Thursday on Winn Tucson carried a weight that went from the practical — voter registration deadlines, budget votes, and out-of-state registration schemes — to the profound: a father who has now lost two children and believes both deaths trace to the same underlying system. Three guests. Three distinct battles. One shared conviction that things hidden in plain sight are the most dangerous.
Wednesday on Winn Tucson covered the arc from Washington to Nigeria — from the third assassination attempt on a sitting president, to a voter registration scheme mailed from Pennsylvania to Arizona addresses, to a Christian genocide that has killed more than six million people and that almost nobody in the American press has reported.
Three guests. Three battlegrounds. And one question threaded through all of it: how much is being done to this country and to this world that we are simply not paying attention to?
Tuesday on Winn Tucson was a full accounting of where Arizona stands — in the courts, in the legislature, in the county supervisor's chamber, and in the voting booth. Five guests. Five different battlegrounds. One through-line: the people who are supposed to serve Arizonans keep trying to circumvent the rules that protect them, and there are people in courtrooms, legislative chambers, and living rooms who are determined to stop them.
The weekend that was supposed to be a celebration ended Saturday night with a Secret Service agent bleeding on the floor of a Washington hotel, a gunman tackled before he could reach the ballroom, and a president who gave a press conference a few hours later sharp enough to note — with unmistakable precision — that if he'd had his big, beautiful ballroom, none of it would have happened.
Monday on Winn Tucson opened on that. It did not close there. By the time the show ended, the conversation had moved from assassination attempts to body armor to the SAVE Act to Senate leadership to Mark Griffith's mayoral campaign to the Pima County Board of Supervisors' spending ambitions to the moral desert that Smith, Winn, and their guests believe is generating these shooters in the first place.
The thread connecting all of it: a country that is not short on problems or people willing to name them — but that is dangerously short on leaders willing to solve them.
Friday on Winn Tucson came loaded. Four guests, four distinct battlegrounds — the collapse of legacy media and what replaces it; the military standoff in the Strait of Hormuz and the redistricting fight tearing through Virginia; the use of AI to win down-ballot elections; and a 56-year federal prohibition that ended, without fanfare, in the middle of the week.
The common thread running through every conversation: the old systems — media, military strategy, political campaigning, federal drug law — are either failing or being dismantled. The question in every case is who steps into the void and with what.
Eighty-eight days to the primary. The Pima County fair was running. Volunteers were collecting recall signatures. The Board of Supervisors had just voted to double their spending cap and put the question to voters in November. And a father in Wisconsin was preparing to spend seven weeks on a radio show in Tucson telling the story of how his daughter with Down syndrome was killed by a hospital that called itself a place of healing.
Thursday on Winn Tucson moved through all of it — from the halls of Congress to the streets of Memphis to a Wisconsin civil courtroom — with the same underlying question threading every conversation: who is fighting for the people they claim to serve, and who is fighting against them?
Wednesday on Winn Tucson moved across three very different worlds — the geopolitical chessboard between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, the fiscal ambush playing out in a Pima County meeting room, and the collapse of personal character among the men who purport to lead the nation. Three guests. One through-line: the cost of not paying attention until it's almost too late.
Ninety days from the primary. A Board of Supervisors meeting underway downtown with a billion-dollar spending maneuver on the agenda. A city burning through money it claims it doesn't have while considering shutting down fire stations. And a growing list of people who've seen enough and decided to do something about it.
That was the backdrop for a Tuesday on Winn Tucson — three guests, three very different battlegrounds, and one common thread: the question of who shows up to serve when institutions start to fail the people they're supposed to protect.
Guest host Dave Smith, who had kept the show running during Winn's trip while his wife Betsy traveled with the Winn Tucson team, joined Kathleen for the opening segment to debrief on the week's news and set the political context. The two opened with what Smith called the "non-personing" of Eric Swalwell — a tactic he had discussed at length on Thursday and Friday's shows.
Brenda Marts, precinct committeeman in LD-18 and a relentless tracker of Pima County's board of supervisors agendas, joined alongside Jay Tolkoff of LD-21 to break down what she had found buried in the Tuesday meeting's 45-item agenda.
ew moments at the weekend's Turning Point USA event in Tucson generated more surprise than when President Trump called out Representative Alex Kolodin of LD-3 by name from the stage. "It was kind of an out-of-body experience," Kolodin told Winn.
Merissa Caldwell — longtime election integrity activist, formerly Merissa Hamilton — called in to detail the weekend's SAVE Act events and the larger battle being waged over the question of who is actually casting ballots in American elections.
Janet Neustedter, president of the Pima County Republican Women's Club, joined for the final segment to discuss an upcoming event featuring election analyst and author Seth Keschel — and to make the broader case for why joining a local political organization matters more than most people realize.
The Strait of Hormuz is open. Oil prices have dropped from over $100 a barrel to around $83. The stock market is surging — the NASDAQ is dramatically up. Iran has signaled a desire for peace, a development the press was certain would never come. "The world's not ending," said guest host Dave Smith, filling in for Kathleen Winn on Winn Tucson.
The second hour brought in the show's guest: Master Sergeant Bob Dohse (U.S. Air Force, retired), who is currently running for the Arizona State Legislature in LD-18.
Dohse's biography is not that of a typical politician. He enlisted in the Air Force in 1976, trained as an aircraft mechanic, and quickly distinguished himself in logistics — helping engineer what he described as the best operational readiness inspection in the history of Tactical Air Command. His method involved an unconventional approach to an IBM 370 mainframe.
