Republicans won up and down the ballot. Head of the Arizona GOP tells us why

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Arizona has officially been called for now President-Elect Donald Trump. With votes still being counted, republicans in Arizona have kept one competitive seat in Congress for David Schweikert and are ahead in the race to keep incumbent Juan Ciscomani in his seat as well.

And that red wave holds true pretty much from top to bottom on the ballot. The GOP is also on track to maintain control of the state legislature, as well as the County Board of Supervisors and the County Recorder’s Office.

To the surprise of many, the former president appears to have built a broad coalition of voters here and across the country that include a sizable chunk of the Latino vote, some women, many young people and the vast majority of men.

Gina Swoboda, chair of the Arizona Republican Party, joined The Show to talk about what led to this in Arizona.

Amber Victoria Singer/KJZZ

Gina Swoboda in KJZZ's studio.

Full conversation LAUREN GILGER: So you had some pretty big wins across Arizona this election, of course, votes are still being counted but looks like it pretty much from top to bottom on the ballot. This surprised a lot of folks, the polls did not look like it was going to be this far apart heading into this election. Were you surprised?

GINA SWOBODA: I was not, but I'm talking my book. So of course, that's what I would say. But no, speaking to the voters, we've been out in the community from the beginning, in every community listening. And people were quite unhappy, and Kamala Harris several times was asked, what would you do differently? And she said nothing. And so, you know, people saw no hope coming and they voted for the only option.

GILGER: So there's one big exception to that rule in this election cycle. Democratic congressman Ruben Gallego is maintaining his lead against Republican Kari Lake in the Senate race. He's expanded a bit over the weekend. It's not been called yet. But why do you think it looks like her performance in Arizona so far has not mirrored Trump's?

SWOBODA: So we are still counting. I don't want to count the candidate out. But there were under votes in that race. So if you're looking, the number of ballots that are cast in the presidential race are far outpacing the number of ballots that were cast in the Senate race. And the only reason that would happen is if people just did not vote. So, you know, people for some reason felt they couldn't make up their mind and just chose not to participate.

So that makes it harder for a candidate. It's not over. I still think Kari has a shot. We have a lot of rural counties out, Cochise is out. But you know, there is a big differential in those two races in participation.

GILGER: OK. It's looking like the GOP will hold on to control of both chambers of the state Legislature as well. And I want to ask you a question about what that might mean. There's still a Democratic governor for them to contend with … and last session, the Republican legislature sort of went around to the governor a lot by putting in, you know, ballot initiatives on the ballot, referring issues to the ballot. Those issues seem to have largely failed at this point. Do you think they will take a different approach heading into this session?

SWOBODA: So we picked up seats. One of the things I'm most proud of in my tenure as the chair is, we did coordinate candidate committees, which is the first time the Republican Party has done that. The Democrat Party did that very well. That's how they took two of those seats in LD4, and I've taken two seats back. So I've swept every swing district, it looks like we're winning all of them.

So we're going to come in with more votes in the House, with more votes in the Senate. On the ballot referrals. That is one of the reasons we had a two card ballot. So we should just as a rule try to avoid all that, but we passed, three or four of them are passing. So that was actually successful.

But it would be far better for the people of Arizona if the governor and the Legislature can come to agreements on policy where they can and try to pass things through regular order. It is going to be easier, I think for Republicans to get policy through without kind of being in a situation where one vote can hold you hostage. If your own majority, you know, is a one-vote majority, then any one person can kill a bill. So it's hard to get to consensus with the other side and govern.

Yes, you need to stay true to your voters. You need to stay true to your platform. But to me governing is about coming to a consensus and advancing policy that helps all of the people.

GILGER: OK. Do you anticipate that happening with the governor in this coming session?

SWOBODA: I do. I mean, I'm hopeful that the governor got the message from the voters of Arizona and the message was we want you to work with the Republican Party. That's why they gave us more seats.

GILGER: Let me ask you about some of the ways in which the Republican Party in Arizona functioned this election and got some of these got into, some of these demographics that they haven't reached before. You had courted Latino voters in rural Arizona. I know specifically Yuma, Santa Cruz County still went to Democrats, but the GOP picked up a lot of percentage points there. There are, these are border counties, majority Latino. Tell us a little bit about the strategy that went into that.

SWOBODA: Well, and thank you for that, Lauren. So, so the first thing is that the policy of the Democrat Party destroyed their own base all along the border. And the same thing happened all along the border in Texas and you can see all the seats flipping, and it's because the communities that are on the border are suffering worse than anybody else in the United States. Because you share potentially an ethnic or cultural background with someone doesn't mean you want them to come into your house and trash your way of life and suppress your wages.

And so I think the Democrats kind of presumed, hey, the open border, these are culturally similar people and they're all for it. No, people that are here that are working very hard, that have a family that have a business, do not want their wages suppressed, they do not want their schools overrun, they do not want their areas having increasing amounts of crime and that's what happened all along the border.

So in Santa Cruz, for example, the Santa Cruz chair Steve McEwen, who's a tremendous person for the Republican Party, worked hard to recruit candidates for the first time in a long time to actually run, and then spoke to Democrats because Santa Cruz is a majority Democrat county and he went out and spoke to people.

And I will also say in places like Santa Cruz, there was a serious corruption case which I'm sure you're aware. And people from South America are very familiar with corruption. You know, a lot of Republicans use the word socialist. Socialist doesn't have a lot of meaning in that community. But if you say corruption, yeah, we all know what we're talking about when we're talking about corruption in the government. So I think that was a big deal.

The first thing I did as the chair was put an ad on Univision that ran in every match of the COPA tournament just talking about what Republicans believe in. I went up on Spanish radio, I was up on Navajo radio, you know, you have to go and listen in the community and in all of the polling and all of the time I spent in all of the communities, both in the Navajo nation, in our beautiful Latino American communities. Everywhere I went, the issues were the same. You know, it was inflation, border and Hispanic community particularly school choice, education, educational choice is very important in that community. And that's a Republican issue in the state of Arizona.

People asked me about abortion, abortion kept not coming up in the top five of things people were talking about. I think the Democrats leaned very heavily on that and that's, that's not the end all and be all of what motivates voters. Talk to them about inflation, the economy, housing, my lady housing, people are getting crushed.

If you increase the supply of the population looking for housing and you don't do anything about regulation to increase the supply of housing. You know, the, the natural outcome of that equation as we were talking about math is pain, it's pain for the average voter.

KJZZ's The Show transcripts are created on deadline. This text is edited for length and clarity, and may not be in its final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ's programming is the audio record.

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