Cut Kavanagh Loose

Jeff Fortney is a special education teacher and member of the Cave Creek Unified School District Governing Board. He is a candidate for State Senate in Legislative District 3.

Why would anybody take on the daunting task of trying to unseat the Republican Senate Majority Leader, a 20-year career politician, in a district that is so heavily skewed Republican that the incumbent rarely faces a challenger? As it turns out, this—and many more reasons—is exactly why I decided to run for this office.

John Kavanagh, the current state Senator for Legislative District 3, is a case study in being complacent, comfortable, and completely out of touch with the needs and wants of his constituents.

Let’s begin with voting. Sen. Kavanagh has stated that his constituents “plead with me, ‘Don’t get rid of the mail-in ballots. We need the mail-in ballots.’ Yet he’s voted to do just that, aligning with ridiculous voting fraud conspiracy theories over his own constituents’ desires. Nearly every door I’ve knocked on since entering this race is answered by someone who uses and loves mail-in voting.

Senator Kavanagh has also tried to limit voting to “quality voters.” When asked, he explained that a quality voter is “a legal voter who says, ‘I want a ballot.’ ‘ Somebody who doesn’t want to be registered to vote, who doesn’t ask for a ballot, who doesn’t follow politics, who doesn’t know the issues, is a different kind of voter…”  It seems Senator Kavanagh is a proponent of bringing back some kind of literacy test for voting. Who exactly would be the judge of who knows enough about the issues to be a quality vote? And just for the record, no one in Arizona is registered to vote against their will… and no one gets a ballot mailed to them unless they request it. So what this really is about is passing Kavanagh’s litmus test on whether someone knows enough about the issues… and knowing enough about the issues equals agreeing with Kavanagh.

I want every eligible voter in Arizona to have easy, unencumbered access to the ballot. There should be no laws passed that make voting more difficult.

Then there’s his interesting view on gas prices. As they were approaching – and exceeding – $5.00 per gallon. He stated this was “not unusually high.” It’s high, but it’s not through the roof.” These prices are acceptable to him because they are a result of Trump’s war on Iran. When they reached similar levels in 2022, he blamed it on President Biden’s economic policies and said it was causing economic strains for Arizona families. People have grown tired of the blatant hypocrisy. 

And what about his infatuation with Empowerment Scholarship Accounts? He doesn’t care that it’s draining over a billion dollars annually from our general fund. He doesn’t care that the vast majority of vouchers are going to the wealthiest zip codes in Arizona. He doesn’t care that there is really no “school choice” for families in rural or low-income areas. He doesn’t care that most families can’t afford to pay the part of private school tuition that the voucher doesn’t cover. He doesn’t care that the vast majority of Arizona’s private schools have raised tuition prices since the passage of universal vouchers (Nearly half of these schools raised their tuition by 10% or more, with several implementing hikes exceeding 20%)! He doesn’t care about the waste or the automatic approval of anything under $2,000. He doesn’t care that there are zero measures in place to track what students are being taught or measure how well they are learning. He just wholeheartedly endorses the program and says it’s working fine. That is, until the Arizona Auditor General says otherwise. 

But more than anything else, the thing I hear the most at voters’ doors is much less complex and has nothing to do with policy. They want the Arizona legislature to stop being an out-of-control circus that gets nothing done, and where no one works together to benefit the people of Arizona.

John Kavanagh’s 20-year history of special interest and downright hateful bills does not line up with what Arizonans want. They want a change. It’s time for our legislature to adjust its priorities and start to focus on making Arizona better for everyone. It’s time for voters in LD3 to really look at their ballots, consider their choices, and consider the character of the candidates… not just blindly vote for the person with the (R) by his name, because knowing that little about your vote wouldn’t pass Kavanagh’s own “quality vote” test.