The NPR Politics Podcast - A Look At Key Senate, Governor's Races In Arizona And Georgia

Episode Date: February 15, 2022

Biden won back Pennsylvania and Arizona from Trump in 2020, but the president's sagging approval ratings could cause problems for downticket Democrats in those states come November. And election conspiracies are proving popular in Republican primaries, but some establishment figures are worried that the so-called Big Lie will be a liability in the general election.This episode: White House correspondent Ayesha Rascoe, senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro, KJZZ reporter Ben Giles, and WHYY reporter Katie Miles.Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Howdy, this is David from San Antonio, Texas, but I'm talking to you now from Padre Island National Seashore down by Corpus Christi. I'm taking a mental health day at the beach. This podcast was recorded at... It is 2.09 p.m. on Tuesday, February 15th, 2022. Things may have changed since then, but I'll still be wishing it was a little warmer and the National Park Service served my ties. Enjoy the show. That sounds real nice, though. I need a mental health day, too. Mmm, my ties. That sounds pretty good. I'd love to be on an island, on a beach somewhere. It's like 25 degrees outside, Aisha.

It is. Like, we need a vacation. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Aisha Roscoe. I cover the White House. I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. Today we're going to talk about two states that we're watching really closely this election cycle, Arizona and Pennsylvania. We're going to start with Arizona. And for that, we have Ben Giles back with us from member station KJZZ. Hi, Ben. Hi, y'all. You're in Arizona where it's very warm, right? Yeah, it's a sunny 80 degrees here. So this might be a good place to take that mental health break. Exactly. So you're where it's nice and warm. But let's talk about, instead of talking about the weather so much, let's talk about the governor's race. The current Republican governor, Doug Ducey, cannot run for reelection because he has already served two terms.

So now you have this wide open race to replace him. And let's talk about the Democrats who are trying to flip this governor's seat to the blue. Who's running over there? Well, the clear front runner so far is Secretary of State Katie Hobbs. She got such a huge name ID boost from criticizing the so-called audit that was conducted for much of last year in Maricopa County. She had frequent appearances on national cable news programs throughout 2021, which surely helped her raise nearly $3 million last year. And trailing well behind her in the polls are former state lawmaker Aaron Lieberman and Marco Lopez, the former mayor of the border town of Gallus. Both have attacked Hobbs, though, over a damaging court ruling.

Hobbs used to be the top Democrat in the state Senate, and during that time, she fired a black staffer who was later awarded nearly $3 million in damages for racial and gender discrimination stemming from the firing. The ruling doesn't appear to have slowed Hobbs down in the polls, but she did take plenty of heat after what a lot of Democrats viewed an ineffective response to the ruling. It took her about a month to really issue an actual apology. And some Democrats worry that it'll be an effective attack for Republicans if Hobbes were to make it to the general election. And so who are the Republicans who are running and has former President Trump endorsed anyone on that side? Yeah, Trump back in February 2021 endorsed former local news anchor Carrie Lake. And that helped her surge to an early lead, a commanding early

lead in the polling over some of the more establishment Republican candidates in the race. And Trump held a rally here in Arizona last month that really drove home the point that these endorsements are for candidates who will continue to lie about the 2020 election. Lake and a parade of Trump loyalists all claimed that day that the election was rigged. And of course, there's no evidence that the election was rigged. And there's plenty of evidence that the election was fair and accurate. But for Lake, the endorsement might not be a silver bullet for her campaign. There is some polling that has shown her lead has stalled since September. We have former Congressman Matt Salmon here also running for governor. He has ramped up his critique of Lake as a fake Republican. For example, while she was an anchor, Lake made contributions to Democratic presidential

candidates like Barack Obama and John Kerry. And Salmon's position in the race has improved in recent months. There's also a few self-financed Republicans in the running, including Karen Taylor Robeson, who is a favorite of the state's conservative business interests and might be a dark horse, so to speak, to watch out for. We should probably hear a little bit about that Senate race, too. You have Democrat Mark Kelly, who won a special election there, but now he's rerunning to get, I guess, like the full term. And who is he going up against? Yeah, so Kelly in 2021, special election, basically to finish the remainder of the late John McCain's term. He'll get a full six years

if he wins reelection this fall. Kelly right now has a huge financial advantage in the race. He's raised more than $27 million in 2021. That's twice as much as all of the Republicans vying to run against him combined. And that includes candidates like Blake Masters, who's got the support of billionaire investor Peter Thiel. Although in Master's case, maybe his fundraising isn't going to matter as much as the money Thiel's going to pump into a super PAC to support his candidacy. Then there's Attorney General Mark Brnovich, who is really a perfect example of how the 2020 election is shaping these Arizona races. Brnovich drew Trump's scorn after defending the integrity of the election in 2020,

but now he's actually courting Trump's support, thanks in part to the so-called audit. You know, this race is really important because it could be determinative of who wins control of the Senate. I mean, it's a 50-50 Senate right now. It's on razor's edge. And Mark Kelly is one of Republicans' top targets. There aren't really that many races that Republicans are able to kind of target this year to really make a broad sweep to win in big numbers. And we've talked a lot about the House and Republicans' likelihood of winning the House. The Senate is different. Certainly things go in waves sometimes. And if Biden's standing gets a lot worse, you could see the Senate go toward Republicans as well. But at this point, Democrats think they

have a fighting chance of at least keeping the Senate. And it really starts in Arizona with the strength of Mark Kelly. All right, let's leave it there. Thank you to Ben Giles of KJZZ. Thanks so much for being with us. Thank you both. We're going to take a quick break and we'll be back to talk about Pennsylvania. And we're back with Katie Meyer of Philadelphia Member Station, WHYY. Hi, Katie. Hi. Thanks for being with us. So we're going to get started by talking about the governor's race. This is also a situation where the current governor, who is a

Democrat, cannot run for reelection because he has already served two terms. Can we talk about the Democrats that are trying to replace him? Yes. So this is actually the only big primary race in Pennsylvania that has a clear front runner. And that's just because Attorney General Josh Shapiro is the only Democratic candidate. So he has the full support of the state party. He's also been very able to easily out fundraise all of the GOP candidates. And that's mainly because there are a ton of them. Okay, okay. So then what's going on on the Republican side? A lot is going on on the Republican side. So Pennsylvania has more than a dozen candidates currently in the Republican side of this gubernatorial race. And so they tend, on average, they skew very

conservative and Trump aligned. So just a couple of the major candidates. We have Doug Mastriano. He's a state senator. He's sown doubt about the election results. He was at the January 6th insurrection. You have Lou Barletta, former congressman, a big longtime Trump ally. Bill McSwain, he's a former U.S. attorney appointed by Trump. He also wrote Trump a letter baselessly saying he had tried to investigate election problems and asking for Trump's endorsement, which was not forthcoming. You get Jake Corman. He's the Senate president pro tem in the state Senate, and he greenlit a kind of Arizona style election review. And so yeah, it's a long list and a big field. But those are some of the major ones. And the state GOP for the

first time in decades, hasn't endorsed anyone they're not planning to. And so that has really kept this field big and without a very clear front runner. And Trump hasn't endorsed either. He's been pretty quiet on this race. You know, the politics of Trump, it really complicates matters, it seems, because that's where the energy is. They're going to have to get through a primary, and they're not going to be able to attack to the center in a state that really, you know, is slightly left of center leaning right now. So that definitely gives Shapiro a bit of a head start. Is that what you're kind of seeing and hearing on the ground and from voters? Yeah, certainly. I mean, the GOP candidates are in a tough situation because they are

trying to, you know, distinguish themselves. That's been their main issue. And so, you know, all of the money is split between all of those candidates. It's funny, there's like been a joke among strategists in Pennsylvania, like you can't find a Republican to really comment on the race anymore because they're all on staff for some Republican candidate. Yeah, it's so wide. Or they're running for election, right? Exactly, or they're running for election themselves.

We've got strategists in the race. So yeah, it's just a very, again, pretty unprecedentedly, at least in recent memory, just chaotic race on the Republican side. So there's also this open Senate seat, and that's a pretty wild race as well. Like, what's going on with that? Yeah, so this one is a very tight race on both sides of the aisle. So for the Democrats, you have Conor Lamb.

He's got kind of the most establishment support. He's running on a record of winning in a GOP slanted congressional district. I should say he's a congressman. We got John Fetterman. He's the Pennsylvania lieutenant governor. He previously ran for Senate as a long shot, but now he is a much more high profile figure and he's running more progressive. But he's also trying to bill himself as having crossover appeal to Trump voters. You also have Malcolm Kenyatta. He's built some progressive support, too, especially in Philadelphia. but he's also trying to bill himself as having crossover appeal to Trump voters. You also have Malcolm Kenyatta. He's built some progressive support, too, especially in Philadelphia. He's a longtime Biden ally, but he has been struggling to fundraise.

So it's really looking like Fetterman and Lamb at this point are kind of battling it out. And those are both Western Pennsylvania candidates. And Pennsylvania, a very kind of parochial state. So that's going to be a big difference to see who can pull out those Pittsburgh area voters. And then on the Republican side, it's been, I would say, a strange field, honestly, characterized by a lot of self-funding and big ad spending. The three biggest candidates right now are Jeff Bartos. He is a real estate investor from Montgomery County, which is a big county outside of Philadelphia. And then you have Mehmet Oz, Dr. Oz, and Dave McCormick, who until very recently was the CEO of Bridgewater, which is the largest hedge fund in the world. And both of those guys just have a ton of money, just insane money.

And they've been self-funding. McCormick, his finances are a little bit of a black box right now because he came in late. He didn't file recently. Oz, though, has put like five million of his own dollars into the campaign so far. I'm sure more has gone in since the last time we were able to check. And so that has been sort of a strange race to try to suss out because especially Oz and McCormick both until very recently lived in other states. McCormick lived in Connecticut.

Oz lived in other states. McCormick lived in Connecticut, Oz lived in New Jersey. And so figuring out how they're appealing to Pennsylvania voters, what kind of message they even have for this state specifically, it's been a little funny reporting on it. What people need to know is that this is a Republican-held seat, this Senate seat. And we talked about the Arizona Senate race a little bit earlier in the podcast, and that's Democratic held, you know, so and Democrats, it seems have a better shot at winning Pennsylvania right now than Republicans do in Arizona. And these are two seats that could

potentially cancel each other out, or add one for Democrats, or Republicans, you know, considering where they are. And every seat is going to count considering it's a 50-50 Senate. Pennsylvania and Arizona are two very different states. But Democrats in both of those states are going to be dealing with the fact that President Biden right now, we don't know where it'll be in November, but right now his poll ratings are not high. And that can be a drag, right? Like, like, is this like, how do you think that might have an impact on these, these states or the state of Pennsylvania? You know, when your approval ratings are not that high, what happens is suddenly there are scheduling conflicts that crop up for a lot of the, you know, marquee candidates in the state because they're not 100 percent sure whether or not the Biden brand is going to help them all that much.

And we're seeing that in both places. All right. Let's leave it there for now. Katie Meyer of WHYY, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. I'm Aisha Roscoe. I cover the White House. I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.