Stephen Richer, MA'08 (MAPSS), JD'15, the elected (Republican) Maricopa County Recorder, joins ours hosts to talk about why he chose MAPSS, the influence it had on his academic and career trajectory, and the political career it led him to today.
Episode 1:
Stephen Richer is the elected (Republican) Maricopa County Recorder and oversees public recordation, voter registration, and early voting in Maricopa County, Arizona. He was named “Arizonan of the Year” in 2021 by The Arizona Republic, “Republican Politician of the Year” in 2022 by Phoenix New Times, “Government Leader of the Year” in 2023 by The Arizona Capitol Times, and “Democracy Defender,” in 2024 by Time Magazine.
Stephen received his B.A. from Tulane University, and his M.A. and J.D. from the University of Chicago. He has previously worked as an attorney and businessman.
Kelly Pollock:
Hello and welcome to Dialogo, an alumni podcast. In each episode, we interview an alum of the Social Science Division at the University of Chicago, exploring their career path and reflecting on their time at the University of Chicago. I am Kelly Pollock, Dean of Students for the Social Science Division at the University of Chicago.
Paul Poast:
And I am Paul Poast, Deputy Dean in the Social Sciences Division at the University of Chicago.
Kelly Pollock:
And joining us today is Stephen Richer, the Maricopa County Arizona Recorder. He is a 2008 graduate of the Master of Arts program in the Social Sciences and a 2015 graduate of the law school here at the University of Chicago. Welcome, Stephen.
Stephen Richer:
Thank you very much for having me. You'll have to tell me about the pictures you have up there because a few of them are Arizona-based.
Kelly Pollock:
Yes, I'm a big fan of the United States National Park System, so I've got some artwork behind me as we're speaking from the National Parks. But Stephen, I want to start by asking you a little bit about what brought you to the University of Chicago in the first place. How did you hear about MAPSS program? What brought you to MAPSS?
Stephen Richer:
I had been a fan of University of Chicago since high school, and I actually almost went there for undergraduate as well, so I maybe had almost went for the trifecta, but I was a Milton Friedman-loving Chicago School of Economics loving high school student who read a lot of famous thinkers from University of Chicago. And so I just thought it was a very compelling institution.
And then I went and visited, and I had a positive experience. Although it wasn't nearly as warm and cuddly as it is now, a lot of the amenities that are now in Hyde Park. I think that I know that each successive generation rolls its eyes at the next one. But when I go back to Hyde Park now, and I see a Lululemon and a Whole Foods, I certainly roll my eyes. We barely had the grocery store. I think we had the Co-Op when I was there the first time, and even that was, I think, a major development.
So had been... University of Chicago had been very much on my radar for a while. And then, my senior year in college, I did not know what I was going to do, as perhaps many social science students in their senior year know, and so I applied for a few jobs. I applied for a few graduate scholarship programs, and I few applied for a few graduate programs. And one of the schools I was interested in potentially visiting was the University of Chicago.
And so, I applied and did the one-year program, and it gave me a good sense of what being in the academy would be like. And I very much appreciated that because I had been applying and interested just as if I were applying to more undergraduate where you apply to some schools that are some good schools and you apply in some fields that you liked. And I liked political science, and I liked history in college. And so I was like, "Ah, I guess I'll just apply for social sciences."
Paul Poast:
That speaks well to exactly what... like the MAPSS program, because the MAPSS program was what you did at the University of Chicago, correct?
Stephen Richer:
Correct.
Paul Poast:
Yes. And I love that you shared about how it's both political science history across the social sciences, but given your Milton Friedman that you talked about there at the beginning, did you get a chance to do anything in... econ-wise, take a course or two?
Stephen Richer:
No, I didn't. Well, maybe I took economic development of Latin America or emerging countries. I think, oh gosh, this is one of those moments where you're like, "Wow, I spent an entire quarter or an entire semester supposedly learning the subject, and now I can barely remember whether or not I took the class." And so it makes you feel really good about yourself.
But I do think I took one class, and I did appreciate, I think especially after the first quarter, the open nature of the program and the opportunities to explore lots of different disciplines. And, of course, the program itself is multidisciplinary. And so, while I never had any interest, I think, in sociology or anthropology, those were something... those were fields that I got introduced to. And though I didn't necessarily enjoy every text that we read, I dare say it helped round out a social studies education.
Kelly Pollock:
Can you tell us a little bit about what sort of master's thesis you ended up developing, how you thought through that, how your coursework may have contributed to that, and how that's, if it did at all, continued to affect your thinking and your development as you've continued your career?
Stephen Richer:
I was interested originally in continuing on with my Ph.D. either at University of Chicago or elsewhere. And I actually wound up applying and even deferring on my Ph.D. program at a few places. And so I began to hone in on which discipline I would want to do pretty early on.
And it was within the Political Science Department and within the American politics subdivision of the Political Science Department. And so for those who are not political scientists, usually they ask you if you want to be a comparative, an internationalist or a theorist or American politics. And I took the American Politics survey with John Brem. John [inaudible 00:06:11]-
Paul Poast:
Brem. Yes, John Brem, absolutely.
Stephen Richer:
Brem. And so I really enjoyed that, and he introduced me to some of the faculty. And at the time, Professor Michael Dawson was one of the more active behavioralists, I guess I would say.
And even just the division between behavioralists and institutionalists was a division that I was unaware of. And so I wound up attaching myself to Professor Dawson, and I wrote a master's thesis on different voting groups in the Southern United States, I think, and some of their interactions.
Paul Poast:
That's terrific. That is, in many ways... Having advised a number of students with their MA thesis, either in the CIR program and the MAPSS program, yeah, that is the both a challenge for the students. And I'm sure you found it a challenge both taking the coursework, being able to write that thesis in one year. But it sounds like you also found it to be a rewarding experience, at least by the fact that you're able to recall the subject matter many years later.
Stephen Richer:
I think more than even what I wrote about was just learning about what a life as a graduate student is like and what the academy is like. And that was probably the most beneficial thing to me about the MAPSS program was again, I applied to graduate school the same way that people applied to undergraduate school, where here's 10 schools that are very good, and let's just apply.
But really getting a sense of what you actually do that you should line up with your advisor's discipline, sort of what the whole process looks like. Meeting people who more... were further along in their graduate studies was very beneficial and giving you a sense of if you spent 6, 7, 8 years of your life doing this, what would that life look like?
And it's that in a small dose, that's a manageable dose that some people will say, "Yeah, sign me up." And other people will say, "I'm glad I did that for one year and got something out of it, but no, thanks."
Kelly Pollock:
I'm one of those people that went straight to a Ph.D. program and went, "Hmm, maybe this isn't what's for me." So I appreciate that part of the MAPSS program.
Paul Poast:
Absolutely. Actually, this dovetails nicely into the next question I have, which is, and you've pointed to this a little bit. You said how you had considered Ph.D. program. You even applied to some Ph.D. programs, decided to defer that, but ultimately, you chose to pursue a law degree from the University of Chicago. So do you want to share a little bit about kind of that process of what made you decide to pivot towards the law degree and not pursue the Ph.D.?
Stephen Richer:
I think what I did not appreciate at the time is that a Ph.D. is a degree... except for maybe a few fields, is a degree for the academy. You are learning to become a professional social scientist. You are learning to become a contributing member of the academy that will push the knowledge further out, and you're learning to... how to engage with the academic community.
I think I had thought of it as more of a, "Hey, a political science Ph.D. is more of a general purpose degree that would allow me to sort of get involved in politics, get involved in government, get involved in public intellectualism," and there are people who eventually wind up doing that. But really the focus is on making you a sophisticated contributing member of the academy.
And when I thought about that more, that was not what I wanted to do, but I'd always promised myself that I would either complete a Ph.D. or I would go to law school. And so I wound up going to law school, in part because I met a number of law school students while a MAPSS student, and I liked them, and I was interested in what they were doing. So fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, and I was back at University of Chicago all of a sudden.
Kelly Pollock:
So you ended up spending a long time in Hyde Park. As you mentioned, Hyde Park was maybe not quite as warm and fuzzy as it is today, but could you tell us a little bit about maybe your favorite parts of Hyde Park or your haunts that you loved?
Stephen Richer:
Oh, well, one, just the people are what makes University of Chicago. Certainly not the weather. Certainly not the traffic. Certainly not the immediate amenities that were south of the Midway, which is where I lived all my years, but just really, really wonderful people. And so I'm very grateful to that. I met my wife as a 1L in law school. They even told us there's a famous scene in The Paper Chase where it's something obnoxious like, "Look to your..." during orientation, "Look to your left, look to your right, one of these people will not be here by the time you graduate."
[inaudible 00:11:39] at University of Chicago Law School orientation they said, "Look to your left, look to your right. You'll probably wind up marrying one of these people" because, apparently, a lot of University of Chicago Law School students wind up getting married. And lo and behold, as snicker as I probably did at time, I wound up marrying somebody in my class. And so, certainly, when I talk about the people at University of Chicago, I have to start with that. So where did we go? We went up to, I mean, where everyone goes, to 55th Street and 53rd Street. We ate the Boston Market that used to be there a lot. We ate at the Potbelly.
I did not know what Potbelly was actually until I visited University of Chicago because, in 2008, Potbelly was not nearly as much of a thing. And I think it might even have started in Chicago. So there was a Potbelly up there by the grocery store. And then, of course, I ate at, was it the Medici and the Valois and all those places. We did not have a movie theater, so I had to go up Lake Shore Drive if I wanted to go to a movie. Now, actually, during law school, I think my last year in law school, they opened up that movie theater. I don't even know if we had a hotel really in Hyde Park.
And when I went back recently, I stayed at this amazing, very bookish place that's right on 60th Street, which was super neat. And so just amazing to me how much the area has changed. But my first time as a MAPSS student, I lived in what was called New Grad, which was at 60th and Kimbark, and it was a dorm for graduate students, and I think that's been taken over by people in the college. And then I also lived south of the Midway when... all three years of law school and so many law school students move up into downtown area 2L and 3L year. But I was committed to the cozy confines of Hyde Park for all my time.
Paul Poast:
At this point, I'd love to be able to pivot a little bit to talking about your time since UChicago and tell us just about kind of your career journey to this point. What happened immediately after UChicago to now taking you to where you are today?
Stephen Richer:
Yeah, so I actually followed somebody when I was at MAPSS, and I had applied during the MAPSS year to Ph.D. programs. And then I got cold feet and took a deferral, and then I followed a friend that I had made at... during my MAPSS year to Washington, DC, just because I thought, "Well, at least I'll have one friend, and Washington, DC, is exciting."
And so, when I landed in DC, I first worked in the public policy arena. I worked for American Enterprise Institute, which is a right-of-center think tank that's pretty prominent in DC. Then I got involved in a whole bunch of different stuff, some of it relating to management consulting, some of it relating to just businesses that wound up doing on my own or with a few friends.
And then, when I went back to law school after that, I practiced law in DC and then in Phoenix, and then I eventually ran for office, and all of them positive experiences. Glad I did it all. I didn't do all of it particularly well, but learned a lot of lessons along the way.
Kelly Pollock:
Could you talk a little bit about your decision to run for office? Was this something you had always thought about doing? Was this something that sort of came up at some point? Why choose to run for public office?
Stephen Richer:
Yeah. My family is not a political family, but for whatever reason, I'd always been drawn to political philosophy. As I mentioned at the outset, one of the reasons I was interested in the University of Chicago was just because so many prominent, both economic philosophy and political philosophy writers, had been affiliated with the university over the last 50, 70, well, longer than that years, I'm sure. And so I had the bug, and then I also had the bug, not just in philosophy, but in the actual politics.
And when you live in Washington, DC, and you work in the think tank world, that it only further compounded that. And I've been involved in Republican Party politics since about 2008, 2009, volunteered on a whole bunch of campaigns ranging from local stuff to some presidential campaigns. And when I moved back to Arizona, I was involved in the Arizona Republican Party, volunteered on some campaigns. And in 2016, the county had previously held itself up as the largest Republican county in the United States. So Maricopa County has about 4.6 million people.
It's the fourth-largest county in the United States, but it was the only one that shaded red at all. And it used to shade very red. And in 2016, we lost two county-wide seats. The sheriff position, which is formerly a guy named Sheriff Joe, who is of national fame. And then the recorder position went over to a guy named Adrian Fontes, who's now our Secretary of State, but he had been a recorder, and so there was a real interest in taking those seats back.
And then I also thought that the offices themselves were compelling. I have a background in management as well, and so I thought I'd like to run for an office that runs something rather than an office that just votes on things. And so one thing led to another, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, I ran in the primary, I won the primary, and then I wound up winning by 4,500 votes out of 2 million in the 2020 general election, and then I took office.
Paul Poast:
So this leads nicely into something that I'm very interested in asking you about, and that is, obviously you enter office in 2020 in a very important position, especially an important position at any time when it comes to elections, but especially Maricopa County 2020.
And I know this is something that has subsequently been influencing how your career has been painted over the past few years, but do you want to talk about your time in the recorder position, especially following the 2020 election, and kind of the things that you had to work on, things you had to try to manage, and even challenges that you've faced during that time in that position?
Stephen Richer:
Yeah. So we have 15 counties in Arizona, but Maricopa County makes up 62% of the voting population of Arizona. And of the 10 largest voting jurisdictions in the United States, Maricopa County is the only one that's highly politically competitive. And it's the only one that had shifted from being reliably red in... before 2016 to then going for President Biden in 2020. And the recorder's office is responsible for some stuff that doesn't draw as much attention, such as recording public documents, most of it relating to real estate, but then also election administration and voter registration.
And so, all of a sudden, Maricopa County became one of the global hotspots for the conversation about election administration, allegations regarding a stolen election. And that really persisted throughout my entire time in office, and my first week in office really gave me a sense of exactly just how hot this was going to be. My third day in office was January 6th, 2021. We had a whole bunch of protesters outside of our office. We had guillotines outside of our office. My second week in office, I got subpoenaed by the Arizona State Senate, who wanted to perform additional audits of the 2020 election.
And then we became sort of the international tourist destination for people who believe that the 2020 election was stolen when a group called the Cyber Ninjas began doing a months-long review of the 2020 election. So it really put us in the spotlight, and it, like I said, became the focal point of many of the national and international conversations about the future of American democracy, the future of American administration, and was the 2020 election stolen. And as the person who all of a sudden headed the office of 160 full-time employees, I was very much enmeshed.
Kelly Pollock:
And despite all the challenges you've faced, you've been able to put some real reforms in place. You've been able to really advance the office. Can you talk some about what you've been able to accomplish during your term?
Stephen Richer:
Yeah. Well, my life has been certainly testament to the maxim that man makes plans, and God laughs. So I certainly had things that I wanted to accomplish in office, and I had a whole laundry list of them. And I would say to anyone who's taking office in the coming years, pare it down because the time in office goes quickly. You're going to have lots of distractions. You're going to have lots of things come up that you couldn't have possibly imagined.
And I think my experience was that on steroids in terms of just how much I had to talk about past election and how much we had to do related to that. That being said, we did knock off a bunch of things on the laundry list, and I am proud of that. But it was always a competition between answering people's questions about the past, affirming the accuracy and lawfulness of a past election while still improving the office.
And one of the tensions repeatedly was how do you say to the public that there are things that need to be improved while presenting that not as an admission of liability or admission of wrongdoing or admission of material error, such that they then walk away with the impression that the 2020 election was stolen, which it was not. And so that was one of the tensions.
And then increasingly, I thought, well, I went into office thinking that it was going to be about improving the nuts and bolts of the job, and it was that to an extent. But it was more and more was communicating about what the office does and answering questions about the 2020 election. And it really made me think a lot about the persuasive process, the idea of truths, and just sort of how we interact with each other as human beings.
And I feel like I've been actually a social science lab rat for the last four years. And so, while I went into office thinking that my position would be most fun for an MBA to study in terms of mechanics, I think that it would be way more fun for a bunch of social scientists... all the social science disciplines represented in MAPSS to dissect my body from the past four years and sort of learn a lot from that.
Paul Poast:
I love that connection, bringing it back to the MAPSS program. And indeed, I can very much attest that that is a subject matter of interest to master's students, Ph.D. students, as well as faculty, obviously understanding the behavior from 2020 on all levels, from the individual voters to the protesting to the reactions of politicians since then. So yes, I think you said it very well, a laboratory for people to study to be able to understand those dynamics.
Stephen Richer:
Yeah. Can we persuade people? Can you persuade somebody about something that's very visceral? I have my doubts, but if you can, how do you do it? Truth. Are we losing a shared truth as society? How do we have shared facts as society? Information systems. It was Cass Sunstein, who... a UChicago guy who wrote sort of the extremes book about how we increasingly self-segregated, and then we put ourselves into these silos of information, and then we gin ourselves up into more extreme, more confident opinions.
And so I think all of that was always in the back of my mind. And when I think about would I've done it differently, I never would've done it differently until of telling the truth about the 2020 election. But I've done it differently in sort of my mechanisms for conveying information, the manner in which I interacted with people. I often think of, though, was I too defensive? Was I too aggressive? Things like that that I think gets into behavioral psychology, which I know is another field in which University of Chicago is very well represented.
Kelly Pollock:
Do you think after the experience that you have had that you will run for office again at some point?
Stephen Richer:
Well, I was rescued from my own stubbornness in that I had gone through a lot over the last four years, and that's pretty well documented in national news stories. But despite that, I was like, "You know what? Damn these people. I'm not dropping out like so many have. I'm not being intimidated out of this office." I ran for re-election. It became a nationally pretty prominent race, which was interesting. And then I lost in the Republican primary, and I just did not take it... Losing's hard.
And so for people who say, "What does it matter" sort of thing, when you put your blood, sweat, and tears into something, it's really hard to assess. And it's hard to say to yourself as a candidate that it's not a referendum on you as an individual because you do get so much wrapped up and your identity gets wrapped up in it. But I'm incredibly relieved now. I'm incredibly excited to actually be moving on to something else.
I'm incredibly excited to put some of the seemingly sort of Sisyphean debates conversations I've had to walk away from that, although I don't think Sisyphus had that opportunity and go on to something else. Would I run for something else in the future? Yeah, I'm a little politically in the woods right now, which is the conversation for a different podcast maybe or a different time. But things change, and that's certainly true of politics.
And so I all continued thinking about that, and there's been a lot of good. And there was not... Well, there was a lot of nonsense in this office and a lot of hardship. There was never a day where I was bored. There was never a day where I didn't have a sense of mission. There was never a day of when I said, "But does any of this matter?"
In fact, quite the opposite. When we would have members of the media come in from all over the world, and they would say basically, "This is where the future of democracies conversation is happening. And by the way, if you guys don't get it right in the United States, then we're in trouble in these other countries." And so I was like, "Oh, okay. Well, that certainly gives you a sense of purpose."
Paul Poast:
Now, before we're done here, I think something that we want to make sure we ask our guests is, and you've covered a lot, so thank you so much for just all your reflections about your time at UChicago and your career reflections to this point. But is there anything that we should ask you or that you would want to share before we're done here?
Stephen Richer:
I think the University of Chicago brand to me at its core is intellectual rigor. I had a professor at the law school, Saul Levmore, pretty famous professor at the law school, who I thought was the real in the way that he treated students during 1L year. I say that in sort of an affectionate manner, but 1L year, he cold-called on me, and I was more interested always in giving sort of flip funny answers. And he said to me something like, this was a regular refrain of his, like, "Is that the type of lawyer you want to be?"
And by that, he meant sort of superficial surface-level scratching, not giving an intellectually rigorous answer. And again, that sort of encapsulates the UChicago mantra, and I think it's desperately, desperately needed within the world right now. I think we are in politics playing to the lowest common denominator. I think that politicians are serving up the most intellectually vacuous offerings they can think of, and the public isn't demanding any better of them. And so I think that we as a public need to ask what Saul Levmore asked of me is and say, "Is that the type of society we want to live in?
Is that the type of politicians we want to live in?" And so just instilling a little University of Chicago rigor to all of our public discourse right now and thinking harder is, I think, much, much needed. And while I did not enjoy every moment of my time at the law school or at the graduate school at University of Chicago, I did walk away with an appreciation for that. And occasionally, I'll be like, "Ugh, I'll be damned. They did make me think about this a different way, and they made me think harder about this." And so I do. I appreciate that.
Kelly Pollock:
Stephen, thank you so much for joining us. This has been just a really fun conversation, and I so appreciate your insights.
Paul Poast:
Yeah, thank you so much. This was great.