There will once again be a candidate named Grijalva on the general election ballot in Arizona’s seventh congressional district.
Adelita Grijalva, daughter of the late Congressman Raúl Grijalva, won Tuesday's Democratic primary in the special election to replace her father, and will advance to this fall’s general election. She’ll face Republican Daniel Francis Butierez Sr. in September.
Grijalva won 62% of the vote; her next closest competitor was Deja Foxx, who won a little more than 20%. Former state lawmaker Daniel Hernandez came in third, with about 14% of the vote. Since this is a heavily Democratic district, Grijalva becomes the front-runner to succeed her dad in Congress later this year.
John Washington of Arizona Luminaria has been covering the race and joined The Show to break down the results.
Full conversation
MARK BRODIE: So I guess maybe not such a surprise that Adelita Grijalva won this contest, but I'm wondering if the margin by which she won was a surprise to folks in southern Arizona.
JOHN WASHINGTON: Yeah, so we had a, a really stormy night last night. There was a monsoon that just nailed Tucson, but there was no political lightning, you know, what people probably most expected to happen when the candidates' names were all set, shortly after, Raúl Grijalva died in March, is exactly what happened.
The, the presumed front runners pulled away easily. And I think that if anyone was concerned the last few days looking at a potential upset victory from Deja Foxx, if you really kind of dug into where she was getting that support, you may have been able to see that a lot of it probably was either online or out of the district.
And, and that seems to have been what happened, and she was able to garner lots of national attention. But she didn't quite get the support that she needed here in Southern Arizona.
BRODIE: Yeah, I mean, as you referenced, there have been a lot of national articles written about Deja Foxx comparing her to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other younger politicians asking if she is the future of the Democratic Party. I, I would imagine it's tough to be the future of a party when you lose by 40 points.
WASHINGTON: Yeah, you know, I think that she, she certainly ran a savvy campaign and she knew how to throw out the bait for the national attention, and she definitely got it. There was a Politico article that was published two days ago saying that she might pull off an upset victory, but that attention, both online and national, just did not translate to votes on the ground.
I, I think, however, Adelita Grijalva addressed Deja Foxx's supporters last night after she was declared the winner, and she recognized that Deja had a message that resonated with a lot of people, and she wanted to invite those people into her campaign and use some of that energy, and I think that even she was starting to do that on the campaign.
You saw, especially in the last month or so, as Deja started gaining momentum and more popularity, you saw Adelita start putting out more Instagram videos, and they were sort of like slightly higher produced and they were a little bit, they had some winks and some, some effects in them. And you know, you see some of those, those lessons that she seems to be wanting to learn from, from, from Foxx's campaign.
BRODIE: At the end of the day, how similar or dissimilar were the policy positions and the messages being put out by Grijalva and Foxx?
WASHINGTON: Yeah, that, that's a good question. There certainly was some daylight between the two of them, but I think both of them were trying to mostly court progressives, as court progressives, the, the, the progressive left without completely alienating the sort of more centrist left. And I think that was the strategy that both of them took.
There were some nuanced differences in, say, border security, but sometimes they surprise each other. You would think that, oh well, Deja is the younger one and come to be more progressive, that she's the one who's gonna more readily say, oh, let's abolish ICE. But it was actually Adelita Grijalva who explained to me that actually ICE as it is right now is something that is an agency that we, we, we, she would not support.
And so she actually went a little bit further there, but then, you know, some of the maybe more progressive taxation things is something that Deja Foxx embraced. So there, there, there's, you know, marginal differences between the two of them.
BRODIE: We usually don't talk about 3rd place finishers the day after an election, but I feel compelled to ask. What happened to Daniel Hernandez?
WASHINGTON: Yeah, so he didn't pull off very many votes in the end. He spent more money as, as far as we know, according to the latest figures, he raised and spent more money than either of the other, any of the other candidates in the race.
And yet, what he was really, really trying to do it seemed, was really play it down the middle more. He was in support of mining. He did not go as far left as either Foxx or Grijalva in terms of, of border policy.
And there was a sort of a snafu that happened rather late in the campaign. This is something that had to do with American support of the bombardment and a genocide in, in in, in Gaza, and their or sorry, Hernandez pushed back. And his, both of his sisters have been in staunch support of, of Israel, and he had a sort of not great moment where he actually pushed someone's phone away who was trying to to record him on camera. And I think that was maybe one of the straws too far for a lot of people who were maybe leaning towards supporting him.
BRODIE: All right, so John, very quickly we should mention there's also a Republican primary yesterday, even though it's a heavily Democratic district. Daniel Butierez won that race over a few other opponents.
Any reason to think that the race in September, the results will be any closer than they were yesterday?
WASHINGTON: No, and that's something that Butierez himself was readily admitting last night. There was an interesting play though that he did, is he invited to his watch party not only other Republican candidates, but he also invited other Democrat, Democrat candidates and Green Party.
And some of them actually showed up. Patrick Harris, who's running as a Democrat, he came to the party. Gary Swing as a Green also came. And Jimmy Rodriguez, a fellow Republican, they all came to Butierez's party.
That's the message he wants to send. He's going to be the unifier here. And you know, I think he still realizes that the makeup of the voting district right now really does not skew in his favor at all.
