The day after: A look at the campaigns that weren’t

Robert Robb

Submitted photo/Robert Robb

For the most part, I think voters look through the distractions of campaign messaging of both parties and decide elections on the basis of some overriding issue or concern. For the most part, they discern this on their own, rather than having it put before them through the candidates’ campaign messaging.”

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OPINION — I’ve never seen an election cycle in which the gulf between real policy choices and campaign messaging was wider. Based upon campaign messaging, you’d think that the biggest issue confronting the state and nation is pedophilia.

I don’t mean to discount the savagery of pedophilia or the importance of the laws against it. However, I think we can stipulate that no major candidates for public office in Arizona support pedophilia or want to coddle or protect pedophiles.

To the extent there are disagreements about specific laws dealing with pedophiles, they are rooted in concerns about precedents and unintended consequences — not sympathy for abusing children. Yet charges of being soft on pedophilia were a significant theme in numerous races in Arizona, with both Republicans and Democrats being the target of the slung mud.

The biggest gulf between campaign messaging and real policy choices has been in the governor’s race.

Coping with a declining quantity of Colorado River water is arguably the most important issue awaiting the next governor. And there is at least a difference in emphasis between Katie Hobbs and Andy Biggs in how to approach it. Hobbs tends to emphasize conservation. Biggs tends to emphasize augmentation, or finding new supply.

Both provided some substance to their positions. Hobbs’s administration has taken executive action and proposed legislation to address overconsumption. Biggs announced policy positions and introduced federal legislation intended to facilitate an augmentation approach.

Neither, however, came close to providing a true blueprint for coping with a declining supply of Colorado River water. And the campaign messaging didn’t really feature an exchange of views based upon the substantive positions they have taken.

Instead, Hobbs ran an ad bragging about not extending the state trust land leases for a Saudi farming operation, which has some localized effect but is irrelevant to the larger issue of coping with declining supply from the Colorado River.

Biggs didn’t raise enough money to run a mass messaging campaign of his own. Turning Point provided one for him, running an ad blaming Hobbs for cutbacks in Arizona’s Colorado River allocation in a decision that was actually made by — drum roll, please! — the Trump administration. You know, headed up by the guy who endorsed Biggs.

Now, there’s a subtler point that could have been made that would have some validity. A claim that Biggs would be a more effective interlocutor with the Trump administration about water would have merit.

So, why not make the true and believable claim, that Biggs would be a better negotiator with the Trump administration than Hobbs, rather than the false and unbelievable claim that Hobbs, rather than the Trump administration, is responsible for Arizona’s Colorado River cutbacks?

There is also an important difference in direction between Biggs and Hobbs regarding state finances.

State government finances are shaky, principally due to mismanagement of previous surpluses — something for which Hobbs and the GOP Legislature share the blame.

Hobbs and the Democrats believe that education and social welfare programs are severely underfunded, but have proposed little in the way of specifics regarding increasing revenues to address it. Biggs proposed eliminating the state income tax, without any specifics as to how that could be done without significant cuts to existing programs.

Hobbs’s campaign messaging sought to blur this difference, rather than to persuade voters that her direction would be superior. Republicans mostly cavil, with some justification, about Hobbs taking excessive credit for tax cuts that weren’t really her idea.

Water and state finances, two big issues on which there are important differences in at least a general approach between Hobbs and Biggs, received a fraction of the campaign messaging of competing charges about being soft on pedophilia.

The gulf wasn’t quite as large in Arizona’s competitive congressional races. That’s because, to a large extent, those elections were a referendum on Trump. The Democratic messaging was that the Republican has been, or will be, a rubber stamp for Trump. And, for the most part, that’s a fair claim. None of the GOP candidates in those races gave any indication of charting a path independent of Trump.

The Republican message was that the Democratic alternative is a radical, an extremist, a socialist, irrespective of the extent to which that is an accurate description. One of the GOP problems is that when you call every Democrat a socialist, it’s a less credible charge when running against a Democrat who really is one.

I’m an independent living in competitive Congressional District 1, who votes every election. I’ve received at least one, and sometimes two, mailers daily from a Trump-affiliated PAC supporting Jay Feely. They’re all the same. On one side is always a scary picture of Amish Shah, featuring all of those invectives. And lots of stuff about him supposedly being soft on pedophilia.

It’s hard to describe how politically maladroit these mailers are, if targeted at independents. They have the messages more designed to motivate marginal MAGA voters to turn out than to persuade independents. In fact, they remind independents of what they don’t like about both parties: over-the-top partisanship about marginal issues.

Meanwhile, both political parties have produced an unsustainable federal debt and a $2 trillion annual deficit. And neither party wants to have a serious discussion about how to put the finances of the federal government on a sustainable footing.

For the most part, I think voters look through the distractions of campaign messaging of both parties and decide elections on the basis of some overriding issue or concern. For the most part, they discern this on their own, rather than having it put before them through the candidates’ campaign messaging.

So, in that sense, our democracy works. But it would work better if candidates and those who support them spent more time saying meaningful things about real and important policy choices.

Retired Arizona journalist Robert Robb opines about politics and public policy. Reach him at robtrobb@gmail.com. Please submit comments at yourvalley.net/letters or email them to azopinions@iniusa.org. We are committed to publishing a wide variety of reader opinions, as long as they meet our Civility Guidelines.