Photo Credit: Scottsdale Progress
In a season of many election surprises locally, few were as surprising at the Scottsdale Mayoral race, where Lisa Borowsky overcame a significant deficit in the August primary to win a decisive victory over incumbent Mayor Dave Ortega. Now that we have the value of hindsight, it’s worth considering how this significant upset happened. So how did it?
First, it’s worth considering how she raised enough money to be competitive in this race; in her last two reports she reported over $160K in additional contributions, enough to allow her campaign to be extremely competitive through election day. But while some donors are frequent flyers in Scottsdale campaign finance reports, Borowsky’s features a new crop of donors that don’t seem to have been extremely active in Scottsdale politics up until then.
For instance, her large ($5K and over) donors since the primary are the antithesis of a who’s who of Scottsdale donors. They consist of the following:
- Mark Schaefer – a consultant at QTrech
- Nariman Afkhami – a developer at Aread
- Slade Stewart – Director at Service Group of America
- Ernest Garcia – President at Verde Investments
- Lawrence Heitz – business owner
- David Hooser – Manager at New Shoes Enterprises
- Guy Villavaso – self-employed
- Tom Hatten, founder of Mountainside Fitness
Only Tom Hatten sticks out as someone who has made waves in Scottsdale politics previously. Borowsky went outside of the normal heavy hitters to fund her campaign.
Also, we should consider how she spent her money, but that also gives relatively little guidance. She spent over $13,000 at the Mesa Print Shop, likely for signs. She allocated a good spend towards digital advertisements via Facebook and various local news outlets. The one real outlier was spending over $66,000 with the Resolute Group; based on campaign finance reports seemed to handle all sorts of campaign marketing and advertising for her.
She did have the full-throated support of the local Republicans on her side, and in a red-wave year that shouldn’t be understated. But in the face of relatively little compelling evidence as to how she may have pulled this off, perhaps it’s also worth crediting an engaged electorate who were very unhappy with Ortega and did a good amount of the heavy lifting for her campaign.