AZ Political Podcast: Stacy Pearson on Grijalva’s vacant seat and where Democrats go from here

(EDITOR’S NOTE: This week’s AZ Political Podcast was recorded before Adrian Fontes announced Wednesday night he will not run for Raúl Grijalva’s seat.)

PHOENIX — On this week’s AZ Political Podcast, Democratic political consultant Stacy Pearson joins me to talk about filling the late Raúl Grijalva’s congressional seat, the direction her party needs to take to win more voter hearts and minds and whether the Democrats can lead the way in digging out of our huge national debt.

Based simply on what she says is the number one quality required of a candidate to have even the slightest shot at replacing Grijalva, I should be calling Stacy a “Pragmatic-Democratic political consultant.”

She realizes that Democrat messaging needs some updating (as evidenced by the large losses they suffered in November) and lays out what she thinks needs to be done for Democrats to hang onto three of Arizona’s five most powerful offices (governor, secretary of state and attorney general) in next year’s statewide election.

But she also sees how Democrats can turn the tables and attack Republicans in the same way they attacked the Democrats last year. After all, the economy isn’t turning out to be quite as rosy as Donald Trump may have promised. At least not as quickly as he hoped.

Finally, after reminding Stacy that the last balanced budget that was ever passed by Congress was signed by a Democratic president (Bill Clinton), we explore the idea of fiscally-conservative and budgetarily-responsible Democrats.

Since most Republicans don’t seem capable of that kind of thinking anymore either, that may be a bridge too far.

But it’s fun to ponder the idea. And maybe something we’ll have to ponder before the US goes bankrupt.

The AZ Political Podcast is available at KTAR.com, the KTAR News app and everywhere you get your podcasts.

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