Meet Conor O'Callaghan
Any realistic list of the dozen most flippable red to blue districts in the country will be filled with congressional seats in New York and California. And there are other states with one district each that is within grasp of a solid Democratic candidate. In Arizona, it’s the first congressional district in northeastern Maricopa County, the state’s richest district. It includes northeast Phoenix plus Scottsdale, Paradise Valley, Cave Creek, Fountain Hills… Under the new boundaries, the district would have gone to Biden by a point and a half. The PVI is R+2. Under the new lines, the partisan lean went from the R+13 that helped elect Republican incumbent David Schweikert to the current swingy R+7. It’s a well-ff, well-educated suburban district, one where Trump’s failings are noted and unappreciated. Last cycle, Jevin Hodge, with virtually no support from the DCCC, exceeded all expectations:
Schweikert- 182,336 (50.44%)
Hodge- 179,141 (49.56%)
The DCCC spent the absolute minimum on Hodge— $95,095, the same laughable package they put towards campaigns they were only pretending to be behind. (At the end, Pelosi’s PAC came in with $1,720,471 but it was too little, too late.)
This cycle there’s a strong and widespread feeling that Schweikert, who has entirely toed the MAGA line, is at the end of his road. He’s raising more money than he did in 2022, but not that much more and one Democrat, Conor O’Callaghan is keeping up with his contributions… and already has more cash on hand. O’Callaghan has 4 serious opponents in the July 30 primary, frequent candidate Andrei Cherny— who is currently weighed down with investigations by the CFTC and the Department of Justice and could never win a race— fake Democrat Marlene Woods (a life-long Republican who decided she doesn’t like Trump), Amish Shah (another former Republican— and when he lived in Manhattan— who voted for Trump and, when he was in the state legislature, voted against over-the-counter access to contraceptives and for gay conversion therapy!) and Andrew Horn, a random self-funder.
Woods is best known as the wife of Arizona’s conservative Republican Attorney General Grant Woods. People remember that she didn’t speak up when he led several anti-Choice cases against Planned Parenthood. In fact, on her own blog, she wrote that she was further right than he was. At the time she was also publicly opposed to LGBTQ equality. Arizona voters also remember that she helped finance extremist Jan Brewer’s run for governor. In 2012 she was a loud Obama opponent, heavily pushing the very anti-Choice Mitt Romney.
I spent some time on the phone with O’Callaghan this week because I liked the way he took on one of the hosts on a far right TV network, smart, measured and definitive. His parents moved from Ireland to Arizona when he was an infant and he’s lived in the district for his whole life, other than when he was at the University of Pennsylvania and, briefly, working in New York. His wife is also an immigrant, her parents having escaped the theocracy in Iran. He told me that his own immigrant journey from Ireland and his wife's escape from an extremist regime “shaped our reverence for American democracy.”
O’Callaghan is a lifelong Democrat and he told me that the top 3 issues he’s been campaigning on are protecting abortion rights, boosting the economy and combating climate change. So I asked him a few very straight forward questions that might trip up a lesser candidate. Like how do you talk to constituents about the Gaza war. He wrote that “We need a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, however, that will not happen without the release of all the remaining hostages. All U.S. and international pressure should be on both sides to negotiate the release of the hostages and the cessation of hostilities immediately.”
How about economic inequality? Remember, he’s running in teh wealthiest district in the state. “We need to revamp our tax code to close loopholes,” he offered, “both personal and corporate, to make sure the rich aren't being favored at the expense of the middle class and that large corporations aren't being favored at the expense of small businesses. We need more tax brackets and we need to raise or remove the FICA cap to ensure the future of Social Security. We must also crack down on price gouging which continues to drive stubborn and persistent inflation left over from the supply chain bottlenecks of the pandemic. And we need a federal minimum wage of at least $15 an hour.”
I felt like we were on a role, so I asked about the border, keeping in mind that he’s an immigrant himself. “People like immigration, they don't like chaos and disorder, which is exactly what we've had at the border,” he said. “There is no ‘open border policy’ as the Republicans like to claim— sure, we no longer rip children apart from their parents or put people in cages, but federal border policy has otherwise not changed substantially under President Biden. This is a decades-old issue and it's not a Democratic Party problem or a Republican Party problem; it's an American problem. The solution at the border must be multi-pronged: foreign policy aimed at creating economic opportunity domestically in Central & South American countries where migrants are fleeing in droves, working with our counterparts in Mexico to better patrol the southern border of Mexico (much narrower than the US-Mexico border) and to cripple the cartels, using our technological resources and intellectual know-how to develop a secure ‘virtual’ border, and streamlining our immigration court system to enable asylum claims, over 90% of which are ultimately rejected, to be heard immediately and rejected on-site in most cases at the Port of Entry, versus asylum seekers waiting 5 years or more to ultimately be told ‘no.’”
With all that cooperation, I asked him to pick an issue we didn’t touch on and tell me what he says to the voters about it. He picked women’s Choice. “Abortion rights will be the defining issue of the 2024 election cycle and the Abortion Access Amendment (to the Arizona State Constitution) will literally be on the ballot in November. Draconian total abortion bans and 6-week bans are putting women's lives at risk in many states; a procedure as routine as a D&E, which used to resolve many miscarriages like the one my wife had almost a decade ago, is now banned in some states. If Republicans get their way, they will pass a federal abortion ban and restrict access to IVF nationally— they have already tried to do so! The government has absolutely no business being in a person's doctor's office or their bedroom. As written, the Abortion Access Amendment would allow a woman to have an abortion up until viability, as determined by the medical professionals involved (with further emergency exceptions for the health and well-being of the mother). This is the correct standard; there should not be a negotiation around weeks. Abortion is healthcare, and the government should not be involved in healthcare decisions, period. We must codify Roe at the federal level and this will be my first priority when I get to Washington.”
If you’d like to see O’Callaghan win the primary and beat the ethically-challenged far right Schweikert, please consider contributing to his campaign here on the Flip Congress ActBlue page.