Amish Shah Voted For Trump... He's Not A Democrat
Democrats see their best shot to pick up a swing district in Arizona, right there in Maricopa County’s first congressional district. The incumbent, MAGA Republican David Schweikert, isn’t beloved by independents and Republicans aren’t that thrilled with him either. The district went from an R+13 partisan lean to an R+7 lean and the PVI is R+2. People there are fed up with MaGA and Biden won the district by a point and a half. The DCCC is optimistic about replacing Schweikert.
The Democratic primary, however, is weird. Conor O’Callaghan, the progressive in the race, is up against two pretend Democrats, Amish Shah and Marlene Woods, two very problematic Republicans attempting to pass themselves off as Dems— and with some success. We’ve talked about O’Callaghan before, but not much about Shah and Woods. Today let’s focus on Shah, who wormed his way into the state legislature after switching from a Manhattan Republican (a rare breed) to an Arizona “Dem.”
Shah represents a super-blue progressive district in central Phoenix, which is already very strange for someone like him— and isn’t part of AZ-01. Nor does he live in the district he now wants to represent in Congress. Last year, FourthEstate48 reported that he “has a proclivity to anger his fellow Democrats in the Arizona House either by sponsoring divisive legislation or cross the aisle to support Republican bills much to his caucus’ chagrin. It has earned him several comparisons to the ever unpopular now-registered independent Kyrsten Sinema. Similarly to Sinema, Shah wasn’t always registered as a Democrat, but rather than starting his political life in the Green Party, Shah was registered as a Republican as recently as 2016 before switching parties and then moving so he could run in LD24 in 2018.” He has admitted that in 2016 he voted for Trump— at least in the Republican primary.
Every member of the Arizona Legislature I spoke with told me he’s not a real Democrat… and no one trusts him. Everyone brings up Sinema’s name when talking about him. He was dis-invited from attending caucus meetings because he shared whatever he learned in them with his pals in the GOP. Besides, in 2021 he worked to kill a bill that allowed women to access birth control over the counter (while working to legalize over the counter accessor— wait for it— hydroxychloroquine. Shah claimed his reasoning was supported by the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, an organization that has been a prolific funder of anti-choice candidates. He also angered his fellow Democrats by voting to pass a religious exemption to a conversion therapy ban, exempting religious institutions of any legal liability during a public emergency.
Shah is dishonest and ammoral, even for a politician. He's shown that he'll say anything to advance himself, no matter how unrelated it is to objective truth. There are enough in Congress like that already, more than enough. Whether you want to compare he to Kyrsten Sinema or Vivek Ramaswamy, there's nothing about him that says, that he'd make a good member of Congress. You can contribute to Conor O'Callaghan's campaign at the Flip Congress ActBlue Page here.
Central Phx might be blue, but it ain't progressive by any stretch.