We may have crossed a line this year.
But it was for a good cause.
Joe gave money to Republican U.S. Rep. Juan Ciscomani’s reelection campaign. But before you blow your top, he also gave money to Democrat JoAnna Mendoza’s run for Southern Arizona’s swing congressional seat.
And all he got was this lousy T-shirt.
Seriously, this is a $50 T-shirt.
Actually, he got a lot more than that.
With a small contribution to each campaign, he got a look behind the veil at how campaigns interact with their donors versus what the average voter sees in the CD6 race.
For the record, the money he donated to the campaigns doesn’t put him on any VIP lists in one of the nation’s hottest races, where independent expenditure groups are currently spending millions of dollars to promote (or attack) their chosen candidates in #AZ06.
Really, $50 to each campaign is a drop in the bucket compared to the roughly $7.4 million raised by Mendoza or the $6.2 million raised by Ciscomani. These numbers will increase by millions soon, when third-quarter reports are due to the FEC tonight.
And by confessing our transgressions publicly, we expect that the campaigns won’t be reaching out to Joe for much longer.
So what does it buy you?
Beyond the T-shirt, here is what happened next: Joe started getting invited to Mendoza’s canvassing events. He also got a bunch of texts from Texas Democrat James Talarico’s Senate campaign asking for cash, which we think are associated with Joe’s contribution to Mendoza.
But Team Mendoza didn’t hassle Joe for more money at all. At least not yet.
Team Ciscomani, on the other hand, had no problem whatsoever sending needy email pleas to donate even more money.
Hell, even Republican Congressman Jim Jordan reached out to ask for cash for Ciscomani.
While Ciscomani and Mendoza both have polished communications operations to push narratives, the fundraising emails from Ciscomani lean into the most partisan, hyperbolic pleas you could possibly imagine.
One that had us chuckling (and feeling a wee bit threatened, to be honest) was an email that began: “Please, don’t ignore me again, John.”1 But there were plenty of other disaster-themed messages that showed up in Joe’s email inbox from Team Ciscomani.
We honestly had a hard time picking our favorite requests from the massive pile of emails.
At last count, we’ve received 100 emails from the Ciscomani campaign.
What’s in the emails?
Fundraising emails reflect a different narrative than what we see in Ciscomani's campaign ads, his statements to reporters and his posts on social media.
So, what’s inside these emails? Frank warnings that without more campaign funding, Ciscomani could lose this election.
Like this charmer.
We also got one asking us to celebrate his birthday. By giving him more money.
One thing caught our attention: Ciscomani has largely scrubbed his campaign website of mentions of President Donald Trump — and these sometimes hyperbolic emails barely mention Trump at all. Maybe political consultants are telling the campaign not to talk about a president whose approval ratings are in the gutter?
We also didn’t see pleas from other Republican campaigns. Apparently, Talarico’s political rival, Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, isn’t in the market for some guy who gave a small-dollar donation to a GOP candidate in Arizona once.2
Other ways to squeeze a lemon
It is a fairly well-established practice to sell, rent or simply borrow donor lists, as they are political gold for other campaigns looking to raise cash quickly. Donated to Mendoza? Maybe you want to give to other Dems as well.
Our favorite plea from a non-CD6 candidate came from Talarico, the Texas Democrat, repeatedly reaching out for cash on the last day of the third-quarterly quarterly filing deadline.
Joe did not give money to Talarico.
For what it’s worth, it doesn’t look like Team Ciscomani sold Joe’s deets to other campaigns — or at least not yet.
Officially, Mendoza’s campaign told us that it didn’t sell Joe’s information — noting that it doesn’t receive donor information quickly from Democrats’ favorite digital fundraising platform, ActBlue.
It’s plausible, several Democratic campaign pros tell us, that a digital middleman sold his information. We’re told some brokers are using AI to data mine these donor lists pretty damn hard.
And then there were three: The Pima County Board of Supervisors selected three finalists to take over when County Administrator Jan Lesher retires. The search committee recommended candidates with “long, exemplary careers of public service,” per a news release from the county. The three finalists are: Deputy County Administrator Carmine DeBonis; Leonard Hernandez, who serves as a county manager in Washington state; and Leah Rhineheimer, assistant town manager in Gilbert.
Staying away from the cameras: Republican Congressman Juan Ciscomani skipped the Trump rally in Bullhead City yesterday due to “long-planned commitments” in the Tucson area, Laura Gersony reports for the Republic. Jay Feely, a Republican who’s running in Arizona Congressional District 1, also “regrettably” was unable to attend. While the candidates gave tactful reasons for not attending, Republican consultant Doug Cole had a more direct explanation, in light of the president’s falling approval numbers: “It would be political suicide for either of them to show up in Bullhead City.”
Time to tighten their belts: Republican Pima County Supervisor Steve Christy doesn’t want voters to give the county government a blank check by approving Prop 425, which would raise the county’s expenditure limit. Christy, the lone Republican on the board, wrote an op-ed in the Arizona Daily Star saying his colleagues keep raising property tax rates unnecessarily.
“If there were guardrails in the proposition language to ensure that core county functions, such as infrastructure, road improvements, and public safety needs were funded fully, then passing Prop. 425 would make some sense,” Christy writes. “But we have seen from the current Board, time and again, that their priorities lie elsewhere.”
Finding parking is hard enough: Fourth Avenue merchants have been upset about the city raising parking meter rates for a while, and now they have a new reason to complain: Nearly half the meters along Fourth Avenue don’t work, leaving customers wondering what they’re supposed to do, Eddie Celaya reports for KGUN. City officials say they’re getting replacement batteries for the meters as soon as possible.
A problem that won’t go away: The Rio Nuevo district set aside $10,000 to assess the 27-acre landfill at the base of A Mountain, after hearing concerns that the landfill might contaminate the water table underneath it, Tucson Sentinel columnist Blake Morlock writes. The city closed the landfill in 1962 and officials estimate the cost of remediating it could reach $50 million.
Inside the Issues is a nonpartisan series from the Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission about the issues shaping Arizona's future — the ones that are complex, consequential, and easy to overlook.
Each episode brings voters into the conversation with experts, public officials, and community leaders who explain what's actually at stake and what decisions are ahead. No pundits, no party line — just the context you need to walk into the voting booth informed instead of guessing.
We came this close Tuesday night to a “Steve Christy Day.”
The only Republican on the Pima County Board of Supervisors pushed back on a new proclamation policy that would give each supervisor one proclamation per meeting. The policy was a response to the overflowing list of proclamations at the start of each meeting.
Christy asked whether he could use all 26 of his proclamations at once.
We admire a man willing to blow his entire proclamation budget in one sitting.
The supervisors postponed the vote until they could get answers to his and his colleagues’ questions on how best to rein in proclamations.
1 John is his legal name, but he’s been writing as Joe for a few decades now.
2 Technically, Joe did this one time before, handing over $25 to get into a Martha McSally donor-only event back in 2018.