Local Majority provides research that is practical and accessible for state legislative campaigns. Acting as a personal research department, we distill national research studies and put together packets with specific and targeted information for candidates’ campaigns to support their efforts. Read our in-depth research reports supporting Democratic campaigns.
Arizona 2024
AZ-Insanities
You Can't Make This Up, 2024 Edition
Republicans want to make it harder to vote, limit personal freedoms, criminalize being homeless and more.
You Can't Make This Up - Arizona's new limits on Freedoms May 2024
AZ-Voting Rights
Arizona - Ground Zero for Election Denials
Republicans want to make it harder to vote. The effort to deny election results—that is, to reject democracy—is contained within a segment of the Republican party and this segment is particularly prominent in the Arizona Republican party
Ground Zero of Election Denial - May 2024
AZ-Abortion
AZ Republicans ban Abortions
Republicans overwhelmingly support the 1864 pre-statehood near-total abortion ban. Only a few Republicans joined Democrats to successfully repeal the 1864 law. Democrats support the Abortion Access for All ballot initiative.
Talking Points - Abortion Rights and Freedom to Choose under threat June 2024
Full Report - Republicans support 1864 law banning abortion June 2024
AZ-EDUCATION
Arizona - Vouchers are bankrupting the state
The family of every school child in Arizona is entitled to $7000 per child per year, which can be used for private school tuition, home-schooling and tutoring. Since there is virtually no accountability, the money is also being used for kayak and horseback riding lessons, home gyms and televisions.
Talking Points - ESA Voucher Program June 2024
Full Report - ESA Voucher Program June 2024
AZ-IMMIGRATION
Illegal Immigration
This is a problem Republicans do NOT want to solve. We know this because House Republicans failed to even consider the bipartisan bill crafted in the Senate earlier this year. That's because felon and former president Trump torpedoed the bill to avoid giving President Biden a political "win."
Illegal Immigration May 2024
AZ-BIRTH CONTROL
Birth Control
On March 13, 2024, Arizona Republicans unanimously voted to block Democrats’ efforts to bring a vote on the Right to Contraception Act. The Republican-controlled legislature has refused to hold votes on contraception bills.
Next on the docket? Birth Control June 2024
AZ-Voting Rights
Arizona - Fetal Personhood
Fetal personhood laws grant the same rights and privileges to fertilized eggs as to actual children and adults. They could result in banning abortions and access to IVF.
Read our report here:Fetal Personhood June 2024
AZ-Democrats Deliver
Democrats deliver on infrastructure
The Biden-Harris Administration has passed historic legislation, including the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and the American Rescue Plan Act. See how this legislation helps Arizona!
Read our report here:
AZ-Affordable Housing
Affordable Housing
There are solutions, but no quick fixes for Arizona’s shortage of affordable rentals and starter homes. Challenges include inadequate funding for developers, zoning restrictions, NIMBY sentiment, shortages of skilled construction workers, and price gouging by large realty corporations.
Talking Points Full report:Affordable Housing June 2024
AZ-Water Management
ARIZONA'S WATER SHORTAGES
Understand the challenges Arizona is facing due to water shortages.
AZ-IMMIGRATION REFERENDUM
AZ REPUBLICANS' ANTI-IMMIGRATION REFERENDUM
Republicans latest anti-immigrant bill is also unconstitutional because immigration is the domain of the federal government.
Read the report here:
RESEARCH REPORTS FROM PAST YEARS
SOCIAL MEDIA BUNDLES FOR KEY ISSUES FOR VIRGINIA ELECTIONS
Local Majority has provided free social media creative assets combined to support our key issue papers. Find them at these buttons and share them on your social media.
2022
Arizona
AZ-GOP INSANITY - 2022
This paper is a collection of the greatest Republican hits, taken from our other Arizona papers. It also includes some illuminating quotes from Republicans. For example, Representative John Kavanagh stated, “Democrats value as many people as possible voting, and they’re willing to risk fraud. Republicans are more concerned about fraud, so we don’t mind putting security measures in that won’t let everybody vote—but everybody shouldn’t be voting.” He went on to say, “Quantity is important, but we have to look at the quality of votes, as well.”
Read the entire report -- Sept. 8, 2022
AZ-EDUCATION
Higher Education Funding
Adequately funding and educating students is the best way to achieve a thriving economy. And a thriving economy benefits all citizens, not just those who have the college degrees or post-secondary technical training. However, due to lack of adequate state funding and the high costs for students, the college graduation rate – already the lowest in the country – is declining.
Read the full paper: Higher Education Funding -- August 31, 2022
AZ-Housing
Housing
“We are so short on inventory that you either move in with somebody, you move back home, or you're homeless.” But if the political will could be found, affordable housing is within reach for Arizona.
AZ-Reproductive Rights
Roe overturned - Now what for Arizona?
With the overturning of Roe vs. Wade, the pre-statehood ban on abortion—from 1864—is in effect in Arizona. Emboldened Republicans are now targeting contraception. These legislators are blurring the lines between contraception and abortifacients, as they try to limit access to oral birth control pills, IUDs and emergency contraception. If Republicans continue to control the Arizona legislature, access to reproductive healthcare will remain under attack.
AZ-K-12 EDUCATION
THE ABYSMAL STATE OF K-12 SCHOOLS
Arizona schools rank near the bottom on many measures: per-student funding, class size and teacher salaries. Although voters want increased school funding, the Republicans who control the legislature refuse to adequately fund education.
Shockingly, teachers earn so little that their own children qualify for free or reduced lunches. Arizona’s teachers spend their own money to buy paper, books, and mousetraps for their classrooms. They use textbooks that are older than they are. Their students sit at broken desks, using 22-year-old computers, held together with duct tape, in rooms with leaky ceilings.
AZ-IGNORING VOTERS
THWARTING THE WILL OF THE VOTERS
Republican legislators have ignored the will of Arizonans on a number of issues. Among those issues are the minimum wage, school funding, ease of voting, the ability of localities to tighten rules where appropriate, and the initiative process itself. This has been going on for a long time. Even the voter-initiated Arizona Voter Protection Act―passed in 1998―has not deterred Republicans; they have repeatedly ignored its provisions.
AZ-VOTER SUPPRESSION
Republicans Suppress the Vote in Arizona
The United States is a backsliding democracy. That is the consensus of numerous international organizations that study and rate the health of democracies around the world. Arizona Republicans have introduced about 10% of all voter suppression legislation in the country.
AZ-POLICE REFORM
Backsliding on Police Reform in Arizona
The Republican-controlled Arizona legislature has voted down bills intended to increase police accountability and instead has passed bills further shielding police officers and departments from oversight and accountability. So, while most of the country is moving forward on police reform and addressing racist and excessive use of force, Arizona has been backsliding to even further shield police officers accused of unnecessary violence against the public they are supposed to serve.
2020
Arizona
AZ-NAVAJO
COVID and the Crises Facing the Navajo Nation
Historic Injustices and the Lack of Infrastructure Exacerbate the Pandemic.
In the 1918 influenza pandemic, the death rate for Native communities in the U.S. was four times higher than for the nation as a whole. Fast-forward 100 years to May 18, 2020, when the Navajo Nation surpassed New York State with the highest per capita rate of COVID-19 infection in the country.
As the U.S. and the world’s attention is turned towards the Navajo Nation, the pandemic is highlighting disparities and inequities that have existed in the Nation for decades. These include overcrowding, lack of running water and electricity, reduced access to healthcare, and deep infrastructure failings.
COVID and the Crises Facing the Navajo Nation - Oct. 2, 2020
AZ-HEALTH
Arizona Republicans Restrict Access to Healthcare
Unaffordable Healthcare in Arizona
Arizona ranks 43rd in the nation on healthcare affordability and accessibility. Without an employer-sponsored plan or a government program, the vast majority of Arizonans cannot afford healthcare insurance. In 2018 more than half of all the people in Arizona were either uninsured or obtained insurance through a government-administered, government-funded program (Medicare, Medicaid, subsidized policies through the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and the military). While Democrats actively try to solve this problem, Republicans pursue policies that restrict access to healthcare at a time when it is most needed—during a global pandemic that threatens us all. The Republicans even dismantled KidsCare, the insurance covering impoverished children, from 2014 to 2016!
AZ-POLITICS and ENVIRONMENT
Arizona’s Stymied Solar Energy is No Accident
Arizona Corporation Commission Corrupt Power Plays
Arizona is the sunniest state in the country with enormous solar energy potential, ranking second behind only Nevada in energy potential. Yet in 2018, the state generated only seven percent of its net energy from solar power. Arizona would be much further along were it not for opposition from the Arizona Public Service Company (APS), the largest power provider in the state. In an effort to thwart both user-generated solar power and net metering, APS corporate spent millions of dollars on the campaigns of anti-solar Republicans to help them get elected to the Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC), the body that regulates the state’s utilities.
AZ-HEALTH
The Telemedicine Cliff is Fast Approaching
It took the COVID-19 pandemic to cause widespread adoption of telemedicine. The waiver of key federal and state regulations and the mandate for insurance reimbursements paved the way for widespread use. Many of these waivers, however, will expire at the declared end of the public health emergency. The temporary coverage and protections must be here to stay.
AZ-HEALTH
The Opioid Epidemic in Arizona
Since 1999, the national opioid crisis has resulted in 700,000 deaths in the United States. At least two million Americans are addicted to opioids, and more than ten million misuse them.
In Arizona, where more people die from drug overdoses than car crashes, opioid use, abuse, and deaths have all increased at an alarming rate over the last fifteen years. Despite significant legislative and public health efforts, the number of opioid deaths rose from 790 in 2016 to 1,375 in 2018. At 92.5%, Arizona had the largest relative increase in synthetic opioid-involved deaths in the country between 2017 and 2018.
A number of factors have contributed to the epidemic of opioid abuse, including over-prescription, aggressive marketing and lobbying efforts by pharmaceutical companies, black market availability, and the stress and despair associated with chronic pain and poverty.
AZ-HEALTH
Fact-checking: GOP Prescription Drug Pricing Claims
On Monday, August 24, 2020, during his speech at the Republican Convention, Donald Trump claimed that he had reduced prescription drug prices by 60 to 70%. Even though there is no evidence to support that claim, his remarks are being repeated across the country. Read our short report refuting yet another false narrative coming from the GOP.
AZ-HEALTH
Protecting Paid Sick Leave in Arizona
If an infected person knowingly goes to work because their job is the only way to feed their family or keep from being fired, who can blame them?
Fortunately for Arizonans, Proposition 206 has ensured paid sick leave since it went into effect in 2017. Nonetheless, Arizona Republicans have shown that they are willing to do whatever it takes to try and overturn paid leave, minimum wage, and other workers’ rights, including subverting the will of the people. They are now hard at work undermining the citizen initiative process itself.
It remains the responsibility of Democratic state legislators to ensure paid sick leave remains a right in Arizona, as the people intended.
AZ-HEALTH
Preemption by AZ Republicans is Hazardous to Your Health
Public health policy often advances through local efforts to improve community health, which can affect businesses if products are taxed or business practices are restricted. In response, corporate interests use financial clout and lobbying machinery to push preemption legislation that prevents local governments from regulating them. Read our full report to learn how preemption laws championed by Arizona Republicans prevents local governments from passing regulations to ensure fire-safe buildings, health insurance availability, firearm safety, and nutrition quality.
AZ-ENVIRONMENT
Arizona Republicans Fail to protect Arizona's water resources
It should go without saying, but water is a precious resource. Its quality, purity, and availability need to be protected to sustain life. As the basis of all living systems, comprehensive, enduring action must be taken to ensure that ecological life-support requirements are balanced with urban, agricultural, and industrial needs. Such has not been the case in Arizona—a situation that has long been recognized but ineffectively addressed to ensure a viable state going forward. Arizona Republicans have made repeated egregious attempts to end-run around regulations that protect Arizona's limited water resources.
AZ-HEALTHCARE
Arizona Republicans Fail to ACT and allow COVID CATASTROPHE
If Arizona were a country, it would have been the world’s hottest COVID-19 hotspot in early July, with more confirmed cases per million residents than even the hardest hit third-world nations.
- Republican Gov. Doug Ducey waited too long to respond to the pandemic.
- When his response finally came, it was too little, too late.
- Gov. Ducey reopened too soon before CDC-recommended indicators.
AZ-HEALTHCARE
Republicans allow Runaway Drug Prices in Arizona
Americans pay the highest prescription drug prices in the world. Drug prices rose at three times the rate of inflation between 2007 and 2018. Arizona has made some progress in chipping away at these issues. Several prescription drug pricing bills were proposed in the 2020 session, but none passed prior to the early sine die adjournment due to COVID-19. These tabled bills included an important Democratic effort to cap drug prices which never made it off the Republican-controlled Senate floor.
AZ-ECONOMY
Roadblocks to Rural Broadband increase Digital Divide
In today’s global economy, access to broadband is essential. Unfortunately, insufficient funding, failure to adopt community-based service providers, and the lack of a comprehensive rural broadband plan implementation have left many of Arizona’s poorest citizens without remote access to education, health care, jobs, goods, and services.
Should Arizona’s legislators fail to act, they will ensure the continuation of a persistent gap between early-adopters and their lower-income and rural peers, as ever-newer, ever-faster technology becomes available. See our Talking Points for a summary and our full report for all the details.
AZ-EDUCATION
Republicans gut Higher Education Funding
Arizona holds the unenviable position of being at the top of the lists for both increases in college tuition and decreases in state spending assistance for students. The result has been a relentless decline in affordability for lower-income students and an astronomical increase in debt taken on by those students who do enroll.
Arizona’s Republican-controlled legislature has chosen to cut personal and corporate taxes every year since the mid-1990s instead of investing in its public colleges and universities. As a result, Arizona is failing to adequately educate its citizenry, and ranks 40th in the nation for people age 25-34 holding bachelor’s degrees or higher.
Between 2008 and 2018 Arizona Republicans cut per-student spending for higher education by 54.9%—the largest cut in the nation, making Arizona one of just seven states that remain more than 30% below their pre-2008 recession education appropriations per full-time equivalent student. Read our paper for more details.
AZ-HEALTH
Disparities in COVID-19 Testing for Minorities
COVID-19 cases in Arizona are surging aggressively. As of early July, cases have reached their highest levels ever for the state, with no indication that the curve is leveling off. Data shows that cases are growing disproportionately among minority populations. The heavily minority, poor, and underserved communities in Maricopa County have the greatest challenges for access to testing. Long-standing socioeconomic and health inequities have resulted in four to five times higher rates of COVID-19 infection among minorities. Heavily urban Maricopa County has the most testing sites of all counties; however, sites are not evenly distributed, and there are fewer in minority communities. Local leaders are scrambling on their own to ensure enough testing sites exist to serve their residents and keep them safe and healthy.
AZ-EDUCATION
Strengthening Oversight of Arizona’s Charter Schools
Ever since charter schools took the Arizona public education landscape by storm in 1994, they have generated a range of reactions, from pride in the best of them to rage over fraud and profiteering. Competition has produced big winners—like the BASIS schools that rank among the top public high schools in the country—to utter failure among online charter schools.
Neither the Arizona State Charter School Board nor the Arizona Board of Education has taken action to address poor academic performance or financial irregularities, including false reporting, self-dealing, and profiteering.
The Republican majority in the state legislature has consistently stymied Democratic efforts to introduce legislation to strengthen oversight of Arizona’s charter schools. But a serious overhaul of charter school governance would go a long way toward enriching choice, optimizing the use of taxpayer dollars, and enhancing student outcomes in Arizona’s public education sector.
AZ-HEALTHCARE
Republicans Jeopardize Health of Rural Citizens
The inequities in the health of rural versus urban citizens in Arizona are profound. With the exception of two outsized counties, rural populations are the norm across Arizona. These rural residents have lower average income, higher unemployment, higher poverty, and greater need for Medicaid. They have the lowest health quality and the highest health risks. There are more aging adults, more chronic disease, and more children lacking health insurance. Greater geographic isolation means people must also travel long distances. There are numerous steps—both short-term and long-term—that legislators can take to help mitigate this crisis rather than stand by as it has spiraled downward under successive Republican administrations, jeopardizing the future of the state.
AZ-EDUCATION
The Deplorable State of Education Funding in Arizona
Arizona voters have long considered education funding to be the number one issue facing the state. But the reality is that no other state has cut school funding more than Arizona. Between 2008 and 2015, legislators cut per-student funding by 36.6%. Since the mid-1990s, the loss of revenue for education spending has been the direct result of Arizona’s Republican lawmakers choosing to cut personal and corporate income taxes instead of investing in schools. The failure to adequately fund education in the years since the 2008 recession means that per-pupil funding is the second lowest and teacher salaries the third lowest in the country.
AZ-ELECTIONs
Attack on Democracy: Republicans Suppress Voting and Silence Citizens
Republicans don’t want you to vote—especially if you are young, a person of color, or poor. They have made it harder to vote in every way they possibly can. The Republican attack on voting rights is not just anti-Democrat; it is anti-democracy. Gutting the citizen initiative process, impeding voter registration, raising barriers to voting by mail, severely reducing the number of polling places, limiting acceptable forms of voter IDs, disenfranchising former offenders, purging voter registration rolls—these are just some of the ways that Republican policies are undermining the fundamental democratic institution of a citizen’s right to vote. Arizona Republicans have been particularly egregious in suppressing voting rights.
AZ-ECONOMY
C.A.R.E.S. Act
Summary of the Federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act.
AZ-HEALTHCARE
ALERT: FCC Funding Going Fast! The COVID-19 Telehealth Program
As part of the CARES Act, Congress appropriated funds to the FCC for a $200M Telehealth program. Through the “COVID-19 Telehealth Program”, the FCC will provide immediate support to nonprofit and public eligible health care providers to enable connected care services to patients at home or mobile locations in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. They will “fully fund” telecommunications services, information services and devices necessary to provide critical connected care services “until the funding is exhausted or until the current pandemic has ended.”
Image from Gage Skidmore - Flickr
AZ-LEGISLATURE
ARIZONA LEGISLATIVE REPORT
In addition to the lightning-rod legislation that makes headlines each year, the Arizona state legislature passes—and kills—hundreds of bills per session that go unnoticed by the public. Historically, the Arizona legislature has been dominated by Republicans who are heavily financed by party-affiliated PACs and corporations.
This in-depth analysis of recent legislation below includes legislation that has become the GOP mainstay in recent years. The GOP has become the “anti” party (anti-environment, anti-workers’ rights, anti-public education, anti-affordable health care, anti-reproductive rights, anti-immigration, and more).
With both legislative chambers in Arizona held by Republicans, progressive bills sponsored by Democrats are killed in committee repeatedly. Conversely, Republican-sponsored bills routinely make their way to the governor's desk.
Read our report for more details.