Who is Karrin Taylor Robson? Unwrapping the enigma who could be Arizona's next governor

Karrin Taylor Robson has been a mover and shaker in Arizona for virtually all of her adult life. As a land-use attorney, developer, corporate executive and member of the Board of Regents, she has worn many hats and has pitched in with others to work on issues critical to the state.

Arizona policymakers and business leaders all know who Karrin Taylor Robson is. But she remains much of an unknown to the person on the street.

Her leading opponent has been a staple of Arizona TV news for two decades. Broadcast news journalist Kari Lake enjoys enormous name recognition because she has had almost daily contact with Arizonans via the airwaves.

Thus, Taylor Robson began this race with a huge identity gap.

To address that deficit, she tapped into her one big advantages in this race – the financial wherewithal to buy airtime and fill Valley TV screens with her campaign ads.

A campaign ad can only go so far, however, in filling out a life story, so she remains an enigma to much of Arizona.

Karrin Taylor Robson is an Arizonan to her core

In a way, that’s surprising because she is to her very core an Arizonan, the scion of a political family that has been in the news a lot over the last four decades.

They are a family that believes foremost in old American values of hard work, prudence and thrift.

When she says her mother was a conservationist, she means she hung her wash on the clothesline to avoid using the dryer, cutting down on energy costs and saving a few pennies.

Dueling campaigns: Pence backs Taylor Robson as Trump backs Lake

Her mother, Kathryn Frances Ryan, was a child of Omaha, Neb., who grew up with conservative values in a Democrat household. She met and married Carl Kunasek in Omaha and in 1962 the family moved to Mesa, Ariz.

It didn’t take long for now Kathryn Frances Kunasek to convert to Arizona conservatism. She read Barry Goldwater’s “Conscience of a Conservative” and was hooked. Soon she registered as a Republican.

You can't start politics earlier than this

By 1964 she was going door to door campaigning for Goldwater in his unsuccessful bid for president. At the time she was pregnant with her daughter, Karrin.

Let the record show that Karrin Taylor Robson wasted no time getting into politics. “I tell everybody I got my start in utero,” she said.

In a stroller, at the time, was her older brother Andy Kunasek, who would one day serve as a Maricopa County supervisor.

Born at Mesa Lutheran Hospital, Karrin Taylor Robson grew up in a house in downtown Mesa. Around the time she turned 5, the family moved to a newer home in the surrounding desert.

Her father, Carl, was a merchant who owned four drugstores, including the flagship Lewis Drugs at 43 E. Main St. It was there Karrin learned the value of hard work, sorting and counting pills for orders and running the cash register.

MLB greats visit the family drugstore

In the spring, Mesa was one of the hubs of Major League Baseball spring training, so it was not uncommon for ballplayers and other members of the Big League family to saunter into Lewis Drugs.

Future Hall of Famers such as Rollie Fingers and Reggie Jackson and six-time All Star Ron Cey would would make purchases or fill prescriptions.

Fingers bought the wax for his iconic handlebar mustache at Lewis Drugs. And because players often arrived for spring training in February, some would buy their sweethearts Valentine’s Day candy at the drugstore.

“They would finish with spring training and then go back to their hotel and shower. Then they would come hang out at the drugstore,” Taylor Robson remembered. “They would loiter every afternoon, reading magazines and flirting with the young high school girls who were working there.”

“One day this guy came into the store and signed a baseball. He gave it to my Dad and my Dad brought it home and gave it to my brothers. And my brothers were like, ‘Who is this guy?’

“It was Joe DiMaggio.”

Lewis Drugs also filled orders for the Phoenix Suns and the legendary Suns trainer Joe Proski, a regular at the store. “The Prosk” bought “everything from bandages to antibiotic ointments to prescriptions,” remembered Taylor Robson.

Success is not a given, she learned

If the Kunasek parents were about anything, it was instilling old virtues in their children. Taylor Robson learned at an early age that success is not given. It is achieved, and only through diligent planning and hard work.

When her parents planned a trip to Ireland, they told her she could go along if she bought her own plane ticket.

“I remember it was $908. I remember that because I had to earn it,” she said. “And so I ended up knocking on neighbors’ doors and cleaning houses for two different homes, and then I would collect newspapers and aluminum cans. Between that and working at the drug store, I earned my money and I bought my ticket.”

These values would carry her to success as a lawyer, businesswoman and community leader, but they got her in trouble early with the nuns at Christ the King Catholic School.

“I was always kind of the class leader and salesperson. I remember in the first grade I’d buy these little erasers from my Dad’s drugstore for a nickel and I’d sell them to my classmate for a dime. Once the nuns found out, I got in trouble, because I was taking the kids’ milk money.”

A leader and salesperson was born

Later in fifth grade, she organized a fundraiser selling M&M’s so she and her classmates could travel to Washington, D.C.

Only, she never cleared the trip with the nuns and they weren’t very happy she had built up unrealistic expectations.

By now her father was in the state Legislature and she had developed a strong interest in politics.

At Mountain View High School she would run for student body president and win. At Arizona State University she would win student body president in 1987-88 and serve at the same time her father was Arizona Senate president.

“It gave me absolutely zero advantages at the time, I can tell you that,” she said.

Going to work for the White House

In her early twenties she went to Washington, D.C., and served in the White Houses of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

“I was a rung above an intern. I was a staff assistant. The difference between me and an intern is that I got a paycheck and a security clearance,” she recalled. “But as my first job out of college, it was pretty heady stuff to be working on memos that ultimately ended up on the president’s desk.”

Afterwards she returned to ASU and law school, where she trained to become a land-use attorney. “You have to be able to navigate government and navigate stakeholders and that was my skill set.”

“I also have a huge belief in private property and a healthy skepticism of government that puts barriers and limitations on what you can do with your property. So, I felt my skill sets sort of naturally tended to real estate and land use.”

She would eventually become executive vice president of DMB Associates, one of Arizona’s most prestigious real-estate development firms.

A passion for freedom of speech

Something she remembers fondly from her ASU days was the ability to engage in constructive debate. “It was a much more civilized time in the sense that you could have arguments with people and still be friends with them.”

That point a view would one day inform her actions when in 2017 Gov. Doug Ducey appointed her to the Arizona Board of Regents to help oversee higher education in the state.

After taking the post, she was one day driving her then-15-year-old son, William, to school when he noted, “Mom, you know there’s diversity for everything but thought.”

It was a eureka moment, said Taylor Robson. “I believe the same thing, but to hear it from my 15-year-old, it was wow!”

The problem of unwritten speech codes and cancel culture have cropped up from time to time at the state’s universities, though the Arizona schools have done a pretty good job maintaining a free environment. They all get high ratings from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

“It’s no secret that (American) academe is largely powered by the left,” Taylor Robson said. “The trajectory isn’t good that we’re shutting down thought, diversity of opinion and intellectual curiosity.”

From the Regents Cup to the Air Force

Taylor Robson swung into action and worked with regents staff to organize an event called the Regents Cup to promote freedom of expression at the state‘s three universities.

You cannot simply pay lip service to free and open dialogue, she said. You have to cultivate it and promote it.

“The implications of this cancel culture are wider and broader than I think anybody imagines, because people are just going to be afraid,” she said. “If you stand back and think about free speech and what it means, and you can (by considering) the scientific method:

“You posit a theory, you prove your theory, defend your theory and you modify based on evidence.

“That’s because of the free exchange of ideas.

“When you start to limit the free exchange of ideas you’re going to start limiting the creation of knowledge.”

Her passion for freedom carries over to a second pursuit, the defense of freedom.

Appointed to the Air Force Chief of Staff’s Civic Leader program, she became a liaison between Air Force brass and the community around Luke Air Force Base.

“I spent over 20 years with and around the United States Air Force. And (value) my experiences I’ve had all over the world with young men and women willing to sacrifice everything so that the rest of us can go about our lives blissfully unaware of the dangers.

“… Over the course of our history we’ve lost a million Americans who have died for us so we can sit around and bicker today.”

We must dial back division, Taylor Robson says

Taylor Robson is running for Arizona high office at a time when Republican politics are maddeningly complicated. Voters may have bumped Donald Trump out of the White House, but he still maintains his hold on the Republican Party.

Kari Lake has gotten the Trump endorsement, but Taylor Robson has opened wide the door to Trump voters to join her movement. She understands those voters need a voice.

While Lake would go into office swinging, Taylor Robson is likely to match that energy instead with discipline and focus.

She has spent a lot of time thinking about the political division in the country and in Arizona and wants to start dialing it back.

“I think about this every single day. Leadership matters. Modeling behavior matters. Everywhere I go I tell everyone I’m an unapologetic conservative. But I’m also an American, and as an American we have to respect the differences of opinion that we all have.”

Phil Boas is an editorial writer for The Arizona Republic. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Karrin Taylor Robson's early years say a lot about who she is