[ad_1]
This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox.
Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego was a first-term mayor, one of the youngest big-city chiefs in the country and a rare woman atop the local political scene, when the Covid-19 crisis landed on her desk in early 2020. Arizona was—and is—fertile ground for Trumpian denialism about the pandemic, a place where a statewide mask mandate never materialized and any restrictions put in place were decided locally and inevitably drew the vocal ire of those who doubted the reality of a deadly threat. Put bluntly: this wasn’t what she signed up for, but it was suddenly front of mind as she and her young son sheltered in place early in the pandemic.
So when she heard protesters were planning on gathering at her home—”the mayor’s mansion” she says with sarcasm—she didn’t know what the proper etiquette was. “What do you do for this? Do you call your neighbors?” she said as we had coffee this week on the sidelines of the national mayors’ summit in D.C. “It was quite the rookie term.”
Gallego, who is now 41, was re-elected in the fall of 2020 in a landslide and is now settling into her role leading America’s fifth largest city, a place that is growing faster than any other urban track in the country and boasting some speedy political changes. Arizona for decades was where independent Westerners thumbed their noses at convention, where Senators Barry Goldwater and John McCain held court and frustrated Washington to no end. But the state broke for Joe Biden in 2020, prompting fringe conspiracies and contemptuous non-concessions to proligerate for years since. Both Arizona’s politics and its needs are changing as tech companies and sunbirds alike move there, which also means the to-do list of its cities is shifting; climate change,…
[ad_2]
