Crazy as it seems, 2024 is a wrap.
It’s been, as usual, a year of the strange and the surprising in Arizona politics. Of a scorned senator and a cornered governor. Of a secret recording hauled out and fake electors hauled in … to court, that is.
A year that began with Democratic high hopes and ended with Democrats wondering what the heck hit them.
Before we lace up our golden Official Trump Victory Sneakers (preorder for just $499) to march triumphantly — or reluctantly, depending upon your point of view — into 2025, let’s look back on the year now gone, one filled with moments we can’t forget.
Some, no matter how hard we try.
Cue the awards for a few of 2024’s standout performances:
Gov. Katie Hobbs is the clear winner. She started the year pledging to flip the Arizona Legislature, putting it into the hands of Democrats. Instead, she lost two seats in the House and one in the Senate, and now faces the most conservative Legislature of our time … maybe even any time.
Hobbs is in for a rough couple of years leading up to her 2026 run for reelection, facing an emboldened Republican Legislature intent on making her life as miserable as possible and a Trump administration that will paint her as out-of-touch with everyday Arizonans.
Judging by this year’s election results, it might not be all that difficult.
Hands down, MAGA.
Conventional wisdom said the wind was at the backs of Arizona Democrats this year, with Republican legislators supporting an 1864 law that criminalized abortion and the right to an abortion being on the ballot.
Conventional wisdom was a crock.
Abortion rights won the day, but so did the Republicans who had hoped to return us to the 19th century, with its mandatory prison terms for anyone caught helping a woman terminate a pregnancy.
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Those legions of angry Democratic voters, supposedly ready to throw the bums out? They never materialized.
Meanwhile, Turning Point USA fired up its get-out-the-vote machine to help Donald Trump coast to an easy win, bringing along with him enough Republicans to solidify the party’s control of the Legislature, hold on to two of the nation’s most vulnerable congressional seats and take over key spots in the administration of Maricopa County.
The prize goes to Karrin Taylor Robson.
KTR reemerged onto the public scene this year, having apparently healed from the wounds inflicted during a bruising 2022 gubernatorial campaign. Fast forward two years and suddenly, KTR was endorsing her arch nemesis, Kari Lake.
Suddenly, “Fake Lake” — the candidate KTR previously dubbed a “complete fraud” with a “long liberal record of hypocrisy” — was the person we should send to the Senate.
KTR is either the most forgiving person on the planet — one who believes a “complete fraud” is a good fit for the United States Senate — or she’s planning a rerun for governor in 2026.
Yeah, I’m going with the second one.
Already, she’s landed the Trump seal of approval for 2026, to the disgust of Sen. Jake Hoffman, leader of the hard-right Arizona Freedom Caucus. Hoffman called her the “UniParty McCain network candidate for Arizona governor.”
He isn’t wrong. KTR is an old school, business-oriented conservative from the McCain-Ducey wing of the party, but one smart enough to pronounce herself “beyond honored” to have Trump’s support.
I picture her laying in a supply of “Fight Fight Fight Perfume” (“For women who embody strength and grace, like President Trump,” $199).
Give it up for Kari Lake.
Oh sure, she just lost another election and announced she won’t be giving voters a third chance to reject her in 2026. But she ends the year as Trump’s choice to head the Voice of America.
Assuming she lands the job — she’ll have to win over a bipartisan board of people with expertise in international relations and journalism — she’ll be running a $267 million media conglomerate that operates in nearly 50 languages and reaches an estimated 354 million people across the globe every week.
That’s a lot of opportunity to scream “fake news” while regaling the world with “real news,” which I’m guessing will be whatever Trump says it is.
This, at an agency whose mission is to provide “objective, independent reporting of news … free of political interference.”
As Lake puts it, “I’m looking forward to this opportunity to serve in this incredible administration and make sure that all of his (Trump’s) achievements are covered fairly and accurately at Voice of America.”
And we’ll be paying her six figures to do it.
Lots of competition here, but Sen. Justine Wadsack takes top honors.
This summer, Wadsack was popped with a speeding ticket for going 71 mph in a 35 mph zone in Tucson. Senator Speedy was actually pulled over in March but thought she could dodge a ticket, given her lofty status as a state senator.
Instead, her play for legislative immunity merely delayed her citation for criminal speeding until the Legislature adjourned, just weeks before the Republican primary.
Naturally, Wadsack saw a conspiracy afoot, claiming political persecution.
“Despite the clear legal prohibitions,” she proclaimed, “the Democrat mayor and Police Chief have decided to use the power of government to prosecute their political opponents.”
At least, the ones who scream down Tucson’s streets, doing twice the speed limit.
The irony, probably lost on Wadsack: Had she not pulled the “I’m a state senator routine” and just accepted a ticket in March, it might not have been big news in July, just weeks before she stood for reelection.
Soon-to-be ex-Senator Wadsack found out that crime really doesn’t pay, losing her seat in the Republican primary.
With her Dec. 23 trial approaching, Wadsack agreed to take a defensive driving class to avoid prosecution.
This, after City Magistrate Lisa Surhio rejected her ridiculous immunity claim.
“Public employment,” Surhio wrote, “is not a sanctuary for crime.”
Put your hands together for Arizona’s fake electors, those “patriots” who falsely avowed that Trump won the 2020 election. In April, a state grand jury indicted the imposters, plus seven other key Trump allies on charges of fraud, forgery and conspiracy.
Ten of the 11 fake electors — one wisely took a plea deal — tried to wiggle out of trouble by claiming their First Amendment rights were being violated.
“There’s a difference,” state Sen./Fake Elector Jake Hoffman’s lawyer huffed, “between a group of people committing fraud and a group of people expressing an unpopular political belief.”
Indeed, there is.
But since when does the First Amendment include the right to sign papers certifying to Congress and then-Vice President Mike Pence that they were “duly elected” by Arizona’s voters to award Arizona’s 2020 electoral votes to the guy who didn’t win?
It’s worth noting that as Trump prepares to pardon the MAGA mob that stormed the nation’s Capitol to keep him in office in 2021, he won’t be coming to the rescue of Hoffman and company, should they be convicted.
Presidents can’t pardon state crimes.
This one goes to Surprise Mayor Skip Hall, who in August had the police frog march a citizen out of a City Council meeting after she dared to question whether the city attorney deserved a five-figure pay raise.
Hall deemed her comments, during the call to the public, an attack and had her hauled off to the local gulag, where she was fingerprinted and searched.
All this, for the heinous crime of daring to criticize a city official.
The good news is the city of Surprise ultimately discovered the First Amendment — the one that says, “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech” — and dropped the criminal charges.
The bad news: It took a federal lawsuit to get them to do it.
Republican Rep. Austin Smith and Democratic Rep. Leezah Sun split top honors.
Sun managed to offend, annoy and just plain scare an impressive array of people during her first year in office in 2023.
It earned her a restraining order and a House ethics investigation into a complaint that she threatened to throw a lobbyist off a hotel balcony.
Her own party leaders filed the ethics complaint.
“Is it because I’m the only Asian person in this community?” she wondered.
It wasn’t. Sun resigned in late January, just ahead of a House vote to expel her.
Curiously, there was no such vote or even an investigation into the ethics of Smith.
In April, this crusader for “election integrity” was accused of forging signatures on his nominating petitions to run for reelection.
Rather than fighting the lawsuit challenging his petitions — explaining to a judge why so many of the signatures looked remarkably like his own — Smith quickly withdrew from the race … though not from the Legislature.
The suspected forger continued on, making laws for the rest of us to follow.
Not so much as a single Republican raised an objection.
This one goes to state GOP Chairman Jeff DeWit, whose clumsy attempt to keep Kari Lake out of the Senate race instead landed him out of a job.
DeWit’s appeal to his (now former) friend came to light in January when Lake’s secret tape of their conversation was somehow slipped to the media.
DeWit, with his talk of “powerful people” who wanted to know what it would take for Lake stay out of the race, sounded like a bumbling flunky to some crime boss.
I would guess, though, that his entreaty was not so much about powerful people who feared the prospect of Lake as a senator. More likely, it was about powerful people who were sick of losing in Arizona and were hoping to entice Lake to stay out of the race.
Turns out, their instincts were right.
Still, Lake’s scripted responses — together with her later post-leak proclamation that she can’t be bought — were nothing short of red, white and well-rehearsed.
As was her timing.
Her secretly recorded tape of the 10-month-old conversation emerged just as MAGA forces were hoping to dethrone DeWit at the party’s annual meeting last January.
DeWit quickly resigned.
Take a bow, U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema.
Once, she was the shining star of the Arizona Democratic Party, having broken the Republicans’ two-decade grip on the state’s U.S. Senate seats.
But Sinema didn’t toe the Democratic Party line, instead playing a fair amount of footsie with pharmaceutical giants and hedge fund managers and such.
Along the way, however, she played a key role in some of the most consequential legislation to come out of Congress — bipartisan bills to help veterans, fund infrastructure, address gun violence, protect same-sex marriage and boost the production of semiconductors.
Which, in the end, mattered not at all.
She ultimately divorced herself from the Democratic Party when it was clear that she couldn’t win another election — only to find out that she also had no path to winning as a politician without a party.
Since deciding in March not to seek reelection, Sinema rarely was seen in the Senate, busy as she was trotting off to France, Japan, the U.K., and other international destinations on her campaign contributors’ dime(s).
She did, however, manage to show up long enough earlier this month to torpedo Democrats’ plans to keep the National Labor Relations Board in Democratic hands.
No word on whether Sinema was wearing her infamous f— off ring as she gave her former party one final finger.
Clearly, Sinema is done with politics. Can’t say that I blame her.
Reach Roberts at laurie.roberts@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on X (formerly Twitter) at @LaurieRobertsaz, on Threads at @LaurieRobertsaz and on BlueSky at @laurieroberts.bsky.social.
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