Live from Music Row Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Amy Wilhite, former 2nd Vote executive director and former communications director for Arizona senate candidate Jim Lamon, in-studio to discuss the changing political landscape of Arizona.
Leahy: In-studio with us, our very good friend Amy Wilhite, formerly with 2nd Vote and also, just recently, the communications director for Jim Lamon, the Senate candidate who finished in second place in the Arizona primary, August 2. What was the final margin of victory for Blake Masters?
Wilhite: I believe it was at nine percent last time I looked, because it took a while for those …
Leahy: It took forever.
Wilhite: That’s because a lot of the voting places didn’t have enough … they weren’t prepared for the turnout that came out, which was basically Democratic-run. How are you not prepared for voting and have enough ballots? So it’s really intentional.
Leahy: Yeah, absolutely. A lot of things are intentional. As you know, at The Star News Network, our flagship news site is here, The Tennessee Star.
We’re in 11 states, including Tennessee. The state that is en fuego, on fire with traffic, is our site in Arizona, The Arizona Sun Times. We have two reporters there. We’re going to be adding two more.
Wilhite: I got to meet them a couple of times, too.
Leahy: Rachel Alexander, our friend, and Neil [Jones]. And our traffic there at that site is just going through the roof. The reason for that – we’ll talk about the similarities between Arizona and Tennessee – but the reason is there is no conservative news outlet in all of Arizona, except for us. Very liberal.
Wilhite: Very, very liberal.
Leahy: It’s worse than Tennessee, if you can imagine that.
Wilhite: Wow.
Leahy: It’s really bad out there, as you know.
Wilhite: Yes.
Leahy: But Arizona and Tennessee, although the geography, the topography of the state is very different, the political landscape has some similarities. And tell us about what you saw in Arizona, compared to Tennessee.
Wilhite: Arizona became a purple state with the last election and a lot of people were fired up, especially with election integrity and what happened in the presidential election. And something I see similar in Tennessee – and actually, when I was with 2nd Vote and traveling across the United States and speaking to different groups, is after that election, conservatives and even a lot of independents are fired up.
They’re joining school boards. They’re starting new conservative groups where actually they know they cannot sit still and they actually have to get involved. So that is something I’ve seen similar across all the states.
People are not sitting on their butts anymore. They’re actually getting out. They’re volunteering for the school board. They’re volunteering for these …
Leahy: They’re more engaged.
Wilhite: They’re more engaged, and they’re fired up. And they’re sick of all the Woke politics. They’re sick of Woke capitalism. And I think things are going to change with this next election.
Leahy: Charlie Kirk of Turning Point, USA hosted a rally in Phoenix on Sunday. Governor Ron DeSantis went out there. Kari Lake was there.
Blake Masters, the Senate nominee, was there. Charlie Kirk called Arizona “the battleground that could determine the future of America.” I think he’s probably right about that.
Wilhite: Yes, that’s all I heard when I was out there. Especially the Senate race, we have to win the Senate race. They’ve got George Soros and all that Democratic money coming in, with Mark Kelly, and he’s actually voted 100 percent with Biden and the liberals, except for during election year when he’s maybe voted two percent the other way.
But he went in as a moderate, and he’s completely turned his back on those that voted him in as such. And so it’s crazy. And I think I heard you say earlier, if you want change, if you want to see things different, you must vote Republican.
Leahy: Absolutely. This midterm election. Now, I understand that when you were with the Jim Lamon campaign, you went down to the border. Tell us what you saw there.
Wilhite: I did. It was a really cool opportunity to get to go there and see, just driving there, you see all these materials that are just laying over there to the side that are ready to finish the wall, but they’re just laying getting dusty …
Leahy: They’ve been laying there since Joe Biden became the legal but not legitimate president of the United States back in January of 2020.
Wilhite: And you’ve got record numbers of folks coming across the border. And when I was there, I got to meet Brandon Judd, who is the National Border Patrol Council president, and he’s just incredible, and they are so overworked. And it’s not that they’re able to be on the ground much.
They’re doing all this paperwork. But when I was there at the border, they had at least 40 military-age men detained, sitting right across the border. And you see on the news sometimes mothers, children wanting a better life.
And that’s sad. You know that they’re trying to flee their country to come to America, because we are the land of opportunity and we have the freedoms that we do. And it’s sad to see that.
But what I saw, and what you don’t see in the media, is what is happening all the time. And that’s military-age men infiltrating our country and they’re not coming for a good purpose.
Leahy: No.
Wilhite: They’re not.
Leahy: They have bad intentions.
Wilhite: They have very bad intentions. And this open border that we have, it is intentional. President Biden and the Democratic Party, this is intentional for them to come across.
Leahy: They want them here.
Wilhite: They want them here. They want them to vote an entirely … a way for them, so that they can always have their way and have the socialist Marxist country that they are wanting.
Leahy: Now, another interesting thing about it, because when I went out there, I noticed Phoenix is the metro area that accounts for about 64 percent of Arizona’s population. Here in Nashville, Metro Nashville counts for about 34 percent of Tennessee’s population.
The weird thing to me about Arizona is the small number of counties they have. Here in Tennessee, we have about the same population as Arizona. We have 95 counties. They have 15 counties. Or is it 12? They have just a few counties.
Wilhite: Just a few.
Leahy: And Maricopa County is like the big dog. But the people that run Maricopa County, the county commissioners, they’re ostensibly Republican, but they seem like they’re Never-Trump Republicans.
What’s the tension there between the county commissioners in Maricopa County and the rest of the Republicans in the state of Arizona?
Wilhite: I think it’s changing a little bit, though. I’ve seen that somewhat, but I do think that it is changing. I know Jim had a lot of conservative legislation. They call them LDs there.
Leahy: LD?
Wilhite: Legislative district commissioners, and so he had them at his house. And they’re all really trying to unite for the right purpose. So I think some of that is changing. They want to see things done differently.
A lot of the independents are also seeing things differently, not leaning more Democrat. So I think the landscape of that is changing. I think we’ll see something happen a lot different than it has been.
Listen to the interview:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
The biggest factor in AZ elections is that (for some reason) they have an election MONTH. As President Trump says, we need an election DAY