Steady is what settles things.
Thank you for reading the letter. Here is the short version.
Early ballots were mailed in the first week of October. Voter Guides are already on their way to homes throughout Arizona because friends like you paid for them. There are more households we can still reach before November 3. After that, it will not matter how good the Voter Guide is. The ballots will already be counted.
Here is how a Voter Guide actually gets used, in case you have never watched somebody do it. She sits down with the ballot on one side and the Voter Guide on the other. She works down the list. Twenty minutes later she has voted the whole ballot instead of the top three lines.
That is the entire idea. It is not complicated and it works.
Those households are not statistics. Each one is a countertop somewhere in Arizona with a ballot on it and nobody nearby who knows the answers.
Loud wins a news cycle. Steady wins the fifty years after it. You have funded a lot of quiet work like this one, and quiet work is what closes a question instead of winning a season.
Here is what I keep picturing. A Saturday morning two springs from now. Same girl, same scraped knees, same early bus. The difference is that nobody is in court about her. The spot she earned is hers, and it stays hers. A soccer field in Gilbert. A track in Yuma. A volleyball court in Flagstaff.
Somebody paid for the Voter Guide in your hands. I hope you will do the same for somebody you will never meet.
Grateful for you,
Peter Gentala
President, Center for Arizona Policy