republicans say they will have to make key strategic decisions on how to engage in some of these races – or whether to stay out altogether, as they might in Ohio as party leaders view the emerging field as full of electable candidates against Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown.
If they come in too aggressively, it could prompt blowback and rally the right behind a potentially weaker candidate. But if they disengage, they could see their favored candidate struggle to gain traction.
In Wisconsin, Republican officials are urging Rep. Mike Gallagher to run, though he could face a potential primary there as well, as former Senate candidate Eric Hovde and others weigh a run. Gallagher, who is chairing a House panel focused on China, said of a potential run against Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin: “I’m not thinking about it at present,” citing his legislative work and family commitments. But he left the door open.
“I’d never conceived of this as a long-term thing; I don’t think Congress should be a career,” Gallagher said, adding: “I’m going to weigh all those factors and see where I can make the best impact.”
In interviews with roughly a dozen top senators, nearly all of them agreed they need to be hyper-focused this cycle on helping candidates who can win not only a primary election, but a general election — repeatedly referencing “candidate quality” as their 2024 motto.
Texas Sen. John Cornyn, a member of Senate GOP leadership and former NRSC chairman, has long had to contend with primary fights between the party establishment and activist base – battles that had effectively cost them the chance at the Senate majority in the 2010 and 2012 election cycles, in addition to 2022.
“It never goes away,” Cornyn said of the primary complications. “Republicans need to make up their mind. Do we want to win, or do we want to lose? And I think that it’s that simple, and I think people are tired of losing.”
Yet some on the right are warning against party leaders picking and choosing their candidates – including Scott, who defends his hands-off approach in the last cycle.
“I believe the citizens of the state ought to pick,” Scott said, adding: “A lot of these weaker candidates often are the ones who actually win. I was not the establishment candidate.”
Scott’s fellow Florida Republican, Marco Rubio, was not backed by the NRSC in the 2010 election cycle. But he galvanized the GOP base and defeated Charlie Crist, who later became a Democrat.
“I’m not a big believer that you can determine who the weaker candidate is. A lot of people up here then would not have been their choice,” Rubio told CNN. “Obviously there might be some exceptions here or there, but generally the NRSC should be engaged in helping whoever the Republican nominee is to win the general election.”
Unlike the last cycle — when the McConnell-aligned Senate Leadership Fund and the Rick Scott-run NRSC clashed publicly over the approach to expanding the Senate map — this time, the two committees are largely aligned. Republicans are betting that their preferred chances will vastly improve with the help of big donors and nationwide fundraising – and potentially an aggressive ad campaign in the primary to derail weaker opponents.
“As we look across the country and look at different traces, it’s pretty straightforward,” Daines said. “We want to see candidates who can win a primary election and also win a general.”
The map heavily favors the GOP – with 23 Democratic and independent seats in cycle compared to just 11 Republicans facing re-election. But Republicans, burnt by their past failures, are well aware that defeating an incumbent is a difficult task and could grow more challenging in a presidential election year, especially in swing states if Trump is the nominee. Behind the scenes, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is trying to limit Democratic retirements.
And Michigan Sen. Gary Peters, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, was skeptical that a more aggressive GOP intervention from Washington would solve Republican woes.
“I’m not sure who the Republicans will put forward as their nominees, but normally the folks who get to determine who the nominee is are the voters in those individual states in the primaries,” Peters said in an interview. “If we look at what happened last cycle, those primary voters tended to pick highly flawed candidates, and I expect that will happen again.”
The fight for the seat occupied by Sinema has quickly emerged as the messiest affair – for both parties.
Sinema’s recent change in party identification — switching from a Democrat to an independent — poses a fresh challenge that party leaders will have to navigate, as it could set up an unpredictable three-way race. Sinema has not yet said if she will run again, but she has been raising enormous sums in preparation for a potential bid and has been meeting with strategists and advisers to map out plans for a possible campaign.
And Democratic leaders are worried that backing a fellow Democrat in the primary could end up alienating Sinema and potentially lead her to caucus with the GOP, forcing them to stay neutral for now.
“She’s a very effective legislator,” Schumer, who so far is neutral in the race, said when asked about Sinema recently.
On the GOP side, several candidates who tried — and failed — to win statewide races last cycle are also complicating that strategy, making it a key source of anxiety among many top Republicans and the Senate committees, according to Republican sources.
Those candidates include Lake and the 2020 Senate GOP nominee, Blake Masters, two of the most Trumpian candidates who lost last year. Both Lake and Masters garnered enormous support among the GOP base for leaning into 2020 election denials and the populist ideals that Trump touted throughout his presidency. Masters has discussed a potential 2024 Senate bid with several Republicans, though it’s unclear whether he will run, GOP sources say.
Lake met with the NRSC for roughly an hour in February and is expected to meet with them again in the coming weeks, sources familiar with the meeting told CNN. The issue of focusing on claims of a stolen election was one point discussed at the meeting, the sources said.
“The point that has been brought up, which Kari knows, is that the issue sets are different from a governor’s race. She knows you can’t run on that because it’s not something, as a senator, that you can fix,” a source close to Lake said, referencing her rhetoric around stolen elections. “The conversation was more about how the issues are different between a governor’s race and a Senate race.”
Senior Republicans acknowledge that her ultimate decision on whether to enter the race could freeze out other candidates, particularly those wanting to run in the same lane, with the source close to Lake saying establishment-minded Republicans have been reaching out to her about a potential run. The source said Lake has a 200,000-plus donor list she could pull support from and believes she would have “widespread support” if she decides to run.
But many in the top ranks are skeptical about her chances.
“If you take a look at the race, where Sen. Sinema is probably going to take some of the right, left and center, it’s going to make for a difficult path for a Republican in that state in any scenario,” North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis told CNN. “The party there is, I think, set on Lake if she decides to run with it, but, I mean, we just have to see how well she performs.”
Tillis added that, given the “three-way race dynamic,” Lake “is not going to be able to make a lot of headway there.”
Cornyn said of Lake: “Her recent track record doesn’t indicate that she would be successful. We need candidates who can broaden their appeal beyond the base and win a general.”
Masters, meanwhile, has quietly reached out to some advisers about what another Senate run would look like and has spoken with some senior GOP officials about a 2024 run.
Other potential GOP candidates include Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb, who is expected to announce a Senate run as soon as this week and is viewed favorably by some top Republicans, according to GOP sources. Abe Hamadeh, formerly the Republican nominee for Arizona attorney general, is also weighing a run. And both Lamb and Hamadeh met recently with NRSC officials, but they have not met directly with Daines, according to a source familiar with the meetings.
Two other Republicans, Jim Lamon and Karrin Taylor Robson, are also considering jumping into the race, sources familiar with the matter say. Lamon and Robson, who ran in 2022 for Senate and governor respectively, did not receive Trump’s support.
Robson recently met with the NRSC, and many within the GOP committee “like her and see her as a quality candidate,” a source familiar with the meeting said. Lamon has not yet met with the NRSC, but is expected to set up a meeting in the coming months.
Arizona’s Senate primary is not until August 6, 2024, and the filing deadline to enter is April 8, 2024 — giving them a long runway to decide whether or not to run — further complicating GOP leadership’s calculus on how to navigate the race dynamics.
“I just think we’re, we’re more likely to get people elected if they’re focused on the future, as opposed to focusing on what happened in 2020,” Sen. Mitt Romney, a Republican of Utah, said when asked about a potential Lake candidacy. “I think the American people have made their judgment about the election and want to move on. So, let’s talk about the future and where we’re headed, and if we’ve got a candidate that is consumed with his or her past, it’s most likely a losing candidate.”
Caroline Wren, a senior adviser to Lake, told CNN, “There’s no doubt Kari Lake is a formidable force in the Republican party right now, but she’s still focused on her lawsuit in Arizona,” referring to her efforts to dispute her loss in the governor’s race.
Rubio said that Lake could be a strong Senate candidate, despite her shortfall last year.
“She was a very competitive candidate. I think I trust the Republican voters in Arizona to pick the nominee,” Rubio said. “I don’t think Washington should be stepping in to do it.”
But Democrats believe that a Lake candidacy will only bolster their chances, even if Sinema decides to run.
Rep. Ruben Gallego, the Arizona Democrat running for his party’s nomination in the Senate race, suggested to CNN he was praying for a Lake candidacy.
“I’m a practicing Catholic – so I have these votive candles for different things,” Gallego said. “I have a special candle for Kari Lake to jump in.”
Support the Agreement to End Hostilities, 2012, former prison artist Michael D. Russell
Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Irish counterpart Bertie Ahern sign the Good Friday Agreement on 10 April 1998
MinisterKingXPyeface putting his arm around fellow prison abolitionist Angela Davis.
Self portrait of prison artist C-Note
MinisterKingXPyeface contemplating on his dream to go from the KAGE to the STAGE.
The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 and the California Prisoner Racial Groups Agreement to End Hostilities of 2012 are examples of successful conflict resolution.
SILICON VALLEY, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES, April 8, 2023/EINPresswire.com/ — On April 11-12, 2023, US President Joe Biden will travel to the UK and Ireland to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday accord. The Good Friday Agreement (GFA), was signed a quarter century ago, as a US brokered agreement to help end decades of deadly sectarian violence in Northern Ireland.
Last year, in 2012, marked the 10 year anniversary of the Agreement to End Hostilities (AEH). The AEH was an agreement amongst California prisoners being housed in the most extreme form of long-term solitary confinement, Pelican Bay State Prison’s Short Corridor.
The AEH was an agreement between the various ethnic groups in the Short Corridor to end racial violence amongst California’s General population housed prisoners,…
PHOENIX (AP) — A giant red spoon that was stolen from an Arizona Dairy Queen and sparked a mystery on social media was found Monday morning, and it’s partly thanks to Pokémon GO.
Michael Foster, 52, was playing the outdoor mobile game when he spotted the 15-foot (4.5-meter) spoon around 7 a.m. It was lying on the ground behind a fence that surrounds a Phoenix middle school baseball field, just 2 miles (3 kilometers) from the scene of the heist.
“The first thing I did was send a picture to my wife and I said, ‘It’s the spoon.’ She said call the police,” Foster told The Associated Press.
“I can confirm the Dairy Queen ‘red spoon’ was located and recovered this morning,” Sgt. Brian Bower said in an email Monday.
Detectives are continuing to search for the suspects who took the spoon, he added. Police are encouraging the public to submit any tips.
A school maintenance man came over and pushed it over the fence to Foster, who handed it to Phoenix police.
“I set it down. They actually did the lifting after we got it over the fence,” Foster said. “They strapped it to the top of a police cruiser.”
Foster said nobody else was around and the school was just opening when he saw it.
“I did kind of look around and was like ‘What?’ One guy did finally come by and was like, ‘Is that what I think it is?’ Yeah, that’s the spoon,” Foster said.
This photo provided by Michael Foster shows a Phoenix police officer strapping down a 15-foot red spoon to his police cruiser in Phoenix on Monday, April 3, 2023. Foster found the giant red spoon while playing Pokemon GO. It was stolen from an Arizona Dairy Queen on March 25 and sparked a mystery on social media. (Michael Foster via AP)
Phoenix police over the weekend released surveillance footage from March 25 that showed two men and one woman get the spoon out of its base and put it on a large flatbed connected to a pickup truck.
Owners Raman and Puja Kalra said last week that they hoped to get it back. Getting another spoon made, delivered and then installed would cost over $7,000. They even resorted to creative strategies such as printing T-shirts for staff that said “Where’s My Spoon?”
Raman Kalra confirmed Monday in an email he was on his way to pick up the spoon from police.
“We are happy to have our spoon back and we are looking forward to the neighborhood creating more smiles and stories with this now world-famous spoon,” he said.
Dairy Queen is known for doling out plastic red spoons with their soft serve Blizzards. The Dairy Queen where the theft happened is the only Arizona location with a large red spoon. It’s been a popular Instagram photo spot.
The couple, who own 34 locations, also offered a reward of free Blizzard treats for anyone who helped facilitate the spoon’s return.
Foster said he doesn’t need a reward.
“Honestly, we’re just glad they’re gonna get their spoon back,” he said.
A giant red spoon that was stolen from an Arizona Dairy Queen and sparked a mystery on social media was found Monday morning, and it’s partly thanks to Pokémon GO.
Michael Foster, 52, was playing the outdoor mobile game when he spotted the 15-foot spoon around 7 a.m. It was lying on the ground behind a fence that surrounds a Phoenix middle school baseball field, just two miles from the scene of the heist.
“The first thing I did was send a picture to my wife and I said, ‘It’s the spoon.’ She said call the police,” Foster told The Associated Press.
“I can confirm the Dairy Queen ‘red spoon’ was located and recovered this morning,” Sgt. Brian Bower said in an email Monday.
Detectives are continuing to search for the suspects, described by police in a flyer as two males and one female, who took the spoon, he added. Police are encouraging the public to submit any tips. A school maintenance man came over and pushed the spoon, valued at over $3,500, over the fence to Foster, who handed it to Phoenix police.
“I set it down. They actually did the lifting after we got it over the fence,” Foster said. “They strapped it to the top of a police cruiser.”
This undated image provided by Raman and Puja Kalra shows their Dairy Queen franchise restaurant in Phoenix with 15-foot-tall red spoon. A local resident stumbled upon the spoon while playing Pokémon GO after unknown suspects stole it.
Raman and Puja Kalra / AP
Foster said nobody else was around and the school was just opening when he saw it. “I did kind of look around and was like ‘What?’ One guy did finally come by and was like, ‘Is that what I think it is?’ Yeah, that’s the spoon.”
Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego said she was happy the spoon had been recovered, saying in a tweet that “they scooped it up from a schoolyard this morning.”
I’m pleased to report the giant DQ spoon has been recovered by @PhoenixPolice. They scooped it up from a schoolyard this morning. Thanks for staying calm everyone!https://t.co/eYF00UEOZf
Phoenix police over the weekend released surveillance footage from March 25 that showed two men and one woman get the spoon out of its base and put it on a large flatbed connected to a pickup truck.
Owners Raman and Puja Kalra said last week that they hoped to get it back. Getting another spoon made, delivered and then installed would cost over $7,000. They even resorted to creative strategies such as printing T-shirts for staff that said “Where’s My Spoon?”
Raman Kalra confirmed Monday in an email he was on his way to pick up the spoon from police.
“We are happy to have our spoon back and we are looking forward to the neighborhood creating more smiles and stories with this now world-famous spoon,” he said.
This photo provided by Michael Foster shows a 15-foot red spoon lying behind a fence in Phoenix on Monday, April 3, 2023. Foster found the spoon after it was stolen from an Arizona Dairy Queen on March 25 and sparked a mystery on social media.
Michael Foster / AP
Dairy Queen is known for doling out plastic red spoons with their soft serve Blizzards. The Dairy Queen where the theft happened is the only Arizona location with a large red spoon. It’s been a popular Instagram photo spot.
The couple, who own 34 locations, also offered a reward of free Blizzard treats for anyone who helped facilitate the spoon’s return.
Foster said he doesn’t need a reward.
“Honestly, we’re just glad they’re gonna get their spoon back,” he said.
PHOENIX (AP) — Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs has been ordered to appear in court Thursday in her efforts to halt pending executions.
Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Frank Moskowitz said late Friday that Hobbs and Ryan Thornell, the state’s prison director, must show up to explain why the court shouldn’t issue an order against them on the grounds they are violating the constitutional rights of victims entitled to prompt justice.
The afternoon court appearance is scheduled the same day convicted murderer Aaron Gunches had been set to die. The Arizona Supreme Court in recent days concluded state law didn’t require Hobbs to proceed with the planned execution, even though it wasn’t officially called off.
An email requesting a response from the governor’s office was not immediately answered.
Arizona Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs speaks as she gives the state of the state address at the Arizona Capitol in Phoenix, Monday, Jan. 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)
At the same time, Maricopa County Attorney Rachel H. Mitchell has asked the court to extend the execution warrant for Gunches by 25 days.
Gunches had been set to die by lethal injection for the 2002 killing of his girlfriend’s ex-husband Ted Price. He had pleaded guilty to a murder charge in the shooting death near Mesa, Arizona.
Price’s sister, Karen Price, has pressed the court to order Hobbs to let the execution go ahead.
Hobbs had previously appointed a retired federal magistrate judge to examine Arizona’s procurement of lethal injection drugs and other death penalty protocols.
The corrections department said Monday its death penalty protocols “have been paused as we conduct our systemic review of the execution process.”
Arizona has 110 prisoners on death row. It carried out three executions last year after a hiatus of almost eight years over criticism that a 2014 execution was botched and because of difficulties obtaining execution drugs.
Washington — Congress on Wednesday approved a resolution to overturn the Biden administration’s protections for the nation’s waterways that Republicans have criticized as a burden on business, advancing a measure that President Biden has promised to veto.
Republicans have targeted the Biden administration’s protections for thousands of small streams, wetlands and other waterways, labeling it an environmental overreach that harms businesses, developers and farmers.
They used the Congressional Review Act that allows Congress to block recently enacted executive branch regulations. The Senate voted in favor 53 to 43 Wednesday to give final legislative approval to the measure. Four Democrats and independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona joined Republicans to vote in favor of the resolution.
“The overreach, basically, it’s unreal,” said Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat of West Virginia and critic of some of the White House’s environmental policies.
The Senate vote was the latest development in a long-running fight over the definition of “waters of the United States,” which establishes the breadth of the Clean Water Act’s protections. Environmentalists and the Biden administration have pushed to broaden the definition and protect more waterways from pollution while right-leaning groups and the Trump administration have argued that protecting fewer waterways would benefit builders, farmers and business.
In early March, the Republican-controlled House approved the resolution 227-198. A Congressional Review Act resolution requires a simple majority in both chambers and can’t be filibustered.
Water protections are “very symbolic and polarized,” according to Julian Gonzalez, legislative counsel with Earthjustice. He said moderate Democrats may vote for the resolution to show their independence from the Biden administration’s environmental agenda.
“The perceived impact won’t be as significant because the president will veto it, so they can sort of achieve their goal without causing that much damage,” Gonzalez said, adding that supporting efforts to weaken the Clean Water Act are shortsighted.
Democratic Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware said the Biden administration’s rule is protective and fair.
“The Biden rule requires us to be good neighbors, and stewards of our planet, while also providing flexibility for those who need it,” said Carper said.
In December, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers repealed the Trump administration’s business-friendly rule that scaled back protections. Since the Biden administration enacted its broader rule, Republicans have targeted it in the courts and Congress.
This month, a federal judge paused the rule in Texas and Idaho in a win for Republican legal challenges. Right-leaning states have argued in court the rule is too vague and would create unacceptable economic hardships.
The Supreme Court is also considering a related case brought by an Idaho couple who are fighting a requirement that they receive a permit to build their home near a lake after the EPA determined that part of their property was a regulated wetland. The justices heard arguments in Sackett v. EPA in October and a decision is expected in the next few months.
“Expansion of federal authority and an encroachment on states’ rights and private lands is the precise reason we have seen overwhelming support for my (Congressional Review Act) resolution,” said Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia.
Democrats hold a 51-49 Senate majority, but Democratic Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania is in the hospital being treated for depression and is unavailable for votes. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat of California, and GOP Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky are also absent.
The Biden administration’s rule is built on a pre-2015 definition of “waters of the United States,” but is more streamlined and includes updates to reflect court opinions, scientific understanding and decades of experience, EPA Assistant Administrator for Water Radhika Fox previously told The Associated Press. She added that the rule modestly increases protections for some streams, wetlands, lakes and ponds.
The new rule repeated the Trump-era rule that was finalized in 2020 and was broadly supported by farm bureaus and business that wanted less regulation on private property. Environmental groups said the Trump-era rules left too many waterways unprotected from pollutants.
Senate Democrats Manchin, Jon Tester of Montana, and both senators from Nevada, Jacky Rosen and Catherine Cortez Masto, supported the resolution. Sinema also voted in favor.
The press secretary for Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs of Arizona shared a meme suggesting that guns be drawn against transphobes ― hours after a shooter identified by police as transgender killed six people at a school in Nashville, Tennessee.
Josselyn Berry faced heavy backlash from Republicans after posting a GIF of actor Gena Rowlands in the movie “Gloria” brandishing two guns. “Us when we see transphobes,” the caption read.
Josselyn Berry’s tweet drew heavy criticism from the Arizona GOP.
The right-wing Arizona Freedom Caucus of state legislators demanded that Berry be fired. “Calling for violence like this is un-American & never acceptable,” the organization tweeted. In calling for Berry’s resignation, state Sen. Anthony Kern (R), who deems himself “Trump-endorsed,” said the entry was “massively disturbing.”
“I don’t think anyone, no matter your political leanings, would look at that tweet — any sane, professional person would look at that tweet and say, ‘This is how I want one of the top advisers to the governor of my state to conduct themselves,’” Daniel Scarpinato, a former chief of staff for ex-GOP Gov. Doug Ducey, told The Arizona Republic.
Republican Kari Lake, who lost the 2022 gubernatorial election to Hobbs and denied the results, wrote on Twitter: “If a conservative made light of a mass shooting & called for more violence, they’d be personally & professionally destroyed.”
The newspaper noted that Berry, whose Twitter account is currently private, wrote earlier Monday about trans rights. If “you work in the progressive community and are transphobic, you’re not progressive,” she wrote. The context behind that tweet was unclear, the Republic noted.
A respondent wrote “not sure these transphobic-from-the-left posers know who they’re messing with,” prompting Berry’s controversial gun tweet, according to the Republic.
Democratic Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly acknowledged there are “risks involved” in the potential indictment of former President Donald Trump by the Manhattan district attorney while reiterating that “nobody in our nation is or should be above the law.”
“I would hope that if they brought charges that they have a strong case, because this is, as you said, it’s unprecedented. And, you know, there’s certainly, you know, risks involved here,” Kelly said in an interview that aired Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Kelly also defended Trump’s calls on social media for his supporters to stage protests and “take our nation back” ahead of a possible indictment and called on law enforcement agencies to do their part to keep any protests peaceful.
“The president’s supporters, they have First Amendment rights, and they should be able to exercise those peacefully. I think it’s going to be important for law enforcement to pay attention to, you know, protests and make sure it doesn’t rise to the level of violence,” Kelly told CNN’s Jake Tapper.
Trump said Saturday he expects to be arrested in connection with the yearslong investigation into a hush money scheme involving adult film actress Stormy Daniels and called on his supporters to protest any such move.
In a social media post, Trump, referring to himself, said the “leading Republican candidate and former president of the United States will be arrested on Tuesday of next week” – though he did not say why he expects to be arrested. His team said after Trump’s post that it had not received any notifications from prosecutors.
The former president has been agitating for his team to get his base riled up and believes that an indictment would help him politically, multiple people briefed on the matter told CNN – a posture that potential 2024 Republican presidential candidate New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu acknowledged on Sunday in a separate interview with Tapper.
“I think it’s building a lot of sympathy for the former president,” Sununu said on “State of the Union.”
“So, I just think that the – not just the media, but really a lot of the Democrats have misplayed this, in terms of building sympathy for the former president. And it does drastically change the paradigm as we go into the ’24 election,” he said.
Kelly on Sunday declined to say whether he would support fellow Arizona senator Independent Kyrsten Sinema if she decides to run for re-election, but praised her record in the Senate, calling her “very effective.”
“I’ve worked with her very closely over the last two years. I mean, really, in a very positive way. She’s very effective in the United States Senate. We’ve gotten a lot done and I look forward to doing that, you know, over the next months in the – in the rest of this year,” Kelly said.
A train reportedly carrying hazardous materials has derailed in Mohave County, Arizona, near the state’s border with California, a sheriff’s office spokesperson confirmed Wednesday night.
No spills have been reported at this time, though there are washes running through the area from recent storms, according to Anita Mortensen, a spokesperson for the Mojave County Sheriff’s Office.
The derailment occurred near milepost 9 of Interstate 40, she said, which is a rural, non-residential area, The highway exit is home to a handful of truck stops and is about 20 miles north of Lake Havasu City.
It is unclear how many train cars left the tracks, Mortensen said.
The derailment comes a week after another train careened off the tracks in rural West Virginia, injuring three crew members and spilling diesel fuel into a nearby river, and over a month after a fiery derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, released potentially hazardous chemicals into the air, soil and water and required extensive cleanup efforts.
The National Transportation Safety Board and BNSF, a freight railway network, have been notified of the derailment and are responding to investigate, Mortensen said.
CNN has sought comment from the National Transportation Safety Board and BNSF.
Arizona’s top education official launched a hotline this week for state residents to report K-12 class curriculum and lessons that they deem “inappropriate,” the Arizona Department of Education said in a press release.
Championed by state Superintendent for Public Instruction Tom Horne, the “Empower Hotline” allows residents to voice their concerns about classroom materials that “detract from teaching standards,” including lessons that “focus on race or ethnicity rather than individuals and merit, promote gender ideology and social emotional learning,” the department said.
Horne, a Republican, unseated the Democratic incumbent last fall, running on a campaign platform of “fighting critical race theory” and stopping the “liberal indoctrination” of schoolchildren, according to his campaign website. He previously served two terms in the position from 2003 to 2011 and as Arizona attorney general from 2011 to 2015.
“I promised to establish this hotline so that anyone could report the teaching of inappropriate lessons that rob students of precious minutes of instruction time in core academic subjects such as reading, math, science, history and the arts. That promise is being kept,” Horne said in the press release.
Horne’s agenda has been criticized for placing unnecessary emphasis on political issues, instead of focusing on other needs such as adding more mental health services for students and trimming class sizes.
Marisol Garcia, president of the Arizona Education Association, told CNN she was “disappointed” that Horne hasn’t worked to “get a grasp of what was going on” in Arizona schools but instead has pushed policies based on what she called “outlandish claims that he had been repeating during the campaign.”
Garcia, who also teaches eighth grade social studies, said she won’t change her curriculum because of the hotline but is afraid inexperienced teachers will alter their classes due to political pressure.
This isn’t the first instance of Arizona GOP lawmakers attempting to curb critical race theory, which the Arizona Department of Education defines loosely as “an ideology that can wear many different labels.” In 2021, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey signed a law prohibiting teachings that “blame or judge on the basis of race,” but the law was later struck down by the state Supreme Court.
Most recently, a bill sponsored by Arizona GOP lawmakers to restrict classroom lessons on race and ethnicity was vetoed Thursday by Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs.
This follows a push from conservative politicians across the country to curb critical race theory and classroom curriculum that teaches about race and ethnicity through the lens of power and privilege.
Critical race theory is based on the premise that racism is systemic in American society. According to CRT, racism is more than the result of individual prejudice; it is baked into institutions, laws and policies, and this creates and maintains racial inequities.
In January 2022, Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia launched an email tip line for parents to report concerns about “divisive concepts” being taught in the classroom. He also issued an executive order banning critical race theory from being part of the public school curriculum, even though it wasn’t included in Virginia’s standards of learning.
The tip line was eventually shuttered in September 2022. In the emails reviewed by CNN, there were concerns about institutionalized racism, mask wearing in schools, a back-and-forth about math curriculum and one woman who said she wanted to flood the tip line with positive comments.
Twilight offered welcome concealment when we met at the prearranged hour. “I really haven’t gone out anywhere” since well before the election, Bill Gates, the outgoing Republican chair of the Maricopa County board of supervisors, told me in mid-November. He’d agreed to meet for dinner at an outdoor restaurant in the affluent suburb of Scottsdale, Arizona, but when he arrived, he kept his head down and looked around furtively. “Pretty much every night, I just go home, you know, with my wife, and maybe we pick up food, but I’m purposely not going out right now. I don’t necessarily want to be recognized.” He made a point of asking me not to describe his house or his car. Did he carry a gun, or keep one at home? Gates started to answer, then stopped. “I’m not sure if I want that out there,” he said.
As a younger politician, not so long ago, Gates had been pleased and flattered to be spotted in public. Now 51 years old, he never set out to become a combatant in the democracy wars. He shied away from the role when it was first thrust upon him, after the 2020 election, recognizing a threat to his rising career in the GOP. But the fight came to him, like it or not, because the Maricopa County board of supervisors is the election-certification authority for well over half the votes in the state.
When we spoke, Kari Lake was still contesting her loss in Arizona’s gubernatorial election. Months later, she is still anointing herself “the real governor” and saying that election officials who certified her defeat are “crooks” who “need to be locked up.” She reserves special venom for Gates. Speaking to thousands of raucous supporters in Phoenix on December 18, beneath clouds of confetti, Lake denounced “sham elections … run by fraudsters” and singled him out as the figurehead of a corrupt “house of cards.”
“They are daring us to do something about it,” she said. “We’re going to burn it to the ground.” Then she lowered her mic and appeared to mouth, with exaggerated enunciation, “Burn the fucker to the ground.” To uproarious applause, she went on to invoke the Second Amendment and the bloody American Revolution against a tyrant. “I think we’re right there right now, aren’t we?” she said.
All of that may seem a little beside the point from afar, an inconsequential footnote to a 2022 election season that, mercifully, felt more normal than the last one. But Lake shares Donald Trump’s dark gift for channeling the rage of her supporters toward violence that is never quite spoken aloud.
In part as a result of her vilification campaign, Gates is stalked on social media, in his inbox and on voicemail, and in public meetings of the board of supervisors. Based on what law enforcement regarded as a credible death threat, Maricopa County Sheriff Paul Penzone removed Gates and his wife from their home in Phoenix on Election Night and dispatched them to a secure location under guard. They knew the drill. “I’ve done it so many times,” Gates recalled. “It’s like, ‘Here we go again.’”
In two successive elections, 2020 and 2022, Gates has had to choose: back his party, or uphold the law. Today, he is a leading defender—in news conferences, in court, and in election oversight—of Arizona’s democratic institutions.
I’d come to Phoenix to try to understand this moment in American politics. November’s midterm election was the first in the country’s history to feature hundreds of candidates running explicitly as election rejectionists. Enough of them were defeated to mark a salutary trend: Swing voters did not seem to favor blatant, self-serving lies about election fraud. That was an encouraging result for democracy, and a balm to many Americans eager for a return to something like political normalcy.
But it was not the whole story. Election deniers won races for secretary of state—the post that oversees election administration—in Alabama, Indiana, South Dakota, and Wyoming. They make up most of the Republican freshman class in Congress. Even some of the losers came very close. Lake’s election-denying ticket mate, Abe Hamadeh, lost the Arizona attorney general’s race by 280 votes.
Of greatest interest to me was the extent to which the narrow losses of MAGA conspiracists gained legitimacy from the words and actions of people like Gates—otherwise low-profile electoral officials, many of them Republican. I wanted to know how he saw the recent election, and what he expected of the next one. The more time I spent with him, and in Arizona, the more uncertain the reprieve of last November appeared.
“I’m politically dead,” Gates told me. It’s what he thinks most of the time, though not always. He toys with thoughts of running again, even running for higher office, but calculates that he has next to no chance of securing his party’s nomination for any office in 2024. If Trump or a successor tries to overturn the vote in January 2025, somebody else will have to be found to push back.
In Maricopa County alone, four of the five supervisors, all of whom have stood shoulder to shoulder in defense of the county’s election machinery, are Republicans. As ultra-MAGA conspiracists continue to dominate the GOP base, what kind of Republicans will be around to safeguard the next election, or the one after that?
Left: Ballot drop box outside the election center in Phoenix, Arizona. Right: “Unborn Lives Matter,” “Trump 2024 Take America Back,” and “Kari Lake for Governor” flags in a residential backyard in Peoria, Arizona. (Adam Riding for The Atlantic)
Something goes wrong in just about every voting cycle, and even when things go right, there are always details that can be made to look suspicious by fabulists intent on breaking public confidence. Sound elections rely on the competence, the fairness, the transparency, and, in recent years, the courage of election workers.
On Election Day 2022, Gates and other county authorities planned to ward off conspiracy theories with a smooth and efficiently functioning vote. The technology gods had other plans.
The first sign of trouble turned up around 6:30 a.m. One polling center reported what looked like a tabulator malfunction. Ballots were printing on demand, and voters were filling them in, but the tabulator spat them out unread. The troubleshooting hotline logged a second call a few minutes later, then a third. Soon, dozens of polling places had tabulation failures. Trouble spots filled the status board at the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center, which stood behind a newly built security fence to keep protesters outside.
“And then it’s like, ‘Oh, crap,’” Gates recalled. “This is a widespread issue.” And “we have literally the eyes of the world on this election.” Voter lines backed up and tempers flared. Nobody knew what was wrong. Gates got on the phone with the president of Dominion Voting Systems, which made the tabulators.
Lake and the far-right information ecosystem had promoted the lie that the ballot was rigged long before Election Day. Social media now lit up with claims that election officials had sabotaged their own machines to suppress the vote in Republican neighborhoods. Lake went on television to say, falsely, that her voters were being turned away.
Gates and Stephen Richer, the county recorder, rushed out a video message at 8:52 a.m. Standing in front of a tabulator, Gates said, “We’re trying to fix this problem as quickly as possible, and we also have a redundancy in place. If you can’t put the ballot in the tabulator, then you can simply place it here where you see the number three. This is a secure box where those ballots will be kept for later this evening, where we’ll bring them in here to Central Count to tabulate them.”
It was the sort of rapid public response—factual, practical, and reassuring—that’s become essential since Trump first began poisoning voter confidence with false claims of fraud. But the Lake campaign and its allies nonetheless saw an opportunity to sow doubt and confusion.
“No. DO NOT PUT YOUR BALLOT IN BOX 3 TO BE ‘TABULATED DOWNTOWN,’” Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA tweeted repeatedly to nearly 2 million followers. Kelli Ward, the Arizona Republican Party chair, posted the same urgent, all-caps advice, adding falsely that “Maricopa County is not turning on their tabulators downtown today!”
Many Lake supporters refused to use the Box 3 option, fearful that their votes would not be counted, and Gates ordered that voters be allowed to try the tabulators as many times as they wanted. The chaos at some polling stations worsened.
The technical error, diagnosed by midmorning, turned out to be that the printers in 43 of the 223 polling places were printing ballots with ink too faint for the tabulators to read. Nobody knew why; the same settings and equipment had worked fine in the August primaries. By early afternoon, technicians had solved the problem by increasing the heat setting on the print fuser.
Lake spread conspiracy theories throughout the day and in the days that followed, as the vote count went on. All Gates and Richer could do was stand in front of cameras, over and over again, answering every question. Box 3, by one or another name, was a standard voting option, employed in most Arizona counties for decades. There were plenty of polling places with short lines. Fewer than 1 percent of ballots were affected by printer issues, and all of them were being counted anyway. A live public video feed showed the tabulation operations, 24 hours a day. No voter had been turned away because of the glitch.
The office of Mark Brnovich, Arizona’s Republican attorney general, amplified Lake’s accusations and warned in a letter against certifying the election results without addressing numerous “concerns regarding Maricopa’s lawful compliance with Arizona election law.” Gates’s lawyer responded that the attorney general’s office had its facts wrong. Gates and his fellow supervisors certified the canvass on November 28. Katie Hobbs, the Democrat, had beaten Lake by 17,117 votes.
Lake filed a lawsuit on December 9, a 70-page complaint filled with florid accusations: sabotaged printers and tabulators, “hundreds of thousands of illegal ballots,” thousands of Republican voters who’d been disenfranchised—all in Maricopa County alone. The judge threw out most of her charges in pretrial rulings. At trial, Lake was unable to supply any persuasive evidence of wrongdoing or identify even one disenfranchised voter or illegal ballot. She lost again in the Court of Appeals on February 16, and now vows to go to the state supreme court. She has raised more than $2.6 million since Election Day, spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C., this past weekend, and seems likely to run for the U.S. Senate next year.
Interior building details of the election center in Phoenix, Arizona (Adam Riding for The Atlantic)
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ost of the election deniers who lost their races around the country in November conceded defeat, with varying degrees of grace. Pretending to win elections they lost turned out to be harder than Trump made it look. Not many politicians have the former president’s bottomless capacity to live and breathe an alternate reality—or make millions of people care. A pair of Joe Biden speeches on democracy, together with the public hearings of the January 6 committee, had also helped discredit election-fraud charges among independent voters. And right-wing media may have been more cautious about baseless fraud claims after the defamation lawsuits brought against them following their performance in 2020. Lake, a charismatic presence who had honed her television skills as a local news anchor, was one of the few candidates who doubled down on conspiracy talk.
But the impact of Lake’s performance was not hard to see. More than 1.2 million people voted for Lake in the governor’s race, three-quarters of a million of them in Maricopa. Many, swept up in her reality-distortion field, believed sincerely that the election had been stolen. Scores of them surged into the board of supervisors’ hearing room on November 16, eight days after the election. Gates had scheduled public comments on election procedures. He sat on the dais with the demeanor of a nervous high-school principal, determined to keep rowdy students under control.
“I’m just going to say this right now: We have children watching this,” he told the crowd, improbably. “So please, no profanity.”
Everyone who signed up to speak would have two minutes. No interruptions. “We’re not going to have any outbursts, okay?” he said. The audience laughed, mocking him.
A woman named Raquel stood up.
“Mr. Chairman Bill Gates and Recorder Richer, you both have lost all credibility and any shred of integrity—”
Applause interrupted her. Gates narrowed his eyes.
Raquel accused Gates of founding “a political-action committee to specifically defeat MAGA candidates” and asked how he could fairly run an election. In 2021, amid a spurious “forensic audit” that tried to prove that Trump had won Arizona the previous year, Gates had made a $500 contribution to a PAC formed by Richer, the county recorder, called Pro-Democracy Republicans of Arizona—“The Arizona election wasn’t stolen” was the first line on its website—but he’d had no role in distributing its funds.
Another woman, Kimberly, told the supervisors that she knew they had sabotaged the ballot printers. “As a former programmer myself, I can tell you there’s no such thing as a glitch,” she said. The crowd, stirring, murmured its assent.
Jeff Zink, a MAGA Republican who had just lost his race for U.S. Congress, brought a more direct sense of grievance. The only reason he had not won, he said, was that “an algorithm took place which shows that at no time did I ever gain any ground whatsoever.” He did not explain what he thought an algorithm is. It did not matter: He had the room behind him.
Some witnesses made specific allegations. Many simply flung vitriol. “I’m just disgusted by your behavior,” said Sheila, a retired city worker. “Look at all these people out here who are suffering so badly because of your falsehoods.”
“You are the cancer that is tearing this nation apart,” said Matt, another speaker, to louder and angrier applause.
“Thank you,” Gates replied tightly.
Several speakers invoked higher powers and threatened divine retribution—or, anyway, retribution in God’s name. “Beware, your sins will find you out,” one speaker said in a quavering voice. Another, a hulk of a man named Michael, said that “God knows what you’ve done … I warn you and I caution you, we got a big God in Jesus’s name.”
Another burst of applause amid angry buzzing. Audience members were beginning to rise from their seats. Two sheriff’s deputies made as if to move toward them and then thought better of it. My sense, sitting near the front, was that the gathering was just below full boil. If the crowd got any hotter, two deputies would not be enough.
“You need to resign today. And I pray that God is going to convict your heart and for what you’ve done,” yelled a furious Lake supporter named Lisette.
Gates tried to respond, beginning to speak of the electoral redundancies that ensure that every vote is counted. But the crowd was standing and shouting. He adjourned the meeting and slipped out a side door, stage right. I joined him a few minutes later in his office across the street. I told Gates that it had looked to me as though the crowd had been making up its mind about whether to rush the dais.
“This is not a game,” he said. “This is very serious. And the danger of violence is just right under the surface.”
Gates picked without enthusiasm at a container of plain chicken and steamed carrots that his wife, the county’s associate presiding judge, had cooked for his lunch. “We’re doing this diet right now,” he said, a bit mournfully. “We’re trying to be good.”
He had rejected the option of packing the room with security, he said. “These are challenging times, because you also don’t want to create a police state, you know? And that’s something that we’re balancing.”
Gates has learned to live with a constant stream of abuse. It began long before the 2022 midterms and has not let up since those elections concluded. One persistent correspondent has written to him several times a month since early 2021. One day, he writes, “Hey I hear little bitch Bill Gates is in hiding? Why? Cause you worked extra hard to steal tao elections … or more? Keep hiding rat shit.” Four days later: “You are scum and deserve to be tried for treason.”
A voicemail left for his chief of staff, Zach Schira, twisted with rage: “I really believe that what we used to do to traitors is what we should do today. Give ’em a fucking Alabama necktie, you piece of shit. Fucking traitor, just like your fucking boss, rigging the election for a little bit of dough, you know? Piece of shit.” (The good old boy who left the message was probably aiming for a lynching metaphor, but he had hit on something else.)
In December, Gates woke up one morning and was moved to post on Twitter about the beauty around him: “If you are in @maricopacounty, step outside and look at the sunrise. We are blessed to live here.” The responses, dozens of them, were almost comically savage.
“Hopefully soon you won’t be able to see that beautiful sunrise, bc you’ll be locked up!”
“Treeeeaaasooon.”
“Quick question. Do you happen to know the penalty for treason? Just curious is all.”
There was more, calling him subhuman, soulless, satanic.
Every now and then, something sufficiently threatening crosses Sheriff Penzone’s desk, and he notifies Gates that it is time to sleep somewhere else. On other occasions, the sheriff will post a pair of undercover deputies outside his home. Most of the time, though, Gates walks and drives and puts himself out there in the world all alone.
A residential property in Peoria, Arizona (Adam Riding for The Atlantic)
Gates knows he is far from the only election official under threat. On January 16, police in Albuquerque, New Mexico, arrested a failed Republican political candidate who’d rejected his defeat and allegedly paid gunmen to shoot at the homes of four Democratic officeholders. On January 26, over in Arizona’s Cochise County, the elections director resigned her post after years of abuse, citing an “outrageous and physically and emotionally threatening” working environment.
Gates stays in touch with peers around the country, mostly Republicans, who have stood up against election denial and faced the consequences. They form a little community, like an internet support group, dishing out comfort on bad days and dispatching a friendly word when they see one another in the news.
One member of this informal group is Al Schmidt, who was the sole Republican on the Philadelphia board of elections in the 2020 election and received a deluge of death threats after Trump accused him of being party to corruption. Gates also corresponds with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and his chief operating officer, Gabriel Sterling, both of whom pushed back against Trump’s demands to “find” enough votes to upend Biden’s victory in that state.
“We have done Zoom meetings,” he told me. “We have met in person. We talk on the phone. We text one another. And it’s very helpful because … if you haven’t gone through this, you don’t really understand. And if you have gone through it, you do.”
The simple banter reminds Gates that he has allies, even if far away.
“Yesterday, Trump endorsed an all-in stop the steal candidate for AG so look for me in handcuffs in early 2023. 😊,” Gates said in a text last June to Maggie Toulouse Oliver, the secretary of state of neighboring New Mexico. He was only half-joking: Abe Hamadeh, who nearly went on to win the attorney general’s race, was vowing to prosecute election officials whom he accused of fraud.
“Omg. Well I’ll come bail you out!! ❤️,” Oliver replied.
Chair of the board of supervisors is not even a full-time job in Maricopa, the fourth-largest county in America, with a population of 4.5 million and a $4.5 billion budget. Gates’s day job is associate general counsel for Ping, a large Phoenix-based manufacturer of golf clubs and bags. His position is not undemanding, but election controversies sometimes keep him away from the office for days or weeks at a time. His bosses, he said, “have been very understanding.”
It is hard to convey how little his world resembles the one Gates signed up for when he first ran for county supervisor. He grew up as a self-described “political dork” in Phoenix and chose Drake University, in Des Moines, for college because of its champion mock-trial team and because he wanted to see the Iowa caucuses in person. Jack Kemp, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush were his political heroes.
In 2009, Gates won an appointment to the Phoenix city council, where he developed a reputation as an urban technocrat. When he ran for county supervisor in 2016, the planks of his platform involved vacant strip malls, water and sewer problems, and garbage pickup. He called himself an “economic-development Republican” who “wants government to get out of the way to allow … free enterprise to flourish.”
Left: A polling-place tabulator and ballot box. Right: Election canvassing books at the election center in Phoenix. (Adam Riding for The Atlantic)
The warehouse section of the election center in Phoenix (Adam Riding for The Atlantic)
Gates did not much like Trump in the 2016 campaign, and voted for John Kasich in the primary. When Trump came to town for a rally, Gates told The Arizona Republic that Trump’s views “do not reflect the majority of Arizonans and the majority of Arizona Republicans.”
Even so, like a lot of reluctant Republicans, Gates voted for Trump over Hillary Clinton that year. “I believed he would nominate judges to the federal bench who would exercise judicial restraint, and that Mike Pence would have a calming influence,” he told me. Now that he represents the election-certification authority, Gates will not say how he voted in 2020.
If 2022 was hard on Gates and his colleagues, 2020 was worse—a fact that can reasonably support either optimism or pessimism for 2024. The presidency was at stake, not the governor’s office, and the aftermath of the election fell upon Gates and his fellow supervisors like a toxic spill. Arizona, and Maricopa County in particular, became a major focus of Trump’s cries of fraud. Angry mobs descended on the election command center and the homes of some of the supervisors, shouting “Stop the steal.” Alex Jones of Infowars and Representative Paul Gosar worked up the crowds. Gates called the scene outside the command center “Lollapalooza for the alt right.” Police put up temporary fencing to protect the ongoing tabulation. Inside, the staff could hear chanting and the reverberation of drums.
The incumbent president, wielding all the authority of his position, mobilized not only the MAGA grassroots but also the GOP establishment in service of his pressure campaign. Trump twice tried to get one of Gates’s colleagues, then-chair Clint Hickman, on the phone. Ward, the state Republican chair, began calling and texting Gates relentlessly as the deadline neared to certify the presidential vote, on November 20. “Here’s Sidney Powell’s phone number,” she said, according to Gates, referring to a Trump lawyer who would become notorious for outlandish claims. “Will you please call her?”
“I’m going, ‘Who’s Sidney Powell?’” Gates told me. “I never returned that call.”
In her text messages, which Gates provided to me, Ward recited multiple alleged anomalies and conspiracy theories. She attributed a baseless allegation about the corrupt design of Dominion software to an unnamed “team of fraud investigators.” She worried that “fellow Repubs are throwing in the towel. Very sad. And unAmerican.” She noted, “You all have the power that none of the rest of us have.”
The texts went on and on, alternately lawyerly, angry, and pleading.
Gates replied in the end with four words: “Thanks for your input.”
Had he felt threatened by all the arm-twisting from the state party chair? I asked.
“Threat is a strong word,” he told me, adding, “I felt pressure. I felt like if I didn’t do what she wanted to do, that there would be political ramifications, certainly.”
Gates grew up in local government and had a politician’s instinct not to make enemies. But if he fulfilled his lawful duty, he would become a pariah in the state GOP and an enemy of the president of the United States. Knowing that—and Ward made sure he knew—was supposed to crush all thoughts of resistance.
“Once you make that vote to certify, you know you’re not coming back from that,” Gates said. “People thought because I was nice over all these years that I was weak.”
Gates and his fellow supervisors voted unanimously, on schedule, to certify the 2020 election. But that didn’t slow the campaign to overturn the results. “Stop the steal” sentiment intensified as the year drew to a close. The Republican-dominated State Senate issued a subpoena for all of the county’s paper ballots and voting machines, planning to hand them over to a MAGA-run outfit called Cyber Ninjas to “audit” the results. Gates and his colleagues refused to comply, believing that would be illegal. They filed a lawsuit to void the subpoena.
Gates was doing last-minute shopping at Walgreens at about 5 p.m. on Christmas Eve when Rudy Giuliani called him. He did not recognize the number and ignored it, but he kept the voicemail, which he played for me.
“I have a few things I’d like to talk over with you,” Giuliani says, after introducing himself. “Maybe we can get this thing fixed up. You know, I really think it’s a shame that Republicans, sort of, we’re both in this kind of situation. And I think there may be a nice way to resolve it for everybody. So give me a call, Bill. I’m on this number, any time, doesn’t matter, okay? Take care. Bye.”
Gates shook his head at the memory.
“Someone who on 9/11 I had great respect for,” he said. “I didn’t return his call.”
In early 2021, state legislators moved to have Gates and his colleagues taken into custody for contempt if they did not hand over the ballots, notwithstanding the pending court case. Gates assured his crying daughters—there are three of them, now all in college—that he would be all right.
“So I actually shot a video on my camera—this was sort of like, you know, a hostage video,” Gates said. “Like, ‘If, you know, if you’re watching this, I’m now in custody,’ kind of explaining why I had done what I did, why I thought we were right.”
For all the sense of menace, there was something liberating about this period, Gates told me, and it was around this time that he began to speak out more often and more forcefully in defense of elections and the people who run them.
“They made allegations that our employees had deleted files, basically committed crimes,” Gates said. “That’s when this board, along with Recorder Richer and other countywide electeds, stood up and said, ‘We’re going to push back now. This is a lie. You’re accusing our folks of committing crimes. We can’t stand by silent.’”
The county court eventually ruled that Maricopa had to turn over the ballots and voting machines, and the Cyber Ninjas circus began. It found no evidence of fraud but stretched on for months, keeping Gates in the news as a foil.
His career, he believed then, was finished. He had no reason to hold back.
“Once you’re dead, there’s nothing they can do to you,” he said. “Right?”
Pedestrians walking along Mill Avenue in Tempe, Arizona (Adam Riding for The Atlantic)
“You know,” Gates told me, “I think this is the most dangerous time for the state of our democracy other than the Civil War.”
By any accounting, the 2020 election was more dangerous than the one last year. Gates knows as well as anyone that it’s too soon to say the worst is behind us. As a presidential nominee, Trump or another candidate could bring a subversive focus and intensity to the party that’s all but impossible during the midterms. More than a third of Republicans are still hard-core Trump supporters, and nearly two-thirds still believe the 2020 election was rigged. The race late last month for chair of the Republican National Committee pitted an incumbent who was all in for Trump against two challengers who competed to be more so.
Yet for all that, and despite what he’s just been through (again), Gates does see hopeful possibilities—possibilities he didn’t see two years ago. Many of the most strident election deniers did lose, he points out. Gripped by MAGA fever, the GOP has now experienced three successive setbacks at the ballot box, in 2018, 2020, and 2022. Some of the party’s elected leaders have distanced themselves from Trump since the midterms, and polls of GOP voters show some softening of support.
If Arizona rejected the extremists who ran for statewide office—Lake and Hamadeh and Mark Finchem, who ran for secretary of state—does that mean a politician like Gates might still have a chance? It’s an important question, because extremists who win primaries won’t always lose local general elections, and in the worst case, it wouldn’t take many extremists in roles like his to throw the country into chaos.
There is no clear answer yet, for Gates or for American democracy. In the biggest picture, the range of plausible outcomes in 2024 is as wide as it has been in living memory.
On January 11, Gates handed over the chair’s gavel to his colleague Clint Hickman. Until next year, when his term expires, Gates will simply be one of five members of the county board.
Recently, he has allowed himself to imagine running for statewide office. Democrats defeated all of the Arizona election deniers in 2022, but perhaps a mainstream Republican could win next time.
“Maybe we can take another shot at this. Maybe we can fight to get candidates who can appeal to the big tent,” he said. “That was the party that I joined.”
Did he really think it could happen as soon as 2024? I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Things change. Two years is a long time in politics.”
This article initially misstated Bill Gates’s job title at Ping.
The person spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because Machado must pass a physical before the deal is finalized.
Machado got a big cheer from Padres fans on a chilly afternoon in Arizona before a spring training game against the Diamondbacks. The third baseman struck out in his first at-bat before lacing a line-drive double off the base of the left-field wall in San Diego’s nine-run second inning of an 18-6 victory.
Machado finished 2 for 3 at the plate, adding a single in the third.
The 30-year-old slugger had said that after this season he planned to opt out of the $300 million, 10-year free agent deal he signed in 2019. With the $120 million he already has received, the new deal increases the free-spending Padres’ commitment to Machado to $470 million over 15 years.
Machado finished second in the NL MVP race last year. He’ll anchor a superstar-laden lineup that includes Xander Bogaerts, Juan Soto and Fernando Tatis Jr., who can return on April 20 from an 80-game suspension for performance-enhancing drugs.
Machado batted .298 with 32 home runs and 102 RBIs last season.
BACK IN BLACK (AND ORANGE)
Michael Conforto saw his first game action in more than a year and went 1 for 3 as the San Francisco Giants’ designated hitter against the Cincinnati Reds. He singled his final time up.
“Felt good to be back. I definitely had some nerves. After the first at-bat most of them went away,” he said.
Conforto, who turns 30 on Wednesday, hadn’t played since Oct. 3, 2021, when he was with the New York Mets. He missed all of 2022 after having right shoulder surgery but signed a two-year, $36 million contract with the Giants in the offseason.
He said the plan is to DH for a couple of weeks, then play some outfield.
“Really what matters is getting to opening day healthy,” Conforto said. “But today was good.”
CAPTAIN JUDGE
Yankees slugger Aaron Judge received several ovations from the crowd at Steinbrenner Field before his first game in pinstripes as the new team captain.
“I felt it with the intro, I felt it on defense, I felt it stepping up to the plate,” the reigning AL MVP said.
Judge was a free agent after last season but ended up signing a $360 million, nine-year contract with the Yankees. He also was named the team’s first captain since Hall of Famer Derek Jeter in 2014.
“He loves the game, and obviously being back here, to be able to put the uni on and go out, I think it was something he was looking forward to,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said.
TROPHY DO-OVER
Marlins right-hander Sandy Alcantara received his NL Cy Young Award trophy on Sunday for the second time – and this time he has no reason to give it back.
“I want to keep it for the rest of my life,” Alcantara said. “I think that is for my mom.”
When the Baseball Writers’ Association of America originally presented Alcantara with the trophy at its January awards dinner, the plaque language dubbed both Alcantara and AL winner Justin Verlander the “most valuble” pitchers in their leagues, leaving out the second “a” in “valuable.”
The new plaque contains the more up-to-date “most outstanding” phrasing — and it’s spelled correctly.
Marlins owner Bruce Sherman presented the award to Alcantara at home plate before Miami’s spring training home opener against St. Louis.
“I didn’t expect that I was going to get my award today,” Alcantara said. “I thought I’d go outside and have fun with my teammates. But when I saw the surprise, it made my day today.”
RULES, RULES, RULES
Cardinals manager Oliver Marmol said Major League Baseball is providing updates — nearly in real time — on the rules changes package that is making this spring training unique.
The two major changes are a pitch clock and a limit on extreme infield shifts.
“They did a really nice job of sending out a memo this morning with all the things that took place yesterday and questions that players and managers that just had to be addressed in order that you can cover it with your staff and club as you feel appropriate,” Marmol said. “So we did that with our staff and brought two different points with our players because they’ve done a really good job of communication.”
The new rules already had an effect during Saturday’s first full day of games: Cal Conley of the Atlanta Braves thought he had just won the game with a two-out, bases-loaded walk. But umpire John Libka ruled that Conley wasn’t set in the box as the pitch clock wound under eight seconds.
He was ruled out. The game ended in a tie.
Braves manager Brian Snitker said Sunday that Conley’s situation was part of a learning process.
“It’s baseball. You’re going to see something you’ve never seen before,” Snitker said. “All to the point where I said I’m glad we’re starting these things when we did. I’m glad we didn’t wait until March 15 or something where we can have a whole month of this, and hopefully in a few weeks that this thing is just normal.”
There were more hiccups on Sunday throughout the Cactus and Grapefruit League games, but most took the changes in stride.
Rockies reliever Daniel Bard was called for a ball after throwing a warmup pitch after the 30-second deadline heading into an inning. The 30-second mark before innings was also a source of confusion during the Cardinals-Marlins game. Two Cardinals pitchers were called for balls before the start of innings before, according to Marmol, the umpires gathered and realized they were interpreting the rule incorrectly.
“It’s spring training for everybody,” Marmol said. “Those things will get ironed out before we get out of here.”
According to Major League Baseball, there were 69 pitch-timer violations through the first 35 spring training games over the weekend — including 35 violations in 16 games Sunday.
SCHERZER FINE WITH CLOCK
New York Mets right-hander Max Scherzer described pitching under the new major league rules as a “cat-and-mouse” game.
Contrary to previous years, Scherzer feels the pitcher finally has gained control.
In his first start of the Grapefruit League schedule, Scherzer was touched for a run in the second inning but struck out five while working the first two innings of the Mets’ 6-3 win over Washington.
“Really, the power the pitcher has now — I can totally dictate pace,” the three-time Cy Young Award winner said. “The rule change of the hitter having only one timeout changes the complete dynamic of the hitter-and-pitcher dynamic. Yeah, I love it.”
Washington’s Michael Chavis, the second hitter in the second inning, stepped out of the box when he felt Scherzer was taking too long. That was fine with Scherzer.
He held the ball for more than 10 seconds before delivering the next pitch as Chavis had to remain in the batter’s box, no matter the level of his impatience. The fact that Chavis ultimately singled to right was immaterial. Scherzer had imposed his will.
“It’s a cat-and-mouse game,” Scherzer said. “There’s rules and I’ll operate within whatever the rules are.”
TWINS ADD SANTANA
The Minnesota Twins claimed right-handed pitcher Dennis Santana off waivers from the Atlanta Braves.
The 26-year-old threw in 63 games, including one start, for the Texas Rangers last season, going 3-8 with a 5.22 ERA. To make room for Santana on the 40-man roster, the Twins put infielder Royce Lewis on the 60-day injured list.
Lewis is recovering from right knee surgery.
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AP Baseball Writer Ronald Blum, AP Sports Writer Bernie Wilson and freelancers Chuck King, Mark Didtler, Jack Thompson and Rick Hummel contributed to this report.
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AP MLB: https://apnews.com/hub/mlb and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports
