Congressional District 1 Campaigns, Attacks are Heating Up

Photo Credit: KJZZ

The race to represent Congressional District 1, which covers much of Scottsdale, Paradise Valley, and parts of Phoenix, is easily one of the premier target Congressional districts in the entire country and could very well play a leading role in the balance of power in the United States House of Representatives (you can read our coverage here). As the election nears we are getting both more clarity and more attacks, as is expected.

As a brief primer, Congressman David Schweikert is defending his seat once again; having had numerous close races in the recent past, he may now find himself in his toughest battle against Amish Shah, a State Representative who is well known for personally knocking on more doors and having more personal conversations with voters at doors than nearly any local candidate.

Election campaign finance reports are out and give some clarity as to what each candidate has spent and what they have left in the final hours of the campaign. First, as of the time of writing, Shah’s “pre-general election” report was not available, but for Q3 he spent a staggering $2.1 million, and yet at the start of October still had $1.5 million cash on hand. Indeed a position of strength.

As for Schweikert, he did file his pre-general election report, which showed him with 392K cash on hand as of a couple weeks ago. Between the Q3 report and the 12 subsequent days covered in the pre-general election report, he was not to be outdone by Shah, having spent $2.2 million over those two periods.

There has predictably been a deluge of advertisements, with mail pieces being a nearly daily occurrence for target voters that the campaigns see as up-for-grabs. While sometimes it can be difficult to capture the intent of those mail pieces before they are tossed into the garbage, their respective digital ads give more lasting clarity.

For Schweikert, he seems to be running very little positive advertising about himself and is almost entirely focused on going negative against Shah. He is tying in Shah with AOC and “The Squad”, calling him radical and picking a few nuggets from his time in the House. Calling easily one of the most moderate Democrats at the House “radical” is a predictable stretch, although tying him in with The Squad, a group that he seems to have little ideological common ground with? One has to wonder if he was white if those same comparisons would be made; Schweikert’s campaigns have a long history of being gross.

Meanwhile, in a refreshing change, Shah’s digital advertising seems to be entirely positive. Since this is a target district, the DCCC has no doubt been using significant resources to bloody up Schweikert; since the RCCC has more-or-less abandoned Schweikert based on previous reports, he doesn’t have that luxury of being able to play good cop.

With relatively equal amounts of spend, it seems as though this campaign will be a test of what works better: purely negative, baiting advertising, or positivity and a lot of doors knocked personally. I’d like to think that Shah’s approach will be the successful one, but there’s a reason why politics is full of cynics.