With three open seats on the Arizona Corporation commission for the 2020 election, the Republican primary looked like it was going to be a real slug fest with six candidates qualify for the ballot. Now, with the dust settled from numerous petition challenges, the GOP suddenly finds itself one candidate short, as four of the five candidates challenged have either withdrawn or been knocked off the ballot by the courts.
Current Commissioners Boyd Dunn and Lea Marquez Petersen, along with former APS SuperPAC chairman Eric Sloan, State Senator David Farnsworth, political campaign consultant and SRP board member Kim Owens, and Nick Myers all filed more than the minimum number of signatures required, although Farnsworth gave himself barely any room for error. Predictably, the state senator was the first to withdraw and challenges were filed against all of the remaining candidates except Petersen. Some of the complaints came from Democrats, while the majority of Republican candidates were challenged by Republican activist and 2018 candidate for State Superintendent of Public Instruction Bob Branch.
Sloan survived his challenge, which was largely on technical grounds, while the remaining candidates faced questions of whether or not they had collected enough valid signatures from voters across the state. One by one they were removed by the ballot, first Myers, more recently Dunn, and just the other day, Owens was given the heave ho by the Arizona Supreme Court. This leaves Republicans with just two candidates for three seats, and the unattractive option of having to run a write-in campaign for a candidate on a statewide basis. To qualify for the general election ballot, the write-in candidate would need to receive nearly 6,700 write-in votes.
“I get that Branch was trying to help his preferred candidate,” said a Republican activist, “but if you’re in the Republican Party right now you can’t be too happy with a guy who may have just handed a seat to the Democrats.”
“Although in fairness to Branch, he wasn’t the only guy filing challenges and Dunn and Farnsworth had both gotten elected before and had plenty of time to collect signatures,” said the Republican activist. “No one made them wait as long as they did to get started. And Owens actually gets paid to run campaigns, so come on already.” Owens, who has been re-elected twice by voters to the SRP Council, is the Executive Director of the Dodie Londen Excellence in Public Service Series that trains Republican women how to achieve positions of leadership and elective office, and she works or has worked as a campaign consultant with Gorden C. James Public Relations.
Getting on the ballot is only the first problem for whoever steps up for the GOP. Compounding their challenge is the fact that the write-in candidate has very little time remaining to raise money or to qualify as a Clean Elections candidate, and if they seek public financing, they will receive no dollars for the primary election, and only get funding for the general election in the fall.