There's A Big Primary In The Tucson Area Tomorrow-- And it Could Be Waterloo For Another DCCC Candidate

The DCCC didn't have the decency wait for local Democratic voters to pick a candidate to run for the AZ-02 nomination. They just barreled in and endorsed-- and spent tons of money on-- the most conservative of the 7 Democrats in the race, Ann Kirkpatrick. Kirpatrick isn't from southern Arizona but she "moved" down to Tucson-- if she even did (she seems to live in Phoenix and just goes down to Tucson to visit her grandchildren and to campaign)-- to get back into Congress.

The 2 most recent polls-- one done for Kirkpatrick's campaign and one done for Matt Heinz's campaign-- both show Heinz slightly ahead, although a source inside the DCCC told me their own poll shows Heinz beating their candidate by 5 points. She's outspent him two-to-one and money has poured into the district, not just from the DCCC, mostly to introduce her to the locals, but from the contemptible No Labels network of dirty money SuperPACs funded by conservative billionaires (particularly the Murdoch family.) Why would wealthy Republicans be spending so much money in a Democratic primary?

Easy: whichever Democrat wins the primary is going to be the next AZ-02 member of Congress. The day Martha McSally announced she was running for the seat, Paul Ryan's SuperPAC folded up it's tent, shut down the Tucson campaign office and snuck out of town in the dead of night. They know very well that Republican Lea Marquez Peterson isn't going to win. She's not just like Trump policy-wise; she's brags incessantly about what a great businesswoman she is-- the way he did-- and then ignores questions about her gigantic bankruptcy-- like he did. Knowing that a Democrat has a 90% chance, Republican donors looked at Kirkpatrick's record and Heinz's record; it was no contest. Kirkpatrick is the best Republican running in the AZ-02 Democratic primary.

Matt Heinz is a progressive. Kirkpatrick, a New Dem, was an NRA star-- who publicly boasted she would protect them from Obama and who got an "A" rating from them. (As part of her campaign of lies and deception, she and her unscrupulous allies have been sending out mailers calling Heinz the NRA candidate to confuse voters. But that isn't the real reason why she's getting so much money from rich Republican contributors. What the Murdochs and their pals are most excited about is that Kirkpatrick voted with the GOP against Wall Street reform (Dodd-Frank), with the GOP on extending the Bush tax cuts, with the GOP on turning Medicare into a voucher program and, in general, voting with the GOP far more frequently than most Democrats. If you can't get a real Republican, you go for someone from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party. And that's Ann Kirkpatrick... always has been; always will be.

Her GOP allies are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars smearing Heinz. She has been moaning that Heinz's policy-oriented compare-and-contrast ads are "negative" but her negative mailers-- 3 on Friday alone-- are part of a tidal wave of slime and negativity. One of Politico's worst fools, Elena Schneider, wrote a lazy, misleading piece yesterday that doesn't even mention that Kirkpatrick is getting help from billionaire Republicans, like the Murdochs (which you'd think her editor and readers might be confused about). She also seems to have not bothered to explain where the negativity started in this race. Schneider also kept hammering home that Kirkpatrick, an arch conservative, is "a moderate." The word "moderate" is the most admired political description in U.S. politics. The opposite of "moderate" is what... radical? extremist? fanatical? What? Matt Heinz's policy agenda is in tune with what Americans want-- nice and moderate. Ann Kirkpatrick is way to the right of what Americans want-- positions so so conservative that the Murdochs and their Wall Street allies are bankrolling her (ironically, along with the DCCC-- yes, strange bed-fellows indeed). Elena needs to go back for some emergency journalism courses... stat.

How much like a Republican does she sound, especially at the end of this video where she brags about her "A" from the NRA? In fact this is how she greeted the NRA when they held their convention in Phoenix. "I am not going to allow Washington to ignore the values of Arizonans' and the traditions of four generations of my family in District One, and I am proud to be pushing back against the federal government to stop our Constitutional rights from being infringed. Every time the anti-gun rights groups propose legislation that restricts our freedoms, I am going to make sure they know millions of Americans will fight them every inch of the way." (And she lies right to the voters and says Heinz is the NRA candidate!) Don't forget to vote tomorrow. Washington is already too full of politicians just like Ann Kirkpatrick.