Can you believe we are already halfway through 2022? With less than six months until the midterms, I wanted to take a moment to thank all of you for the work you have done this year.
Through our office’s efforts, we have not only ensured that Pima County will have 425 elected Democratic Precinct Committee members for the ‘22-’24 cycle, but we are leading the charge in regards to fighting for reproductive rights by being the center of petition activity in Pima County.
Our volunteers who staff the office are our civically-minded librarians who greet visitors and answer their questions using a wide variety of resources. Keeping all of our volunteers organized can be tricky, but our new Team Leader volunteer program is making it a lot easier!
Team Leaders will help to train new volunteers, learn our office opening and closing procedures, assume a managerial role during their shifts, be the main point of contact for volunteers, and will have special access to PCDP data systems.
Because of this extra help, I have been able to work on launching our Discussion for Democracy forum series with Democratic candidates running for offices up and down the ballot. You can check our D4D page here, where we have posted all of our recordings of these forums. Our last forum will be in person this Saturday, June 11 at 1pm at the Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona. You can go herefor more information.
In addition to candidate forums and volunteer leadership, I’ve also been working with our fundraising team to launch our First Wednesday fundraisers, and to prepare for our Fall Udall dinner on September 17th at the Desert Diamond Casino.
June is expected to be one of our busiest months here at the office because of the ballot initiative deadlines; people will be relying on our office to get their petitions notarized and to turn in their signatures. Right now we have five different ballot initiatives, all of which will need hundreds of thousands of signatures to qualify for the ballot. If you haven’t already done so, please consider circulating these petitions among your friends and family. You can either stop by our office or check out our website for more information.
I’m so glad to be serving as your Director, and I’m looking forward to the excitement of such an important election year!
We’ve finally arrived in 2022! Although the weather is staying nice, the heat is turning up for Democrats in Pima County!
Our new legislative district maps are still going through an approval process by the Pima County Board of Supervisors. Once that is done, the final boundaries must go through another process of approvals. Eventually we will have a new map, but exactly when that will happen is still unknown.
In the meantime, PCDP would like to request that all PCs, regardless of their new LD, continue to work with their old LD until we’ve gotten the final-final map approval.
With the beginning of the new session, Arizona GOP legislators have ramped up their efforts to limit voting rights with a series of new bills that aim to ban mail-in ballot elections. There are many different resources out there that you can use to stay up to date with what’s going on every day at the legislature.
I highly recommend that you sign up for the Civic Engagement Beyond Voting weekly overview; it can be tricky to follow bills sometimes because they are so quick to either die or become part of another bill.
You should also tune in to AZ List’s weekly legislative updates on Facebook Live, where you can hear from legislators about what is happening on the floor.
To put it a different way, that means 1 out of every 291 Arizonans have died because of COVID-19.
With a year left in his term, the governor’s executive orders against mask mandates and approval of state laws that gut school budgets will ensure no end in sight to this pandemic for Arizona teachers and parents.
Another issue that has arisen from Arizona’s Republican leadership is the protection of voting rights. The Arizona Republicans fell into line with almost every other Republican lawmaker in the country when former President Trump declared the 2020 presidential election a fraud and that the voting process in the United States must have been rigged.
Republicans refuse to allow their worries about the integrity of voting to be assuaged by two truths: that widespread voter fraud does not happen and has never happened in this country, and that restricting the right to vote (for those who are legally qualified) means that voting for minority groups becomes more difficult. For people of color, young people, people who live in rural areas or on reservations, families with a single parent, or someone who has a physical disability and is unable to leave their home it may not be feasible to cast a ballot at all.
Rather than creating new restrictions, lawmakers should encourage more people to engage in the voting process, and trust county recorders and secretaries of state to do their jobs of safeguarding our democracy.
As we enter this new year, I want to take a chance to re-introduce you to our partners with PCDP. These groups are their own organizations. Any questions you have should be directed to the contacts below:
Project 15/30 is the Arizona Democratic State Party’s new year-round field program whose mission is to help build party infrastructure in all 15 counties in order to elect Democrats into the majority of 30 legislative districts. Their Deputy Director is Lauren Burson, who has lived all over the state but finally decided to make Arizona her home. You can contact her at lburson@azdem.org
Mission for Arizona is the Arizona Democratic Party’s coordinated campaign working to elect Democrats in statewide and federal offices. A coordinated campaign is basically a group of candidates who decide to combine their resources into one campaign focused on electing all of its candidates who decide to contribute. Right now Mark Kelly for Senate is Mission’s flagship, but there will be more candidates after the August primary. Mission’s Southern Deputy Field Director is Isaac Bardin. You can contact him at ibardin@missionforarizona.com
Arizona List is a Political Action Committee dedicated to electing female leaders up and down the ballot here in Arizona. Their Political Director is Claire Knipe, a Tucson local. You can contact her at claire@arizonalist.org for more information.
Stop Dark Money is a campaign created by the Arizona Political Action Committee Voters’ Right to Know to circulate a statewide initiative that will bar anonymous sources from political spending on election advertising. Their petition is available to sign at the PCDP office and their point of contact for Southern Arizona is Chris Hawkins. You can contact her at chrisazorganizer@gmail.com for more information.
I look forward to seeing you all soon. Thank you to all of our volunteers, especially Margaret Lacey and Patti Bersbach, for helping us continue to answer the phones and check messages from home. You all are the greatest, and the reason why we’re going to win in 2022!
Miranda Lopez Pima County Democratic Party Director
I wanted to take a moment here, as we head into the summer of 2021, to give you an update on what’s been going on here at the office. I am planning to write more of these monthly blog posts so you can see how PCDP is working every day to elect Democrats up and down the ballot here in Southern Arizona!
As you may already know, we onboarded a new PCDP administration in January of this year. Since then, there have been a few changes, but we are now fully staffed with a Chair, First Vice Chair, Second Vice Chair, Corresponding Secretary, Recording Secretary, Treasurer, Operations Coordinator, Social Media Strategist, Website and Graphic Designer, and Director. In addition, we also have some new interns in the office who are helping with everything from our communications to fundraising.
PCDP is cautiously optimistic that we may soon host an office re-opening event where people can come in to meet our new folks!
In the meantime we have started to open our office again to volunteers, who have dedicated their time to make sure our office operations continue to run smoothly. We’re also planning hybrid events, where people can join either in person or via Zoom.
Of course, we have continued to build our strategy for how we are going to contact the 18,000+ Democrats in Pima County who are now at risk of being removed from the AEVL list. We also monitor #fraudit and redistricting, both of which threaten the integrity of the elections process. Every day as restrictive abortion and voting rights laws continue to pass in the Arizona state legislature we are reminded of what is at stake if we do not act.
The 2022 campaign season has already begun, and we need your help to make sure we are ready to fight for the next 17 months so we can keep Arizona blue.
On election night of 2022, as the results start coming in from all over the state, I do not want to be asking myself if I could have done more; I know I will have done all that I can to ensure that Democrats win up and down the ticket.
If you haven’t already this year, please take a moment to think about all you are doing to help elect Democrats, and ask yourself if there is any room to take on more. Whether it is increasing a donation, committing to volunteer, or writing to your representatives, every act of political engagement will enable PCDP to fight for your Democratic values.
I am incredibly grateful to be working with such a wonderful community, and I’m excited to see where we will take PCDP next!
