Youth vote key for both major parties in recent primaries
Residents across the state recently left their homes for one thing: The polling center.
Arizona state primaries were held on Tuesday, Aug. 26. Doug Ducey, current state treasurer, took the Republican nomination for gov- ernor with 37 percent of the vote. Former mayor of Mesa, Scott Smith, took second place with 22 percent of the vote.
Smith spent $1.1 million on the primary, while Ducey spent nearly $4.3 million.
Christine Jones was the center of much media attention as a Republican candidate for governor. The first in-house lawyer for Go Daddy, Jones spent over
$5 million on the primary and took third place.
Democratic candidate Fred DuVal ran unopposed in the primary for governor and took nearly 97 percent of the vote.
Michele Reagan won the Republican primary for secretary of state with 43 per- cent of the vote.
Reagan said she chose to run for office after serving as “chairwoman of the commerce committee in the Arizona House of Representatives and chair-
woman of the elections committee in the
Arizona State Senate.” “These are the two areas of law that the Secretary of State deals with on a daily basis,” Reagan said. She believes this experience makes her the choice can- didate.
The young vote is something over which politicians have clamored for years. “The youth vote is incredibly im- portant,” Reagan said. “I do not think young people understand that they are now the largest voting bloc, yet they do not vote.” She believes that youth need
to be more active in casting their ballots. “Your vote is your voice and you should not be silent,” Reagan said.
Terry Goddard – who ran without op- position – won the Democratic nomina- tion for secretary of state with nearly 99 percent of the vote.
Goddard served as the attorney gen- eral of Arizona for eight years. He said “unless we can get more of our citizens participating in the voting process, we’re not going to get out of this slump we’re in.”
The slump, he said, is “very radical leadership in the legislature and state- wide.”
Goddard is a clean elections candi- date, which means that he can obtain
3,000 contributions to his campaign, each being $5. The candidate then turns that in to the clean elections commission and re- ceives, in turn, a fixed amount of money on which he can run his campaign. After that, the candidate is not allowed to so- licit any more funds for his campaign.
Goddard stated that he was allotted
$195,000 in the primary and “$292,000 or $293,000” in the general. According to public records available on azsos.gov, however, Goddard spent about $250,000 on the primary.
Goddard said the young vote is very important to him. He plans to be at Mesa Community College on Sep. 23, which is National Voter Registration Day. Com- munity colleges, he said, “have been overlooked in some of the voter registra- tion drives.” He went on to say that many of the students in the Maricopa County Community College District are unreg- istered. These students “should have a voice in our government,” Goddard said, “and I’m going to be out personally with some of my volunteer campaign staff making sure folks have an opportunity to register.”
Current Attorney General Tom Horne lost the Republican primary to Mark Brnovich, who received just under 54 percent of the total votes cast. Attorney
General Horne overspent Brnovich nearly six to one. Brnovich spent just over
$100,000, while Attorney General Horne spent $618,000.
Going up against Brnovich in the general election is Democrat Felecia Ro- tellini, who won just under 99 percent of the vote.
On the local front, John Giles beat
out Danny Ray in the Mesa mayoral race. Giles, who will serve the final two years of Scott Smith’s term as mayor, took home 72 percent of the vote.
Sam Myers, a student at Mesa Com- munity College, says that the young vote is of the utmost importance to today’s politicians.
“We’re pretty much the most inde- cisive voters out there,” Myers said. He then said many college-age voters
“probably don’t know who we’re going
to vote for, especially for city stuff .” Col- lege students, Myers said, usually follow world events, rather than local politics, making it hard “to follow what’s really going on in the community.”
The Democratic and Republican vic- tors will square up against one another for their respective offices in the general election, which will be held on Nov. 4.
