I’m not speaking about the response from the Legislature, where someone clearly screwed up in failing to properly highlight changes to the law governing precinct committeemen elections, or where 90 lawmakers from both parties failed to detect critical changes in the language.
No, I’m speaking about the way the entire matter has been handled by Republican leadership within the party itself. Within one day of the error being discovered, legislators were already working on a fix. This would have been the perfect time for real leaders in the AZGOP to step forward and let the party’s activists know that the error had been recognized, the fix was coming, and to keep their powder dry.
Instead, virtually everyone in the Party participated in a collective freak out, either due to a genuine lack of emotional control, or a desire to be seen as a leader in a fight that was already over and resolved. For far too many, it was a chance to fill their social media with outrage, attract viewers for podcasts or Twitter Spaces, or to prove how devoted they were to the grassroots.
There was even an instance where a party leader was asking for screenshots to prove that Republican candidates were raising their voices for a repeal of the bill, as a litmus test of their fealty to the conservative movement.
What utter stupidity. And how predictable has the resulting damage been.
By shining a statewide media spotlight on how critically important this issue was to Republicans, AZGOP leadership handed the Democrats in the Legislature an incredible amount of leverage. Fixing the bill will require Democrat votes, because the original bill contained an emergency clause and to fix it in time for the upcoming primary election will require a similar emergency clause. That means Democrats will need to vote for the bill. And Kelli Ward and Tyler Boyer, and all of the rest of the spotlight chasers, instead of being smart politically, have now handed them a weapon to use against election integrity efforts that Democrats want to stop. Democrats have already made it clear that in order to get their votes to fix the precinct committeemen problem, they expect Republicans to kill some election integrity efforts in return.
By exhorting precinct committeemen to fill the State Capital committee hearings with hours and hours of angry testimony, Republican Party leaders have slowed the process and made more difficult the lives of the very Republican legislators who are working to fix the problem in the first place. A simple debate within the committee, followed by the vote, would take 15-20 minutes. Instead, there have been multiple days of hearings and poorly considered attacks on both GOP and Democrat lawmakers. Calling the same Democrats, whose votes you will need to fix the problem, “anti-God” and pro “porn and racism in schools” will make an angry PC feel better, but it remains incredibly stupid politics.
The fact is that it is not fair to expect the average Republican to be good at politics or smart about politics. We have full time jobs and responsibilities, and we use our spare time to participate in politics in an attempt to save our country. We are amateurs, not professionals. That is why the responsibility for this deliberately agitated response belongs with an incompetent party leadership that is so desperate to be seen as fighters, that they don’t stop to find the smart way forward that would allow us to win the actual fight at the lowest possible cost.
Again, Republicans at the Legislature were unanimous that this problem needed to be fixed and would be fixed within a day of this problem being noticed. Nothing good has come from any angry words or messages or testimony from any Republican Precinct Committeemen or activists since then. If you imagine that complaining to your legislator or threatening your legislator has made a difference, you are wrong. The problem was already being solved. What has happened is that an incredible amount of time has been wasted, and tremendous political leverage has been lost to the Democrats, whose own Precinct Committeemen have smartly been entirely silent during this whole process. Once again, Kelli Ward and her leadership team have lost another battle to the Democrats and once again their defense will be that they never claimed to be smart, they only promised to be fighters. If we’re going to win, Arizona Republicans need to start insisting that their leaders be both.
David Lara
David Lara has been a Republican Party Precinct Committeeman for 20 years in Yuma County. In 2005, he was named the Arizona Republican Party’s Most Outstanding State Party Worker of the Year. Mr. Lara is a small business owner and member of the Yuma Union High School District #70 Governing Board. He was instrumental in exposing the ballot harvesting scheme in Yuma County that has resulted in the indictment of Democratic Party operatives by the Arizona Attorney General’s Office.
