Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense.  I’m Jon Wiener.  Later in the show: Arizona is a key swing state – Sasha Abramsky will review the massive Democratic organizing going on there for an abortion rights initiative and Senate and House candidates, and against the crazy Arizona Republican party.
But first: the former prosecutor versus the convicted felon: John Nichols has our analysis of the new presidential race — in a minute.

[BREAK]

The convicted felon versus the former prosecutor. The 78 year old man versus the woman 20 years younger. The white man versus the woman of color. That’s American politics right now. For comment, we turn to John Nichols. Of course he’s national affairs correspondent for The Nation. His most recent book is It’s Okay to Be Angry About Capitalism, co-authored by Bernie Sanders. We reached him today in Asheville, North Carolina. John, welcome back.

John Nichols: It’s good to be with you, Jon.

JW: The big question, now that Kamala Harris is the candidate with the responsibility of keeping Trump out of the White House: is America ready for a Black woman president? Can she recreate the Obama coalition — young people, people of color, and women, or something like it? How should she do that?

JN: Well, it looks like she’s already done it, so we can go onto the next question.  No, I don’t say that. That’s a pretty glib answer. But I’ve got to tell you, the first 36 hours or so of her candidacy have been nothing short of Obama-esque. That doesn’t mean, honestly, that she will fully recreate the coalition, but her fundraising from small donors is very parallel to what we saw with Obama and with Bernie Sanders. Her volunteer signup rate is very similar to what we saw with Obama. The grassroots energy is very similar. I want to be careful about going overboard on this, but we’re really are seeing similar patterns. My daughter, who is a University of Wisconsin student, 20 years old, so this is entirely anecdotal, but she’s been around this a lot, and she says that what she’s seeing with students on campus is the most excitement since anything associated with Bernie Sanders. So something’s happening out there.
Now, where it goes, if it could get tripped up, all these things are real. I understand all that, but I think she is pulling the coalition together. Of course, we’re hours into the campaign, so again, there are complexities. She could make a stumble of some kind. But if she picks the right vice presidential candidate, keeps on going on this track, I do think you’ve got prospects for something pretty remarkable.

JW: Our colleague at The Nation, Steve Phillips, pointed out on this podcast recently that the Democratic candidate who got the highest percentage of the white vote over the last 25 years, in the last six presidential elections, was Obama in 2008. He got 43% of the white vote. That’s the most white votes of any Democratic candidate since Clinton. And that suggests that lots of white liberals respond when called on to vote in favor of making America a more equal society, to demonstrate that they want America to be a multi-ethnic democracy. The Obama example is a great one for Kamala to follow.

JN: Steve’s basic point is an important one, but there are still challenges here, and there are still things to look at. One thing I’ll note about Obama that I think is going to be challenging for Harris — one of Obama’s successes was that, for a variety of reasons, he got white moderates, and even some relatively conservative voters.  Remember, toward the end of the 2008 campaign, Obama was scoring a lot of Republican endorsements. There were Republican former senators, members of the families of former Republican presidents, others who were stepping up to endorse Obama. I don’t know if Harris could get to that or would, but obviously when you’re starting as fast as she has, it’s entirely appropriate to aspire to that.
But if she does go from strength to strength, then you can start talking about the impact it might have in a state like Ohio. Remember, Obama won Ohio in ’08 and in ’12. And then in ’16 and ’20, Ohio went way over to the other side.  I’m not saying that Kamala Harris is going to win Ohio. But the strength of her candidacy could have a profound impact on Sherrod Brown’s reelection run as a senator in Ohio. Similarly, if Kamala Harris starts to up those Democratic numbers in the interior West, she might help save a senator like Jon Tester in Montana.

JW: Let’s talk about Kamala on the issues for a minute. She’s been great at talking about abortion rights. She used to be great talking about the Dreamers, the kids brought to this country as infants who now face deportation. But what about the kitchen-table, bread-and-butter issues that have been so important to the Biden administration, some of which there’s so much opposition to and dissatisfaction with. How will she do with those, do you think?

JN: I think it’s really important that you go to the economic issues. Because that’s the area where Harris is less tested, at least in the media profile and sort of what we have seen of her as basically the surrogate in chief for the Democratic party over the last three or four years. The economic issues, I think, she has the potential to be very effective on. Bernie Sanders, for instance, has been saying how important that is, that she needs to pick up where Biden was at his strongest in the last few weeks. Because Biden obviously had all the challenges coming his way. But he went to Detroit about two weeks ago on Friday and delivered a remarkable speech, that was really a first 100 days, economic justice, economic democracy speech. It was not much covered because the next day you had the assassination attempt on President Trump.But Biden’s speech there was quite good.
And so you want to see Harris pick up some of that basic messaging, which is that you’re going to expand Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Stop talking about saving it, talk about expanding it. You’re going to talk about ending medical debt, i.e., really getting people who are facing the reality of bankruptcy because of their medical costs, being able to get beyond that. That’s a huge issue. Talking about strengthening unions, talking about restoring the child tax credit. These are all things that people understand, and that if she frames them in the right way, in the effective way, I think she can pick up a lot of that.
I have interviewed the vice president a number of times. And all of our interviews have come back, at least at some portion of the interview, to the subject of labor and unions. Because although it hasn’t been much covered by most of our media, she has been the chair or the point person as regards the Biden Administration’s outreach to unions. I mean, she’s literally their person. So she has spoken at union conventions across the country. She’s been in regular contact with the leadership of major industrial and building trades unions. It’s a roundabout way of saying she knows the economics well.
I do think that the vice president’s engagement with these issues and interest in these issues is genuine. She’s not a newcomer to the economic discussion and to the economic populist discussion. It’s really important as she goes into this campaign, which is very fast paced, very demanding, there’s going to be a lot of counsel she’s getting from all sorts of places. People pulling her in all sorts of directions. That she goes to what she knows about economics, to the people she knows, the trade unionists, the labor activists across the country, and that she amplifies that. She makes it central to her message.
Yes, she is going to talk a lot about reproductive rights. That’s important. Yes, she’s going to talk a lot about defending democracy. That’s important. But in this mix, she should also make sure that the economic democracy, the economic justice issues, are front and center so that, when people kind of take their assessment, no matter whether they live in the country, no matter what their background, they say, you know what? She keeps talking about this. I know she’s on our side.
And she also, the other thing that she needs to do, she knows farm issues quite well. And that ought to be amplified as well because Democrats have an immense amount of work to do in farm and rural. Under the last two campaigns, they fell way down in the vote totals that they got in rural and small town America. And this campaign, if it’s going to begin to achieve the level of support that we talked about at the start of this conversation, there’s got to be a farm and rural component to it as well.

JW: Let’s talk about your state, Wisconsin, the tipping point state in ’20, when Biden won by 20,000 votes. Four years earlier, Trump carried Wisconsin by 23,000 votes. It’s also one of the states with the largest percentage of white people. Kamala pretty much has to win Wisconsin if she’s going to defeat Donald Trump. Of course she knows it. She went to Milwaukee on Tuesday. Can Kamala Harris win in Wisconsin? What would it take?

JN: There’s no question Harris can win in Wisconsin. In fact, it’s notable that, even as Biden was sort of ticking down in his poll numbers, his Wisconsin numbers were better than in most of the battleground states. There’s a couple of reasons for that. One, the Wisconsin Democratic Party has really gone through a complete remake since 2016. It is a far more activist, far more engaged, far more effective party. Democrats have won most statewide races in Wisconsin since 2018. And so the dynamic has shifted to some extent.
Beyond that, here’s an interesting fact for you. Since she became vice president, Harris has been in Wisconsin nine times. She’s been in Wisconsin, I think, this is the fourth or fifth time, just when she was there on Tuesday — that’s the fourth or fifth time this year.
And one little twist that’s kind of worthy of note, for what it’s worth, Kamala Harris was born in California and obviously was a senator from California and et cetera. But when she was a little girl, she lived in Madison, Wisconsin. Her parents, her dad was a university professor, her mom was a cancer researcher. She not only lived in Madison, she has memories of Madison and people who remember when she was there. She can’t quite run as a hometown candidate, but as any good politician, she can talk about it.

JW: Great. We have to talk about the vice president. Who do you think she should get?

JN: I think there are a number of people that she should get. If it was I was making my pick, I’d probably start with Shawn Fain of the UAW. Because I think he’s really, really good at going out and talking to people in battleground states, but I don’t anticipate that’s likely.
We’re seeing a list develop. It is primarily governors, with maybe Senator Mark Kelly out of Arizona. Of the governors I’ve seen, I think that some of them bring strengths. But I would say that the best pick would be somebody who obviously has the issues and is good on the issues, pro-labor, pro-choice, et cetera, things like that. But also who you think could really go after JD Vance. Because remember, one of the key things that a vice presidential nominee does, in addition to campaigning and everything, is they go into that debate with the Republican vice presidential candidate. It can be very telling.
And so I might look at somebody like Andy Beshear out of Kentucky because Andy Beshear actually comes from the areas that JD Vance writes about. And the thing is, if you’ve listened to any of Beshear’s interviews, as a Democrat who’s won twice in a red state, it’s fascinating because he really doesn’t like JD Vance. He calls JD Vance a fraud. He says he doesn’t know the things he’s talking about, and that can make for a heck of a debate.

JW: Last question. You’ve interviewed Kamala Harris a lot over the last many years. There’s a sense that she struggled in the early part of the Biden administration when she was vice president. Do you think she’s overcome that now and will be a good candidate for all of us?

JN: Well, that’s a very good question. Look, Kamala Harris got a lot of bad press. And some of it was fair, some of it was unfair. But she was also, frankly, neglected. She wasn’t well covered. And so I don’t think people have as much of a sense of her from herself as they should. They often have things from media, things from Republican attacks.
In my experience of Kamala Harris interviewing her, talking to her, seeing her out with people, she’s really good at this. She’s actually a much better campaigner than I think a lot of media folks give her credit for. And so if her campaign is smart, and if they say, “Yeah, be who you are,” I think she’ll do very well. She’s somebody who laughs easily, who has a great sense of humor.
She’s really an interesting person, by the way. If I could just throw this one last thing in, in my interviews with her, we’ve talked a lot about jazz. She’s a huge, huge jazz fan. She knows it with depth. She’s a very interesting person with a lot of experience and a lot of things to say. If people start to get to know that, I think they will like her quite a bit.
And then there’s always the issue of can she give the perfect speech? Bernie Sanders didn’t always give the classic oratorical speech, but he went out there and he kept coming back to a set of issues. Pundits complained about it. They said he keeps talking about these same issues again and again and again, and he keeps explaining them again and again and again. Well, one of the reasons now why he is the most or one of the most trusted political figures in the United States is because people actually heard it.
And so for Kamala Harris, I think she’s a solid speaker and quite capable of it. I think she’ll do a good job. But I think the most important thing for her is not the oratorical flourishes. It is that depth, that speech again and again and again that drives home the economic and social and racial justice themes, the vision for saving the planet. I’m not a cheerleader for her. There’s things I disagree with her on and I’ve seen her imperfections. But I think that the enthusiasm about her, if it keeps going the way it is right now, that’s going to feed on itself. As that happens, the Republican attacks are going to seem just a lot dumber.

JW: John Nichols — read him at thenation.com. John, thanks for talking with us today.

JN: Thank you, Jon.
[BREAK]

JW: The following segment was recorded before President Biden withdrew from the race on Sunday.
Now it’s time to talk about politics in a key swing state, Arizona. Joe Biden carried Arizona in 2020 by about 10,000 votes, the first Democrat to do that since Bill Clinton in 1996. Of course, two years ago in 2022, the Democrats elected Senator Mark Kelly, and a Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs. Can the Democrats win the state again this November? The polls right now show Trump ahead. 
For comment, we turn to Sasha Abramsky. Of course he writes regularly for The Nation. His work has also appeared in The Atlantic, The Village Voice and Rolling Stone. He’s written many books, including The American Way of Poverty and The House of 20,000 Books. His new book, Chaos Comes Calling, will be out in September. He has the cover story in the July issue of the Nation magazine. Sasha, welcome back.

Sasha Abramsky: Hey, it’s always good to be on the show.

JW: Arizona for Abortion Access, the coalition organizing an abortion rights referendum for the ballot in November, announced it had turned in more than 823,000 signatures. That’s more than double the amount needed to get the measure on the ballot in November, and that’s more signatures than have ever been submitted for a citizen-led ballot measure in the history of Arizona. I’m told it represents something like one in five Arizona voters.
but I want to start not with the support for the initiative, but with the opposition.  It comes in particular from one Republican candidate. This is the guy running for the Republican nomination for the House seat in a safe Republican district in Phoenix. His name is Anthony Kern. The primary is July 30th, but early voting began on July 4th. You went to Arizona, and the great thing about your reporting is that you talk to a lot of people who the rest of us might not talk to. You talked to Anthony Kern. Tell us about him.

SA: He was a character. One of the things I like when I’m going around the country is I can meet people who are not just ideologically weird, but just larger than life characters, and Kern fits that bill in every way, shape and form. He was a fake elector and he was indicted by the Attorney General recently for his role in the fake election plot. He’s hard, hard, hard right to the extent that he thinks his MAGA opponents in the congressional district that he’s running for are now mealy-mouthed liberals. He’s absolutely convinced that Californians have not just abortion on demand up to nine months, but have post-birth abortions, that there is this conveyor belt of babies being killed after birth, in the name of abortion, in California.
I asked Kern who his political role models were and he said, “Well, Jesus Christ,” and he mentioned a couple other religious figures, and then he said, “and Trump.” So you have this sort of Father, Son and the Holy Ghost situation, you have Jesus Christ, you have one other prophet, and then you have Donald Trump. So these guys are not good eggs, and I think that speaks to where a lot of the Arizona Republican Party is at the moment. It’s become this sort of extremely hard right, irrationalist, cult-like political machine, and it’s terrifying, but it’s also rather fascinating to explore.

JW: Another of the Republicans running against him in the primary, which is underway right now, include a guy being attacked for being a Muslim and going to Mecca. This is Abraham Hamadeh.

SA: He wasn’t just attacked for being a Muslim, but his political opponent, Blake Masters, who is another election denier and ran and lost for high office last time around in 2022, Blake Masters attacked him for being an anchor baby. There is just the most venomous, toxic, eat-your-own kind of politics in Arizona at the moment.

JW: The Muslim MAGA candidate, Abraham Hamadeh, he, as you say, lost his bid for State Attorney General in 2022. How did he take that loss?

SA: He sued and he sued and he sued. He never accepted it, which may be why he’s now in Trump’s good books, and Trump actually endorsed him instead of Blake Masters or Anthony Kern. But no, he’s a dyed in the wool election denier. He’s of the philosophy that, if you don’t win, you fight in the courts, you never accept the democratic election result. And he’s been more than capable of holding his own in the MAGA wars for the primary. He’s accused his opponents of being not America-first enough. So this guy is an ultra-nationalist, ultra-MAGA candidate. It’s where Arizona Republicans are right now.

JW: And where are the other Arizona Republicans on abortion rights?

SA: Well, this has split them because pragmatically, they realized that having a law on the books from 1864 that bans all abortions, even in the case of rape and incest, isn’t going to fly over the Arizona electorate. The Arizona electorate’s views on abortion are much more similar to California’s electorate. It’s just the Arizona political leadership’s views are way out of whack.
The Supreme Court ruling in Arizona saying that the 1864 law could go into effect, which was then put on hold, to be fair. That law is on hold, but when that ruling came up, people like Anthony Kern were ecstatic because they thought it was this culture of life, this finger in the eye to the pro-choice movement and so on.
More pragmatic politicians realized it was a catastrophe, and the opinion polls back it up.  I talked to a number of opinion pollsters who said, “Look, you could not get a worse scenario for the Republicans because they’re now stuck with defending this terribly rigid anti-abortion law, and if they try and modify it, they raise the wrath of their hard right base.”
Now, a number of Republicans said, “You know what? We’ve got to raise the wrath of the hard right base. We have to do it.” I think it was three senators and two house members actually did vote to repeal that law and to replace it with a 15-week ban, which is where Arizona’s heading at the moment.
So there is a divide. It’s maybe the only issue that leading Republicans in the state are vaguely pragmatic on. On all the other issues, they’re sort of dyed in the wool hard right, but they have compromised a little bit on abortion because they know they’re heading to an electoral annihilation otherwise.

JW: That’s the Republican primary. On the other side, the Democrats hope to flip a red House seat in Tucson. The candidate there is Kirsten Engel. You say she has one thing in common with Anthony Kern. Her campaign is also based on the idea of “freedom.” Tell us about Kirsten Engel.

SA: It’s interesting because Arizona is a Western state. It still has that pioneer ethos, et cetera, et cetera. And part of that means that there’s a language of liberty and freedom that all sides really glom onto. So Anthony Kern defines liberty as being about getting rid of abortion because abortion is a culture of death, he says. On the other hand, Engel, who’s running for this very competitive District 6, she defines freedom in the exact opposite way. It’s about preserving the right of access to things like abortion and reproductive rights. It’s about expanding voting rights. It’s about taking care of the environment. It’s a very different understanding of liberty, but both of them are using a Mountain West, Desert West language to describe their politics.
Engel’s probably going to win her seat. Arizona’s got at least two congressional seats that could well flip. If they do, it could be the margin that gives the Democrats back the US Congress. So it’s a really, really important state at the moment. 

JW: So that’s Kirsten Engel, the Democratic candidate who’s probably going to flip a red to blue district. Of course, there’s another Kirsten we think of when we think of Arizona politics, Kyrsten Sinema. A huge effort put her in the Senate six years ago, and then she turned out to be the nemesis of the White House and the Democratic Party, and she became so unpopular in Arizona, she decided not to run for reelection. Instead, Democrat Ruben Gallego is running for that seat against Kari Lake, another familiar name from the recent past of Arizona politics. Remind us about Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake. This is not her first statewide race.

SA: No. She ran a very toxic race for the governor in 2022, and she lost to Katie Hobbs, and again, never accepted the results. She went on this lawsuit binge. She accused the Maricopa County recorder, who’s a Republican, a guy called Stephen Ricker — she accused him of everything from vote fraud to treason and went to such extremes to defame him that eventually he sued her and he won. She actually pled no contest. But Kari Lake spent the last two years ginning up this sort of … She’s almost like a Trump avatar in Arizona. All the things that Trump says on the national stage, Kari Lake says on the state level. She doesn’t accept election results. She doesn’t accept the integrity of the election process. She thinks there’s these conspiracies involving county recorders and county clerks to deprive Republicans of a voice. So she lost the governor’s race. She then pivoted. She’s almost certainly going to be the GOP candidate for Senator, and she’s very, very unpopular.
It’s entirely likely that she loses even more significantly than she did in her governor’s race, in her Senate race against Ruben Gallego, which will be wonderful because Gallego is a very, very plausible candidate and also because the Democrats desperately need to hold that seat.

JW: The abortion rights referendum for the ballot in November is being organized by a group that calls itself Arizonans for Abortion Access. This is a coalition of Planned Parenthood, the ACLU and other groups. The theme of that campaign is “Arizonans deserve the freedom to make our own healthcare decisions.” There’s freedom again. I noticed they put the very word abortion in the title of their group. It’s not called Arizonans for Choice. It’s called Arizonans for Abortion Access.

SA: They’re on the offensive. There’s nothing defensive about their language. There’s nothing defensive about their politicking. They know the public’s on their side. They know that they’ve got, as you said earlier in the segment, way more than enough signatures to qualify for the ballot, and they’re optimistic, extremely optimistic that they’re going to get this vote passed and enshrined into constitutional law.
Basically, it’s a coalition of people who have spent months and months and months gathering signatures. They gather them in shopping malls, they gather them on hiking trails, they gather them in community centers. They go all over the place and they gather signatures, and it’s disproportionately, as far as I could tell, elderly volunteers who have just grown up with certain rights and are now seeing those rights being taken away for their children and their grandchildren, and they’re really angry about it.
One of the interesting things about this abortion access initiative is it’s going to bring people to the polls. Young people who may not be terribly enthusiastic about the up ballot names and races are going to come out to the polls because on this issue, they care. And once they’re there and once they’re voting, that obviously has a huge impact on senate races, on the presidential race, and so on and so forth. It’s a really interesting issue, and it has the potential to undermine the validity of some of these polls, which at the moment show that Trump’s quite far ahead in Arizona. You bring a lot of people out on abortion, calculus changes a little bit.

JW: Arizona has an impressive array of grassroots progressive groups that are focused on the longer term of political engagement and mobilization. In The Nation, you highlight the work of organized labor through the union, Unite Here. That’s the hospitality workers union that played a pivotal role in turning Arizona blue in 2020. They’ve planned a huge effort this fall. Tell us a little about Unite Here and their political arm, which is called Worker Power.

SA: Unite Here has been great both in California and in Arizona over the last few years. They’re one of the most activist unions in the country. They have a huge get out the vote operation, about 500 workers who get put on leave in the run-up to the elections, and they’re carefully trained, and they go to door to door and they have incredibly large metrics. They’re basically planning to knock on a million doors between now and the election. It’s an unprecedented mobilization effort, and it worked in 2020.
It was one of the critical, I mean, there were obviously many critical factors, but it was certainly one of the standout critical factors in 2020 that gave Biden that edge over Donald Trump.
It was the height of the pandemic. Most people weren’t knocking door to door. Unite Here worked out a way to do it, and they worked out a way to do it safely. They trained people on social distancing. They trained people on what to wear and what masks to wear and so on and so forth, and they knocked on doors at the height of the pandemic.
If they have the same mobilization effort this time, and there’s every evidence they will, it’s going to play a huge role not just at the top of the ballot, but all the way down the ballot as you go into local races for city council, for mayor, and so on and so forth.  This is how you build local power. Unite Here has worked out the sort of secret sauce, if you like, and they’re really, really good at it, and Arizona is a template for what could be done if you had these activist unions and their grassroots membership really energized in different states.

JW:   So far we’ve talked about the MAGA Republicans, we’ve talked about the Democrats, we’ve talked about the grassroots groups. What happened to Arizona’s old guard Republicans, the party of John McCain, the ones who won the votes of independents, who actually in Arizona outnumber Republicans and Democrats in voter registration?  I know you talked to some of Arizona’s old guard Republicans when you went there, too.

SA: I mean, Arizona is a weird state because on the one hand, it’s always had this hard line edge. It’s the state that created Barry Goldwater and then the new conservative movement back in the ’60s. On the other hand, a generation ago, its political leadership was defined by people like John McCain or at the beginning of the Trump administration, Jeff Flake, who was a perfectly reasonable Republican senator.
What’s happened is the base of the Republican Party in Arizona has long been infatuated with extremism, whether that’s John Birch extremism in the ’50s and ’60s or whether it’s QAnon in the 2010s, and Donald Trump or MAGA in the 2010s. It’s long had that hard edge and that hard edge played out, especially in the 2010s around immigration. So you have people like Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, who were going out of their way to racially profile and out of their way to use a bill called SB 1070, which was basically a law allowing you to stop anybody you liked if you thought you had reason to suspect them of being undocumented, which was just basically a blueprint for racial profiling.  The hard line of the Republican Party has always liked that kind of politics. So in a way, McCain was a more moderate bulwark against his own base.
McCain died and Jeff Flake retired, and that bulwark vanished. So what you have now is a state Republican apparatus that’s extreme. You have state political leaders in the House and in the Senate who are died in the wool MAGA, and you have candidates for national office, Senate, US Congress and so on, who are also owing their allegiance to the MAGA base.
I think it’s a perfect storm that all of the breaking mechanisms that used to be there to create a moderate leadership in the Republican Party have vanished. In a way, Arizona is a microcosm for what’s happened to the Republican Party all around the country, that those brakes and those bulwarks have disappeared and you now have a party of Steve Bannon or a party of Turning Points USA and Charlie Kirk or the party of Donald Trump. You have a party of extremely hard line America-first nationalists, and it produces really unpleasant, oftentimes quite disastrous policies.

JW: Do the old guard Arizona Republicans you talk to think about the possibility that they might return to power if Trump and his acolytes are defeated in November?

SA: Yeah. I mean, I spoke to one moderate Republican strategist called Tyler Montague. He was fairly optimistic. He had this notion that it was entirely possible MAGA was playing itself out at the moment, that it’s reaching the end of its line, and that it would discredit itself, and if it discredits itself, yes, there are moderates in the wings who would desperately like to reassume power over the party. Whether they will or not, an open debate. I’m a little bit skeptical. It seems to me the Republican base at the moment is in no mood to compromise and no mood to hew to the middle on anything.

JW: So in Arizona, we have the abortion rights Initiative. You can find more information about that at arizonaforabortionaccess.org. We have the Senate campaign of Ruben Gallego and the effort to flip the House seat red to blue in Tucson with Kirsten Engel, and we have the massive statewide door-to-door organizing campaign of Unite Here through the union’s political arm, Worker Power. You can read all about it in Sasha Abramsky’s cover story for the July issue of The Nation magazine, “Will Arizona be MAGA’s last stand?”  It’s online at thenation.com. Sasha, thanks for your report — and thanks for talking with us today.

SA:   I always enjoy it. Thanks, Jon.