This special election is to fill the seat that Republican Trent Franks resigned from. A primary was held on February 27; both parties had competitive races. The candidates chosen in those primaries are Hiral Tipirneni (D) and Debbie Lesko (R).
AZ-08 has a Cook PVI of R+13, so it’s a heavy lift for the Dems, but after last night, it’s hard to argue that it’s out of reach. Lesko has been in the AZ state legislature since 2009, and is the state chair of ALEC. Tipirneni, an emergency room physician, is new to electoral politics.
From reading about Tipirneni, she seems like a pretty strong candidate for a first-timer. Right now Cook and others are calling this “Safe Republican” – I wonder if that will change as they put more attention on it.
Even if we lose, getting that fundraising money spent and off the board for the actual midterms will be a win. Can the RNC afford the optics of another loss?
Looking at those numbers, I wonder if that districts as R as indicated. Franks has essentially run unopposed from 2012 on. The fundraising numbers of 2010 and 2008 represent Gabrielle Giffords demolishing the competition. There may be a chance to actually capitalize on a swing district that people mistake for red due to a lack of D effort since Giffords was shot.
My Googling isn’t good enough to get old Cook PVIs, but I suspect that the post-2010 redistricting made this district substantially more Republican than it had been when Giffords represented it. If you look here, Kerry and Obama both got 46% of the vote in this district in 2004 and 2008, but Obama and Clinton both got 37% of the vote there in 2012 and 2016.
Nonetheless, I think it’s worth the effort of contesting. (Hell, I think all special elections are worth contesting, but I agree that this is a better prospect than your average R+13 district.) Arizona in general was turning purple in the middle of the last decade, but when McCain was the GOP nominee, the national Dems seemed to give up on it, and didn’t really try to do much in AZ until 2016. I’ll be throwing a few shekels into Tipirneni’s campaign fund.
And National Republican Congressional Committee adds in $170K more, and The Congressional Leadership Fund $100K too.
This is a very different sort of district than PA-18 was. Trump’s approval is apparently still at 59% there. It is “a mix of small towns and the western Phoenix suburbs, including Sun City, a large retirement community that served as former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s base of support”.
It is hard to imagine this one becoming at all a competitive race, yet it seems that the run of special election swings has the GOP imagining exactly what that unlikely prospect would look like. Even “just” winning in high single digits there would be an ominous portend for them. If this one ends up competitive they are not safe anywhere. They can afford to drop even a few million to insure against that upset; they cannot afford this race being close.
My attitude about special elections is that, if you compete (‘you’ being a political party here), it gives you a chance to figure out what works with the demographics represented in that district - what they get excited about, what they’re just kinda ‘meh’ on, what causes them to shut down. One cycle’s special elections give you a decent sample to learn from, so you know what issues to encourage your candidates to run on in a general election.
In particular, Arizona has one of the two most winnable (for Dems) Senate seats in the country for Dems this cycle, with the other being next door in Nevada. Whatever we learn about keeping AZ-08 close will have major applicability in the fall.
And to clarify my position, I believe it unlikely we can win this one. But we CAN make outside groups spend money they could spend elsewhere. I count that a win. Time and money are both limited resources, they more they spend here the less they can spend defending other seats come the fall.
Of course, that works both ways: Time and money we spend on the election is also time and money we can’t spend elsewhere. You have to figure out how to spend your resources efficiently.
Sure, but the R’s playing defense are spending more.
In PA-18, outside groups spent more than $12MM against Lamb while he got $1.7MM in his support. I’ll take a 7.05 multiplier on my opponents. We’re always going to be playing at a disadvantage on outside money, might as well hope they waste it.
I’d bet money that Lesko won’t win by double digits. She’s still definitely the favorite to win next week.
I’m not getting my hopes up yet, but man, that would be some shocker if Tipirneni pulls off the upset next week. If that happened, the GOP wave of retirements might not be over even yet.
To paraphrase Conan, I want to see the Republicans driven before me, and hear the lamentations of their donors.
I suppose the sweetest outcome would be to force the Republicans to spend a lot of resources on defending this race, and still steal it away from them.
As an aside, has Conan O’Brien ever used a variant of that quote? Seems a shame for a comedian to have a name like that, and never take advantage of it.
Genghis Khan, humorist and raconteur. No, really, he snapped off a line, everybody laughed. It was like nobody wanted to be the first to stop laughing, he was that funny!
It could be simply that the stakes are much higher for them – if the Democrats lose, that’s only to be expected in a heavily red district; if the Republicans lose, it reinforces the building narrative that they’re big-red-capital-Superman-“S” screwed in November.
For those actually running and those associated with the campaigns, if the Republicans win this one but by less than 10ish, it reinforces the building narrative that they’re big-red-capital-Superman-“S” screwed in November. They’d be sweating enough to change shirts. This is a very white, fairly older, very GOP, district; an actual loss would have cause many to have to change their underwear in a hurry.
