Arizona: Psychologically Unfun (with Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer)
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Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Focus Group podcast. I'm Sarah Longwell, publisher of The Bulwark. And this week, we are talking about the Arizona governor's race. Now, if there is any race in the country this year that keeps me up at night, it is this one.

Now, Joe Biden won Arizona by 10,000 votes in 2020, which means two things. This governor's race is a toss up and whoever wins is likely to preside over a close presidential election in 2024. Now, if you're a regular listener of this podcast, you probably know by now Carrie Lake, the Republican nominee for governor, has said she wouldn't have certified the 2020 election.

putting the certification of the next presidential election in her hands could get dicey fast. She's not talked about the 2020 election as much since winning her primary, but she still won't say she'd accept her own defeat. Her opponent, Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, refuses to debate her.

Democrats are worried this race is slipping away. Lake leads by less than a point in the latest 538 average. There's also a very important Secretary of State race. Not only does the Secretary of State oversee and certify elections, but they are first in the line of succession for the governorship because Arizona doesn't have a lieutenant governor. The Republican nominee for Secretary of State, Mark Fincham, is just as, if not more, crazy than Carrie Lake.

But what do our swing voters think of these extreme candidates? And again, we are talking to people who voted for Trump in 2016 and then refused to vote for him in 2020.

We have a really awesome guest for today. He's a Republican who's been on the front lines of combating all the falsehoods about the 2020 election, and he's the county election official for about 60% of Arizonans. Maricopa County recorder Stephen Richer. Stephen, huge thanks for taking the time. I assume you are busy right now running an election, so thank you so much for being here. Oh, thanks for having me. Yeah, anything for you, but yes, it is busy time right now.

So listen, right now, there's a lot of reports coming out from Georgia about like record turnout in the state. You guys also have early voting that has started out there in Arizona. What has turnout looked like for you guys so far?

So far, it's lagging a little bit behind where we would ordinarily be. And it might be because we have extraordinarily long ballots this season. Many ballots in Maricopa County have over 75 contests on them. We have 10 statewide initiatives. We have a lot of judicial retention elections. We have bonds. We have...

measures. And then, of course, we have hotly contested races. But I think people have more information typically on the politicians' races.

Interesting. So you said back in August that your job can be psychologically unfun. So just give our audience just a level set, a quick rundown of what your job is, the recorder's job entails, and what it's been like for you as a Republican pushing back against election denialism there in your state.

Yeah, the Recorder's Office is an office of about 150 full-time employees, and we have three main statutory functions. We record over a million documents a year. Most of it relates to real estate, but this is anything that you would want in the public record in Maricopa County.

The second is voter registration. We are the registrar of voters and we maintain the voter registration database. We have about 2.4 million registered voters in Maricopa County. They divide roughly a third, a third, a third between Republicans, Democrats and independents.

And we are the second largest voting jurisdiction in the United States, behind only Los Angeles County. And as Sarah mentioned, we make up about 60-61% of the voting population of Arizona. The third component is election administration. And that's obviously been a hot topic, and no place has had more attention than Maricopa County over the last...

year and a half, in part because we were such a close state in the 2020 presidential contest, in part because we're an evolving state politically, and in part because we had members of the political body here who continued to indulge the falsehood that the election was somehow

compromised or stolen from former President Trump. And we even engaged in a months-long, multi-million dollar endeavor led by conspiracy theorist amateurs that kept us front and center in the conversation regarding the stolen election theory. I got to ask you, did the cyber ninjas, did they look like ninjas? No, they looked like ordinary guys, which was perhaps all part of their clever ruse. But

You know, they caused some real trouble and it had real world ramifications. Some of the things that they would allege would immediately translate into allegations against my office, threats against the people in my office, threats against me. The FBI has recently arrested two people who have made death threats to county employees, including me. Both of those were made as a result of something that the cyber ninjas had alleged regarding the elections.

So I guess when you said that sometimes your job is psychologically on fun, you mean that you standing up for truth and not engaging in these conspiracy theories has like brought real life impact as people sort of threaten you for not being an election denier. That and...

I'm operating in a world that is wholly unfamiliar to me, that is a world of passion and faith and less a world of facts and logic. And that's unfamiliar waters for me. And then there's a whole industry that is politically or economically incentivized to continue to attack my office, to continue to sow doubt in the election system. And if I'm being calm and collected about it, then I would say it's nothing personal. It's just

That's where the money is right now. But it is very wearing and people are trying to make it nearly impossible to administer elections in this important county. Yeah. And I guess I should just say on a personal note that I know Stephen. And one of the reasons I know Stephen is that he has been just a total champion of democracy.

tamping down the hyperbole, but explaining to people calmly and rationally over and over and over again, the election was not stolen. And your Twitter feed is just a font of you trying to sort of calmly explain, here's how the election is going to go. Ballots are going out. You're trying to educate people in this very neutral way. And I appreciate that because it's

It's dwindling among the ranks of many people on the Republican side. And so you have been just a steadfast champion, and I'm a great admirer of yours. But let's jump in here to the focus group. We're going to begin by talking about a bit of national news. So we did this group in Arizona.

the evening of the last January 6th committee hearing. Now, we know from our Trump voters, who we talked to a lot, that they denounced these hearings as a dog and pony show. But even for these swing voters, they were kind of mixed on whether the hearings were worthwhile. Let's listen.

I think they're showing clear evidence of what went on. And, you know, I think that all the evidence, particularly that they showed today where he had these speeches written back in July and October before the election even took place, that he was going to say he won.

To me, that's just really scary. I just don't think you can label it a witch hunt. I mean, there's very clear evidence. And I said it any better. I agree.

I was really appalled by January 6th. I actually watched it when it was happening and I couldn't believe it was happening. So I do believe somebody should be held accountable. I don't know if this is a Trump witch hunt or not. I don't know. I just think it's a Trump. Yeah, I guess it has to be done. I'm probably not really interested in it either. I'm trusting the outcome. Yeah, it's very political. So I don't know. But something had to be done, I think, because it was terrible.

I don't trust the committee. I mean, from what I know of it, it sounds like they wanted to have some Republicans on it and then they wouldn't let them on and they handpicked who they wanted on it. So it's a one sided thing. I don't know how much truth is going to come out of it, how much fairness is going to come out of it. So, I mean, it's too one sided, I think. So what's the point? I mean, seriously, yeah.

God, it's nice to bring all this out in the open. Can we keep it from happening again? Pull together, move forward. Geez, isn't there enough to worry about? I think they made their case. I don't think we need to drag him in and have another dog and pony show. Everybody's so full of shit. It's hard for me to just zero in and listen to anybody because I'm at the point where if you're a politician and you're talking, if your mouth's moving, you're lying.

All right. So mixed bag, mixed responses from our swing voters. And I'll just say, so oftentimes in our swing voters, you'll have people who voted for Trump in 16 and then voted for Biden in 20. In this group, some of them voted for Biden. Some of them went third party or wrote somebody in or left it blank. So it's kind of a mixed group, but important because of the narrow margins to know these are the swing voters. So

Listening to them, Stephen, I am constantly struck by voters where they've just lost faith in institutions. Sometimes when people ask me, what's one of the dominant themes? I mean, it is just the collapse in trust and faith in the media and institutions. You are somebody who has been trying, I think, very diligently to build trust in the election system in Arizona. How are you approaching that?

with a lot of work, a lot of effort. That's the one thing I can control. But as was reflected in that conversation, and I listened to the whole hour and a half of it, is I sometimes wonder, prompted by people like you, Sarah, if it's a Sisyphean endeavor, whether the stolen election crowd has metastasized and there's no convincing them otherwise, or

When I get into that mentality, I try to say, well, forget about the past, because all the people in that focus group said they didn't want to hear anything more about the 2020 election. And so I guess I take heart in that. And let's just hope.

Provide good information, provide tours, provide videos, provide accessibility, provide transparency, humanize the process moving forward, because I do think that we have diminishing marginal returns on the 2020 election. And so we try to make our information as forward focused as possible.

All right, let's dive in to the governor's race. I would say that this group had a generally negative impression of Carrie Lake, but that doesn't mean that they were all automatically going to vote against her. Let's listen. Carrie Lake is a nut job. She is... Tell us what you really think. She's a right of right. I don't think she's in touch with anybody that is even close to even...

conservative, let alone moderate. I mean, she is so far to the right that, I mean, I think she will destroy Arizona if she has the opportunity. And unfortunately, our legislature will feed right into her politics. So she scares the hell out of me. And I hope that there's a chance that she will not win. But unfortunately, right now, polling is...

looking like she is bleeding from what I see. I will do anything to not vote for her. She is a MAGA nutjob. She's so far to the right that she's off the platform. And I'm pretty much, I agree. I'd rather have Katie Hobbs do nothing to very little than screw us over. She's a brown-nosing MAGA Trumper and I cannot stand election deniers. I just wish that

We'd have a good nominee coming up on 2024. I noticed that in the Arizona election here, that seems like Republicans that we have a choice of now seem to be a little bit nuts as well. And will I probably vote for them? Yes, out of my pure principle, but I want to see what everyone else thinks. This whole thing with the abortions, you know, come on, what are we doing? How many years are we going back? Makes me want to go back to New York.

That guy who said he'd vote for the nuts Republican candidate was a Kerry Lake Mark Kelly voter. So I'm still on my split ticket hobby horse here. But if you want to listen to the rest of this podcast, and I know you do, we got a lot more stuff coming up. Then you got to go to the bulwark.com and become a Bulwark Plus subscriber. When you become a subscriber, you will have access to a bunch of other awesome stuff.

stuff like the secret podcast that I do with Jonathan Last, the secret podcast that Charlie Sykes does with Mona Charon, newsletters, all kinds of stuff. So go become a Bulwark Plus subscriber and you'll get to hear the rest of this podcast. Thanks so much.