Arizona Republicans elected Sergio Arellano to lead the state party into the 2026 election cycle after resigning Chairman Gina Swoboda resisted efforts to convince her to stick around as chair.
After two rounds of voting Saturday, Arellano won a runoff election against former party First Vice Chair Pam Kirby, who is also a former Paradise Valley councilwoman and Scottsdale school board member.
“I hope to achieve victory alongside you, because I am one of you, one from the grassroots that is now ready to come in, knock some doors, raise some money, and kick some butt for all of us,” said Arellano, an army combat veteran and longtime party activist.
Arellano, who lives in the west Valley, previously worked on President Donald Trump’s 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns and is now a communications advisor for the Republican-led Arizona House of Representatives.
New chair or old chair?
Arizona’s political parties typically pick new their chairman in odd-numbered years, but Arizona Republicans scheduled a special vote for the party’s annual meeting this year after Swoboda announced in October she would resign shortly after entering the race to replace Rep. David Schweikert in Congressional District 1.
Over 1,000 Republicans packed into the Findlay Toyota Center in Prescott Valley for the vote, where some in attendance tried to recruit Swoboda to remain the party’s leader.
Before the meeting, a video ad played on stage highlighting Swoboda’s accomplishments as chair, including returning financial stability to the party and helping Republicans, including President Donald Trump, win most high-profile races in Arizona in 2024, with the exception of the state’s U.S. Senate race that was won by Democrat Ruben Gallego.
Later in the meeting, several Republicans asked Swoboda to reconsider or enter the new chairman election alongside Arellano, Kirby, Dr. Robert Branch and Kathleen Winn.
But Swoboda rebuffed those attempts.
“Please do not try to keep trying to keep me,” she told the crowd.
That left Republicans to choose from the four remaining candidates, a process that took nearly 11 hours from the time the meeting kicked off on Saturday morning, largely because the AZ GOP opted to fully hand count every ballot for the chairman’s race and a handful of other leadership positions.
Grassroots party members had criticized leadership for using vote tabulators in past years as some Arizona Republican officials publicly called for full-hand counts in the state’s elections in the wake of disproven claims that widespread voter fraud affected the 2020 and 2022 elections.
Elections officials and experts have long said hand counting is less accurate than using tabulators and would take longer than the current process. For example, the state Senate’s hand count of Maricopa County’s 2020 election took months, cost millions of dollars and was proven inaccurate.
On Saturday, it took Arizona Republican volunteers hours to count the first round of around 1,600 ballots that included the chair race along with a handful of other leadership positions.
No candidate received a majority of votes after the first round, sending the top two vote getters — Arellano and Kirby — to a runoff.
Swoboda didn’t announce Arellano prevailed on a 761-621 vote until about 9 p.m.
The new chair
For years, the party has been led by Republicans closely aligned with Trump, and that isn’t going to change.
Like Swoboda, Arellano has worked on Trump’s campaigns. He also features photos of himself with the president and other administration officials, including Kari Lake and border Czar Tom Homan, on his website.
Swoboda was lauded by many party faithful for returning stability and improving fundraising after several chaotic years under former Chairs Kelli Ward and Jeff DeWit.
Despite holding a voter registration advantage in Arizona, Republicans lost a succession of statewide races under Ward, including governor, attorney general, secretary of state and a U.S. Senate seat. She also faced criticism for draining the party’s coffers, and several high-profile donors stopped or limited contributions during her tenure.
DeWit, a former state treasurer and Trump campaign surrogate, took over the party in 2023, promising to improve the party’s finances. But he was gone a year later after a leaked phone call recording showed him trying to pressure Republican Kari Lake to drop out of Arizona’s 2024 U.S. Senate race.
Swoboda was elected to take over the party in 2024 with Trump’s endorsement. She was largely successful in stabilizing the party and bringing back old donors. Republicans expanded in the 2024 elections and won nearly every competitive race, excluding the Senate race Lake lost to Democrat Ruben Gallego.
But Swoboda also had her critics, including the far-right Freedom Caucus led by state Sen. Jake Hoffman (R-Gilbert), a frequent critic who called on her to resign after Swoboda backed reforms to the school voucher program — a position she doubled down on at the state party meeting on Saturday.
After winning the chairmanship, Arellano praised Swoboda.
“You laid the groundwork for something great,” he said.
And he indicated he plans to continue down the path she set for the party.
“So we’re gonna take and build upon the good things that she did,” Arellano told KJZZ. “We want to capitalize on all the momentum and the movement that we got from President Trump and the work that was done from the Arizona Republican Party.”
But he also said he plans to make his own mark.
“I want to take it a step further and open up the umbrella to make it even bigger,” Arellano said. “We want to reach more Latinos. We want to reach more minorities and people that aren't engaging in the civic process and educate them that our values reflect more of their upbringing than what the other side brings.”
Before leaving the job, Swoboda suggested the new chair will have to convince the donors she brought back to the party to stick around. That came after AZ GOP Treasurer Ron Gould confirmed the state party has just $164,000 left in the bank to spend on elections this year.
“So the day that I put out this statement saying that I would be willing to tender my resignation if the body chose another direction the donors, unsurprisingly, that came back to the party stopped,” she said, adding it will be up to the new chair to bring them back.
Arellano said he is confident he can do that.
“What the donors look for is for a plan, and I have one that I can lay out in front of them, and what it's going to cost for us to get to where we need to be to win in November,” he said.
What are the rules?
While the chair vote itself ran relatively smoothly, the meeting began with a raucous debate over the rules and little-known laws governing internal political party functions in Arizona.
That disagreement nearly led to Arellano being held off the ballot entirely.
The debate centered on the question of who actually qualified as a state committeeman, the local party officials from Arizona’s counties and legislative districts who are allowed to vote for new party leaders or run for those positions.
Typically, in Maricopa and Pima counties, those state committeemen are selected by the local members of their legislative district. Each district is awarded one state committeeman for every three local members, who are called precinct committeemen.
However, that calculation doesn’t always result in a round number of state committeemen for each district. For example, if a district has 100 precinct committeemen, the calculation would award the district 33.33 state committeemen.
Swoboda said that for years the state party has rounded up those leftovers and appointed additional state committeemen to fill those slots.
But not everyone agrees that the Arizona Republican Party had the power to name those so-called “fractional” appointments.
And, shortly before the meeting, Republican attorney Tim LaSota sent Swoboda a letter threatening to sue if the party allowed those fractional members to vote. That led Swoboda to notify those 16 state committeemen, including Arellano, that they would not qualify to participate in the meeting.
However, at the meeting itself, she turned that decision over to party members and held a vote, saying either way the Arizona Republicans are likely to be sued over the decision.
“Don't worry about the litigation. That's the party's problem,” Swoboda told the members.
They then voted overwhelmingly to seat Arellano and, hours later, named him the new chair.
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