By now, you should understand that I value accuracy and telling it like it is more than I value getting along for the sake of not upsetting anyone. Arizona, my home since 2023, ranks near the top of the pile for readership of Captain K’s Corner; therefore, what I’m writing here today is going to ruffle feathers, and I’ll bet a lot of the top pearl clutchers in the state (and in Pima County) are going to be very fussy. So be it. Here’s the bottom line up front:
Katie Hobbs is slowly but surely moving toward reelection.
Yes, the frumpy, uninspiring social worker from hell with nine political lives, who came back from the electoral dead to “win” the Secretary of State office in 2018 after her Republican opponent was called the winner on Election Night (allowing her to run the corrupt 2020 election in the state), and who, in that position, ran her own election for governor against Kari Lake (also ripped off with mail-in ballots and counting games)… is about to get reelected in a race that isn’t shaping up to be all that close.
Now, I’m not believing all the Janet Napolitano-level polling out there. Polarization alone guarantees there will be no 2006 repeat, and with that, should rule out any chance Hobbs wins by 13%, or whatever insane margin some of Arizona’s most ludicrous pollsters are publishing. Arizona is also too red, and Hobbs too unpopular, for a legitimate blowout.
This is exactly why I am so disappointed watching the race for Arizona governor play out. In December, I published a lengthy analysis outlining how unlikely a Hobbs reelection appeared based on 102 years of registration data. Only 2 Democrat gubernatorial candidates had retroactive performances that could have overwhelmed the current GOP registration advantage in the state. Here’s an excerpt:
I have party registration figures back to 1924 in Arizona. The state ran gubernatorial races every two years until 1970, when it moved to a quadrennial format. The only gubernatorial years without party registration figures are 1942 and 1944. The Arizona Republican Party took over the voter registration advantage in the state in 1986 and has never once relinquished it. Prior to then, it had been voting Republican for President (no misses) since 1952, but still playing ball with Democrat governors and Senators.
In 33 of 35 hypothetical matchups with today’s party registration figures, Katie Hobbs loses the governorship. The only historical exceptions would be:
Bruce Babbitt (1982 reelection) - popular incumbent running in a Reagan recession midterm (pre-boom), had important accomplishments on water management and healthcare, and prosecuted land fraud; ran 27.6% left of D+2.4% party registration advantage in a 30% blowout of a weak Republican and strong libertarian vote stealer.
Janet Napolitano (2006 reelection) - a pragmatic moderate who only slipped up after becoming part of team Obama, impossible to beat from the get-go with a high approval rating; ran against weak Republican challenger and beat him from the right by deploying the National Guard to deal with the border emergency. Ran 33.4% left of R+6.2% party registration advantage and won every county. The performance against the registration count, 576,764 left of the R+160,462 advantage, is the only one of 35 performances strong enough to top the current R+328,534 advantage.
Notably, Napolitano would have lost in 2002 (when she won by +1.0%) with the current GOP registration advantage.
What I did not know at the time I wrote that article is how Biggs’s campaign would never really even get going and wait until the fourth quarter to open the playbook. People have been waiting for it to get moving in earnest for a solid year, and now we are two months out and still waiting for the gloves to come off. Sure, we aren’t helped by the late primary, and David Schweikert’s vanity campaign ensured zero party unity would be possible until the end of July. With the changes in state registration and the conversion of the Latino working class in increasing numbers away from Democrats and toward the GOP, combined with Biggs’s on-paper attributes, I’m utterly stunned that everyone and their mother expects Hobbs to be reelected, with the GOP praying to Heaven above that they’ll hold at least one chamber of the legislature to sideline Hobbs 2.0.
Biggs is a sitting Congressman with a higher margin of victory than President Trump in AZ-5. He’s born and raised in Tucson, and a well-known resident of Maricopa County. He’s soft-spoken and non-threatening, but he also has a very Trumpy voting record and is great for policy. He’s also a Mormon, in a state with a very influential Mormon Republican voting bloc that has recently been the reason, in the age of Trump/Lake populism, that Maricopa County even bends close enough to steal through the mail.
What the hell is going on?
Let me explain what I can. Arizona has an attachment problem with governors. The state hasn’t fired one that ran for reelection since 1966, and has never fired a governor since the job became a four-year gig in 1970. The voters prioritize stability, and despite her reputation as the “veto queen” and clear progressive credentials, clearly don’t perceive her as the existential threat she actually is.
That is on the Biggs campaign.
When I was an Army officer in 2012, I was absolutely confident Mitt Romney would trounce Barack Obama, incumbency be damned. 2008 was a sugar high, I said. Everyone I knew hated Obama, I thought. Romney was clearly more polished, sharper, better, and presented better policies, and given a two-party system, the choice was clear. He pummeled Obama in the first debate, and then came the struggle.
He was accused of racism, got shoved aside like a rag doll by Candy Crowley at the next debate, and forgot to go on offense at all while believing his own polls. Romney’s internals had him dead even or winning Florida, Virginia, Colorado, Ohio, New Hampshire, and Iowa. All of those states landed with a thud for him, and so went the 2012 election and an opportunity to shed Obama, who himself lost over three million votes from his previous run.
Romney failed to paint the picture of the existential threat of an unchecked, second Obama term.
As a result, the people stuck with the status quo, and the segment of the electorate that elected Trump in 2016 (the white working-class) stayed home in states that would have put Romney over the top. These voters turned out and changed sides in 2016, which is why I say two-time Obama voters in the Midwest elected Donald J. Trump in 2016.
Right now, Andy Biggs’s campaign is failing to paint the picture of why Katie Hobbs is an existential threat. Yes, I realize Hobbs is awash in cash and doesn’t need to consider campaign funding when flooding digital advertisements to every market. I’m a hard right-wing voter in a torch red precinct, yet the YouTube app that plays music in my home gym has a Hobbs ad damn near every commercial break. She’s not even sticking to targeting purple areas - she’s going for the jugular.
Meanwhile, I accompanied Rachel to an event in Saddlebrooke on Wednesday afternoon. The guest speaker was former State Senator Sine Kerr (see-na), who is the GOP nominee for the newly created position of Lieutenant Governor, running on the same ballot line as Biggs as a ticket. Sine is smart, polished, and the kind of non-flashy candidate our pearl-clutching voters in affluent suburban areas should like, but the campaign is essentially invisible and chalks it up to the fundraising disparities. I stepped out in the hall to talk to the local Turning Point representative, and a gentleman from Oro Valley passed us by. The Turning Point representative told him Sine Kerr was speaking, and despite our friend from Oro Valley being a local GOP club leader, he said, “Who’s that?”
When local GOP club leads don’t know who the Lieutenant Governor candidate even is, we have a much bigger issue than reaching the much dramatized and over-glorified “independents” everyone salivates for. We aren’t even making the case to Republican base voters, and here is the case:
Katie Hobbs is an existential threat to Arizona. Seeking reelection, she has sought to maintain an image centered on moderation and will occasionally tout measures related to border security she had no choice but to enact, and will champion tax cuts that were forced on her by the GOP legislature as if they were her own doing. With no reelection on the table after 2026, and with a Democrat legislature (which they have a legitimate shot at winning for the first time in six decades), Arizona will become unlivable and trend like Colorado. Every progressive wishlist item will be fulfilled, and in the next two decades, the population of Arizona will crater.
Thursday, Biggs finally announced some attack ads against Hobbs:
We have only been waiting on this for 18 months, a time in which everyone knew he would be the GOP nominee and when the campaign should have already been in general election mode instead of worrying about David Schweikert, who was nuked so badly in the primary he may not even be allowed to speak at a Republican club again.
We know Arizona governors get reelected, for whatever reason. Therefore, the steady state of running a Mitt Romney-style decency campaign doing everything it can to not offend people who are perpetually offended, is to lose this election by four or five points. Good game, nice try, “incumbents just win here,” see you in four years. Here’s your 1.2 million votes, but there’s her 1.4 million ballots because they know how to collect them over the course of a month.
What this means is that the only way to shake these trends is to go scorched earth, spend every last dollar approaching the low propensity Trump voter (not 4/4 GOP voters in front of Republican clubs in counties that will be won by 30 points) while peeling away some of the Latino working class she needs, and expose the extent of Hobbs’s corruption and her true goals to transform Arizona into another locked-down progressive hub. We are not going scorched Earth at all, because whoever is running this campaign at the highest levels buys all of the media about how Kari Lake hurt everyone’s feelings and alienated the precious moderates.
It is possible, in taking my advice, that alienating the moderates may actually happen and turn a five-point Hobbs “incumbents always win” reelection into a comfortable win nearing double digits, but it is a guarantee that playing the “please don’t call me a radical” Romney campaign will do exactly what it did to Mitt in 2012: lead to the default outcome. Imagine you’re a run-heavy football team and you find yourself down 17 points in the second half. Throwing the football may lead to turnovers and a 30-point loss; but you don’t have enough time to establish the run and now have to open up the playbook to have a chance.
That’s where the Biggs campaign is today.
I did not like writing this article. I will probably missed out on future consulting opportunities I already don’t have, but what I dislike even more is leaving people in the dark as to what is going on in the political world around them. I’ve offered to consult for the campaign. I didn’t offer what they’re looking for; therefore, my advice comes for free on a Saturday. Ballots are out in less than a month, and if the electorate isn’t afraid of four more years of Hobbs, then four more years of Hobbs is exactly what we will get, with Arizona looming large for the future of the United States as one of last beacons of hope in the entire American Southwest.
Seth Keshel, MBA, a former Army Captain of Military Intelligence and Afghanistan veteran, is the author of The American War on Election Corruption. His analytical method of election forecasting and analytics is known worldwide, and he has been commended by President Donald J. Trump for his work in the field.
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I voted for Romney because I felt i had no choice. I read BHO's books and KNEW exactly what he was and how he would govern.
Romney isnt the nice guy he portrayed. He's a back stabbing weakling. Would he have been better than Obama, probably; but wouldnt have been any worse.
I've always liked Andy Biggs but find that "consultants" often only care about their fees. Of course they want lots of media ads placed; they get a percentage of that money. Most of them aee like lawyers, they will work for an support whomever pays them.
I cant vote for Andy but based on what Ive seen and heard about Hobbs, it's hard to believe she would be reelected. She's not too bright and I have no doubt that she messed with the 2020/22 elections.
Thank you for at least trying to help. Unfortunately, I suspect you analysis is correct. 😕
Sad to hear this. Every election is local as we know.