Your Week with AZCentral

August 2, 2024
by RJ Hamster

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Your Week with AZCentral

A SPOTLIGHT ON THE JOURNALISM YOUR SUBSCRIPTION HELPS BRING TO LIFE.

Fri Aug 2 2024

Raphael Romero Ruiz | Engagement Reporter

@raphaeldelag

Hey reader,

Election officials across Arizona are still counting votes from Tuesday’s primary election. Some races already have clear outcomes based on early results, but as of Friday, several races remain too close to call.Full, unofficial results are expected by Monday.

As primary elections cool here, the presidential campaign trail is heating up: Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, is expected to announce her running mate in the coming days.

While Democrats continue to wait to find out who they might be voting for as vice president, the GOP’s Trump-Vance ticket has been campaigning across the country, including battleground states like ours.

JD Vance made his first appearance in Arizona this week at a campaign rally. As my colleagues who reported on the event noted , Vance critiqued Harris and her work as VP on issues like immigration. He hoped to turn a corner on what has been some bumpy first weeks of his vice presidential bid.

Comments made by then-Senate candidate Vance in a 2021 interview with Tucker Carlson on Fox News went viral last week. Vance claimed that the country was being run by Democrats, oligarchs and “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

This week, I spoke with Republic Data Reporter Caitlin McGlade about a story she wrote profiling the reactions of local cat-mom voters to Vance’s 2021 comments. She also talked about the new tools we have developed for Arizona voters to track ballot counts during this election season.

🐱 Will ‘childless cat ladies’ in AZ affect the election?

With that, here’s what Caitlin had to say.

Arizona Republic reporter Caitlin McGlade and her cat, Maddie.

Provided by Caitlin McGlade

‘Cat people can’t have thin skin’

The news clip of Vance on Tucker Carlson’s former Fox News program was shared widely online. Reactions poured in across social media platforms, some from woman cat owners who felt disrespected by what he had to say. You actually found real people here in our community who are potential voters in the November election. How were you able to find the people you spoke with for this story using electoral data?

Caitlin: I found them through several methods. One: I had voter registration data combined with consumer data that helped me identify women voters who were likely to have cats and no children. So I went down a list of non-partisan and Republican women and just cold-called. I tried about 100 people and a few people were willing to talk to me. My other method, which I tried when I was striking out on cold-calls, was through my neighborhood Facebook page. My neighbors are super active on that platform so all I had to do was post a picture of my cat and ask folks if they wanted to talk to me about their cats and their politics. The post got a ton of interest, and I ended up finding a woman who did a whole art exhibit on cats as a symbol of women’ rights from that post.

I also called up a woman I know from investigating senior living issues. She had testified for bills at the state Legislature to reform the industry. I knew she didn’t have children, had a cat, and has been critical of the Biden administration so I figured she’d have an interesting take on the cat lady comment. And she did! She was the only person I found willing to be on the record who said it didn’t affect how she’d vote.

“Cat people can’t have thin skin,” she said in a text message. “We’d bleed to death lol.”

‘People just really love talking about their cats’

What was your experience making these phone calls? What did you learn from the people you spoke to?

Caitlin: Most of the time no one answered. I left so many voicemails. I started out by leaving a lot of details in the message, then over time essentially shortened my plea to: “Hi, my name is Caitlin McGlade. I’m a reporter at the Republic working on a story about cats and politics. I’m calling dozens of women voters to get their perspectives. I’m specifically looking for women who don’t have children and have a cat. If that description fits you, and you want to talk to me about your politics, I’d love to hear from you!”

When people did answer, they’d laugh. Except for one Republican woman. She told me she didn’t find Vance’s comment offensive and I asked her to expand on that. She got mad and told me to take her off my list and hung up.

I got several folks who talked to me but did not want to be quoted.

What did I learn from the people I spoke to? People just really love talking about their cats.

Developing new tools for the November election

The election season has kept the Republic’s data team busy counting votes accurately. The primaries served as a preview for what’s to come in November and an opportunity to test some new tools you all have been developing. Can you talk about those tools and what our readers can expect to be able to do with them?

Caitlin: I’ve covered elections in Arizona for years and if there’s one question that everyone has, no matter who’s in the race, it’s how many ballots are there left to count after election night. I used to just call every election director to get an estimate after 9 p.m. on election night and get a rough estimate. But that was pretty hectic and a lot of election directors were understandably too busy to help me out. The Secretary of State’s office started tracking this, but we learned in 2020 that the numbers were not reliable in the immediate hours or even couple of days following election night.

So my colleague Sahana Jayaraman, with the help of Chris Weber at University of Arizona, built a model that will predict how many ballots are left to count we can rely on until the Secretary of State numbers become clearer.

We tested it out on the GOP Senate Primary and it worked!

The other tool we’re building is a map that shows you where votes are coming from at the precinct level, with red points for Trump votes and blue dots for Harris votes. It will update with each ballot drop as well.

We tested it out for the primaries as well. We had a few hiccups but we’re well on our way for a smooth deployment in November.

This newsletter is written by Raphael Romero Ruiz. Reach him at rromeroruiz@gannett.com. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter, @raphaeldelag.

Arizona has 10,000 ‘childless cat lady’ voters, the margin Trump lost the state by in 2020

“If you want to say hurtful things about women, let us show you how we really do it,” said Kaylee Johannsen, an independent who voted for Trump in 2020

READ MORE

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