The two Republicans seeking the party’s nomination in this year’s Arizona attorney general’s race are engaged in a heated primary battle focused on who has the experience to defeat incumbent Democrat Kris Mayes in November.
The attorney general is Arizona’s top prosecutor and runs what amounts to the largest law firm in the state, responsible for overseeing hundreds of employees and representing dozens of state agencies.
Republican Warren Petersen said he has the experience to run that office, pointing to his work as the state Senate president. That includes filing dozens of lawsuits and other legal briefs to defend state laws that Mayes doesn’t support.
“I have the overwhelming support from the legal community and from law enforcement, and the reason is because I have been doing much of what the current AG does, and that is I am defending the laws where she is not,” Petersen said.
Real experience or resume padding?
Both Mayes and Rodney Glassman, Petersen’s opponent in the Republican primary, have called those claims misleading, saying they overstate his legal acumen and actual involvement in drafting those filings.
Glassman said that’s because Petersen actually hired other attorneys to file those cases on Senate Republicans’ behalf.
“Warren Petersen, as the head of the Legislature, has always been the client, which is the equivalent of me getting a haircut and then traveling around the state describing myself to voters as a barber,” Glassman said.
Glassman pointed out that his opponent has only been licensed to practice law for less than three years and has little trial experience.
State Bar of Arizona records show Petersen was licensed in December 2023.
Petersen said he does have courtroom experience and prosecuted nine cases with the Scottsdale City Attorney’s Office.
According to the city of Scottsdale, Petersen was assigned to the city prosecutor’s division as part of the Prosecution Clinic for students at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law.
Glassman, by comparison, has practiced military law for nearly two decades.
“I'm a Lieutenant Colonel in the United States Air Force JAG Corps Reserve. I've been a prosecutor for over 17 years,” Glassman said.
He also has also worked in private practice, though state and federal court records show his courtroom experience in those arenas is sparse. Federal records show Glassman listed as the attorney in one case in 2021. A database of Arizona superior court cases dating back to 2010 does not show Glassman listed on any cases as an attorney.
Petersen argued the attorney general’s job is more about leadership and management — areas where the Senate president says he excels.
He also claimed that Glassman’s legal credentials aren’t what they seem.
“Anybody who knows Rodney Glassman knows that he's not practicing law,” Petersen said.
However, military records back up most of Glassman’s claims about his past experience.
Officials with Luke Air Force base confirmed that Glassman works as a reservist with the base’s Staff Judge Advocate and has actively participated in cases as a supervising attorney. And records released to KJZZ show Glassman received positive performance reviews and multiple commendations while working in various part-time legal roles at Luke and Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson since 2009.
Those records, released with Glassman’s permission, show he prosecuted at least eight cases during his first five years, and also led a special investigation of an Arizona National Guard unit.
Does experience matter?
Ultimately, it will be up to Republican voters to decide who is better prepared for the job.
Mesa Republican Peggy Matney said she was impressed by Petersen’s message after he spoke with a local GOP club near her home.
“I think he understands the problems that we’ve got, and his intention would be to solve them,” Matney said.
Republicans like Matney, called precinct committeemen, are dedicated grassroots party members who vote in disproportionately large numbers in partisan primaries.
Another precinct committeeman, Scottsdale resident Christine Hawkes, showed up to support Glassman at a different meeting in 3rd Legislative District in May.
Hawkes said she was impressed by his background.
“He is a real attorney. He’s practiced law. That’s the main thing for an attorney general,” she said.
Points of agreement
Despite their differences, both Glassman and Petersen agree on one thing: they want Republicans to defeat Mayes in November.
And they’ve staked out similar positions when it comes to how they want to run the office. That includes a focus on supporting law enforcement and working with the Trump administration on border issues.
Both candidates also accused Mayes of engaging in “lawfare,” which refers to allegations that she is using the Attorney General’s Office to target political enemies or undermine President Donald Trump’s agenda.
Petersen and Glassman also said they were committed to working with the Trump administration on election issues as Trump and the Department of Justice continue to rehash debunked claims that widespread voter fraud affected the results of the 2020 presidential election.
That focus on elections comes as both candidates vie for support from the president, who has not endorsed anyone in the race.
Glassman inaccurately claimed that a previous Republican attorney general, the late Mark Brnovich, did not investigate those voter fraud allegations.
“Unfortunately, our attorney general in 2020 did not want to open an investigation, did not want to secure the ballots, did not want to look into the 2020 election,” Glassman said.
When she took office in 2023, Mayes released records showing Brnovich’s staff had prepared reports dismissing claims of voter fraud in 2020, including allegations of duplicate votes, bamboo ballots, and even satellites controlled by the Italian military changing votes.
Petersen — who turned over election records from the Senate’s flawed 2020 review to the Department of Justice — disagreed with Glassman, saying Brnovich “did a great job.”
But Petersen did commit to boosting the attorney general’s “election integrity unit” that engages with every county in the state.
“People will know we're serious about it, just like they know the Trump DOJ is serious about it right now,” he said.
Looking ahead
But their primary election fight threatens to weaken Republican chances to do just that by giving the Mayes campaign plenty of ammunition heading into the general election.
Mayes already took a shot at both of her potential Republican opponents after they participated in a particularly nasty televised debate in May.
“What a clown show; what an absolute clown show,” Mayes said. “And as a former Republican, I can't believe that that's what the Republican Party has put up as their two candidates.”
Unsurprisingly, Glassman and Petersen don’t agree on who gives the GOP the best chance to win the general election.
Petersen said he is the best man for the job, pointing to Glassman’s long history of losing elections.
“He is spending most of his time running for office,” Petersen said. “He's a trust fund baby with all the time in the world on his hands.”
After winning a seat on the Tucson City Council nearly two decades ago, Glassman ran an unsuccessful U.S. Senate campaign as a Democrat against the late Republican Sen. John McCain.
He also ran unsuccessfully to be the chairman of the Arizona Democratic Party before switching his party allegiances. Since that time, he’s lost three more races, including the 2022 Republican attorney general primary.
For his part, Glassman says his legal background is what matters.
“The most important thing for the Republican primary is to nominate the candidate with the experience to defeat her,” Glassman said.
But there are real questions about how much general election voters care about that experience.
Mayes did not have traditional bona fides in the courtroom as a trial lawyer when voters elected her in 2022. She won that race by just a few hundred votes over Republican Abe Hamadeh, who defeated Glassman in the primary and had about three years of experience working for the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office.
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