Chuck Coughlin, president and CEO of High Ground Consulting

Andy Biggs, US representative and candidate for AZ Governor

Jim Sharpe sits down with Congressman Andy Biggs with less than two weeks to go until the primary election for Arizona governor. Biggs discusses his campaign strategy, the urgent need to combat Medicare and Medicaid fraud within the state's recovery industry and how he manages to balance a statewide campaign with his duties in D.C. He also shares his Day 1 vision for reaching across the aisle to work on unifying issues such as water conservation, power generation and data center regulations.

Carine Werner, Arizona State Senator

Seeing Democrats and Republicans work together “really well” — even “collaboratively" — in an election year, is not only encouraging, but it can also give you faith in our system of government. Too bad that getting to this place politically requires tackling an issue awful enough that it can cause one to lose faith in humanity.   Republican state Senator Carine Werner told me on the AZ Political Podcast this week that Arizona’s child welfare system is so broken that trying to reform it was daunting and an all-hands-on-deck (Rs and Ds) approach was necessary. And so were 13 new laws.   Werner fills us in on what those laws attempt to reform and fix: the Department of Child Safety (DCS); runaway prevention; foster care group home supervision; cooperation between the state of Arizona and the state’s sovereign tribes; and how the abuse of children is reported as well as how those reports are received — and acted upon.   But Werner feels there’s more work to be done, saying, “We don’t want to take our eyes off the ball, we want to continue to work on this.”    One of the things she says she’d like to undertake in the next legislative session is staffing, retention, and pay for DCS workers. She knows the job they do leads to high burnout, leaving DCS with little institutional knowledge to train the next generation of workers.   There’s no way this gets fixed overnight, but if you’d like to insert a dose of hope in your life by hearing how there are people who actually care about what happens to Arizona’s most vulnerable children — and then sprinkle on a little extra hope by seeing that our elected leaders can work together when necessary — please take the time to watch this edition of the AZ Political Podcast.

Marlene Galán-Woods, candidate for CD1

Will the second time be the charm for Marlene Galán-Woods? Will her second attempt to win the Democratic nomination in Arizona’s 1st Congressional District (CD-1) lead to her being Arizona’s second Latina in Congress? (Adelita Grijalva became the first when she won last year’s special election in CD-7.)    Galán-Woods won’t get the chance if she comes in second to Amish Shah, the Democrat who won 2024’s CD-1 Primary. (Shah went on to lose the General Election to Republican David Schweikert.)   Shah and two other men, Rick McCartney and Johnathan Treble, will be sharing a debate stage with Galán-Woods Tuesday night.     Galán-Woods tells me on this week’s AZ Political Podcast that with Schweikert out of the CD-1 picture (he’s running for governor), Democrats’ chances of flipping the seat have greatly increased. And she argues that she represents her party’s best chance to beat whomever the Republicans nominate in the CD-1 race.    On the podcast, Galán-Woods also discusses her personal journey: starting out as the daughter of poor Cuban immigrants to realizing her dream of being a broadcast journalist.    And she shares her political journey: what caused her to go from being a solid Cuban-American Republican to a Democrat worthy of receiving the endorsement of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.    Even though this was my first time interacting in the media with Marlene Galán-Woods, in the interests of full disclosure, I should mention I was friends with her late husband, former Republican Attorney General Grant Woods — who took a similar political journey before his death in 2021.

Stan Barnes, Copper State Consulting

Nothing’s more important on Arizona’s political calendar this week than the Republican gubernatorial debate. So much so that not only will KTAR News carry it live on-air and online (at 6 PM Wednesday), doing a preview of the debate on the latest AZ Political Podcast was a no-brainer.    I also didn’t have to use much brain power to pick the guest for this topic: Republican political consultant Stan Barnes, who is long-time friends with the two top candidates fighting to face Democratic incumbent Gov. Katie Hobbs this fall, Congressmen Andy Biggs and David Schweikert.    With so many similarities between Schweikert and Biggs, Stan believes they won’t debate policy — nor does he think there’ll be any personal attacks between the two. So, he thinks the debate will come down to one thing: a candidate’s electability versus Hobbs.    Stan tells me that, at his core, Shweikert believes he is the guy to hobble Hobbs and that if he loses the nomination (the direction polling is pointing), Hobbs not only beats Biggs, that defeat could also lead to Democratic majorities in both chambers of the state Legislature — a political place Arizona hasn’t been in since 1966.    For those who think it’s unfair that lower-tier candidates don’t ever get mentioned, Stan and I do talk about Ken Miceli and Scott Neely: two East Valley businessmen who will be on the GOP ballot and the debate stage with Biggs and Schweikert.    Stan thinks they’ll likely have their biggest impact on Wednesday night when he presumes they’ll go after the front-runner, Biggs. Will they score enough points to move Schweikert up? Or will they just make it look like it’s three against one?    You can get answers by watching the debate on KTAR.com [http://ktar.com/], but I’d suggest doing that after you watch the pre-game show: the AZ Political Podcast.

Stacey Pearson, co founder of Lumen Strategies

Will you get to decide if firing squads will be part of a list prisoners can choose from when they’re executed in Arizona? How do you feel about mail-in voting? Would you vote by mail to enshrine into the Arizona constitution the right to vote by mail?   Those are just a couple of the dozens of examples of what you could be voting on this year. That’s because Arizona is one of a handful of states where you get to be a quasi-legislator and partake in direct democracy by creating (or rejecting) laws in the voting booth.    On this week’s AZ Political Podcast, I get to talk with political consultant Stacy Pearson of Lumen Strategies not only about the ballot measures you could see this fall, but also the four types of ways they end up on ballots: two that are initiated by citizens and two that are referred by the Legislature to voters.    Stacy’s firm is engaged in trying to get an initiative called the “Constitutional Right to Early and Mail-in Voting Amendment” on Arizona’s ballot and there are some big hurdles to get there: State law requires that almost 384,000 signatures need to be gathered (and tens of thousands of extras to make up for those ineligible to sign) and submitted by July 2. And there are potential legal challenges to the signatures as well as challenges to the wording of the initiative.   Whew! It takes a lot of initiative to get an initiative in front of voters.   We also discuss what happens when two opposing ballot measures pass; how it’s possible for two similar ballot measures to split the vote and both fail; and the electoral track record of ballot measures.    Initiatives and referendums make for fascinating politics because it’s voters making government “of the people” and “by the people” by bringing “power to the people” to create law.