Arizona's primary election is around the corner. Here are the most consequential races to watch

If you’ve driven around town recently, you’ve probably noticed the campaign signs crowding the sides of the roads. A sure sign that it’s election season.

Arizona’s primary election is just around the corner — next Tuesday, in fact. If you’ve got a ballot sitting on your counter, it’s too late to mail it in. Better look for a drop box or voting site where you can drop it off.

And, there are some big races up for grabs this time around — from governor and attorney general — to a few seats on the Corporation Commission and the superintendent of Public Instruction.

KJZZ Politics Desk Camryn Sanchez and Wayne Schutsky joined The Show to talk about some of the most contentious — and some of the most consequential races on your ballot.

Full conversation

LAUREN GILGER: OK, so let’s start at the top of the ballot with the governor’s race. The primary on the Democratic side is nonexistent. Gov. Katie Hobbs doesn’t have a challenger. And Camryn, it’s starting to look like from recent polling, the Republican side of the race is also pretty well decided.

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: I mean, that is certainly what Andy Biggs thinks, and he’s running for that office alongside Republican Congressman David Schweikert, and there are two other folks in that race. But Biggs, from rather early on, he’s had a lot of big endorsements, big support, big money, and he has big name ID. And so everything has been kind of pointing in his direction, and he’s certainly been campaigning as if that’s the case, as if he has it in the bag.

LAUREN GILGER: Did you say Biggs there, big a bunch of times?

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: Yes, I did. I said Biggs bigly.

LAUREN GILGER: Pun pun intended? OK. We’re starting to see, in fact, because of the kind of heavy lean on on the Biggs side in the polling, that the general election is kind of shaping up already. Like, we’ve got Governor Hobbs doing some media talking about Biggs trying to paint him as a fringe "no" vote in Congress. You’ve got Biggs arguing already that he’s that he’s bipartisan often. Let’s hear a little bit about what Biggs told you about this, Camryn.

ANDY BIGGS: I have my principles and my values and I adhere to those. But I also know that across the aisle are some ideas that are really good, and if we find a point of of agreement, then we work together to get that stuff done. And that’s that’s the bottom line.

LAUREN GILGER: Tell us more about your conversation with Andy Biggs.

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: Yeah, I think they definitely have their sights set on each other, and that came across in our interview and also in the debate, if anyone watched it. He’s painting himself as more moderate, as willing to work across the aisle, as he said, and sort of differentiating himself a lot from Kari Lake, who Hobbs had to run against back in 2022. And I think Hobbs is trying to adjust herself to this new candidate. But I think she’s attacking him for his background and the fact that he’s been a Trump supporter from the get-go.

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Yeah, and I think the key difference here right now with Biggs is it’s style versus substance when we’re talking about the Kari Lake comparisons. He’s said he’s not Kari Lake, and I’ve spoken to people on both sides of the aisle who agree. And it’s has it’s not he’s a very conservative congressman. He’s sided with President Trump. He voted against certification in 2020 when the president falsely claimed the election was stolen from him.

LAUREN GILGER: Right.

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: But he’s not getting on television all the time and and screaming about this kind of like Kari Lake did with all those television interviews. She was always doing bringing it up over and over again. He’s doing this what we call pivot to the center, which is usually what you see in the general. Given his comfortable lead that Camryn mentioned over Congressman Schweikert, he’s doing that earlier than ever. But again, it’s I wouldn’t say he’s any less conservative, more of a moderate than Kari Lake. It’s just he’s presenting himself as more of a reasonable candidate to the voters.

LAUREN GILGER: Now, tell us more about about what he’s saying now about his involvement in something like Jan. 6, or or voting not to certify the 2020 election. What’s the message today?

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Yeah. Matt Casey, one of our other reporters, and I actually did a story on this a little while ago. And and Congressman Biggs did speak with us about it, and he kind of downplayed his involvement in anything having to do with Jan. 6. Obviously we have testimony from former Speaker Rusty Bowers to Congress saying that he did get a phone call from Congressman Biggs. And Congressman Biggs paints that as, "Well, this was just a letter. I was trying to get some lawmakers asked me to help get some signatures on." Wouldn’t really talk about what the purpose of that letter was.

Now, the speaker obviously went into more detail that it was trying to stop certification of the election. So again, a lot of the similar qualities to Kari Lake on a policy side. It’s just he’s now kind of shying away from that stuff, whereas she really leaned into it and continues to do so.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. Camryn, tell us more about David Schweikert and his message here. I mean, what’s interesting about this primary is that these two represent such different wings, I guess, of the of the GOP right now.

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: Schweikert’s pitch has really come down to the fact that he has experience winning competitive races and that Biggs doesn’t, because Schweikert represents CD1, which is a competitive district, and he has held on to that seat for several cycles. And that’s true. And he’s saying, "Well, that that illustrates the fact that I’m the only candidate in this GOP gubernatorial race who could go on to beat Katie Hobbs in a general election." And sort of agreeing in a way that he’s trying to paint Biggs as an extremist also.

But Schweikert doesn’t have as much support from these big groups and from the president. He doesn’t have as much name ID, arguably. And I just don’t think there was ever a point where he was ahead in this race. He came in late. Karrin Taylor Robson was in when he jumped in, I think like eight months after Biggs had. And so he had a lot of catching up to do, and I don’t think he ever really closed that gap.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. OK, I want to move on and talk about another top-of-the-ticket race. Republicans attempting to unseat Democratic Attorney General Kris Mayes. Wayne, we have Rodney Glassman up against Senate President Warren Petersen. And this race is shaping up to be a whole lot about experience, right? Because both of these candidates are dealing with questions about basically their legal careers. Tell us about this, Wayne.

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Yeah, so for some reason, we keep having attorney general candidates who don’t have a ton of experience as attorneys, or at least attorneys in the courtroom. That traditional pipeline you would think of, whether it’s going to the U.S. attorney or the prosecutor with Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, things like that.

So Senate President Petersen has only been a licensed lawyer for less than three years, hasn’t really ever practiced in a courtroom outside of some internships that he did in law school. And then Rodney Glassman has been an attorney for almost two decades, but a lot of that has been military service with the JAG Corps in the Air Force Reserves. And so again, that’s a very specific type of law, and I don’t know how much that really lines up with what the attorney general is doing.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, so these two have been attacking each other a lot. If you’ve been watching TV news at all, you’ve been seeing a lot of attack ads from both sides. Glassman, you know, used to be a Democrat. There’s lots of attack ads about that. Let’s hear one of the attack ads against Warren Petersen here.

ANNOUNCER: Would you want your barista flying your plane? Your accountant fixing your plumbing? Your realtor prosecuting criminals? Warren Petersen, lifelong politician, real estate agent, never prosecuted a case, yet wants to be attorney general. Petersen: not qualified, not conservative, not for you.

LAUREN GILGER: And obviously lots of attacks on the other side as well, Camryn. But this race is getting pretty dirty.

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: Yeah, it’s been really mean from like a few months ago, but they’ve been attacking each other nonstop. And I think Petersen in this case has a lot of the name ID that Glassman lacks, or that Glassman kind of has name ID in a bad way because the other thing he’s really known for is being kind of a perennial loser. Like, he’s run for a lot of stuff, and he’s lost a lot of stuff.

And, of course, his background as a former Democrat, that doesn’t really play very well in a GOP primary race. So whether the voters are comparing their experience page for page and making like a exact comparison on that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s going to be the outcome for this race.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. Yeah. OK, I want to move on before the break here to talk about the secretary of state’s race, Camryn, which you’ve been covering. Democrat Adrian Fontes is in office now, and we’ve got two very interesting and I think very different Republican candidates hoping to take him on. Tell us about them.

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: Yeah, we’ve got Gina Swoboda, who is the former Arizona Republican Party chair and a former elections worker. And we have Representative Alex Kolodin, who’s a member of the Freedom Caucus and kind of has the support of that wing or that ilk, and they really, really don’t like Swoboda. And he doesn’t really have that kind of experience. He does have experience as an election lawyer, and he was involved in lawsuits to try to challenge the 2020 and 2022 election results. And obviously election integrity, that is a huge issue in the secretary of state’s race, which is very much our top elections administrator.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, yeah. And obviously Swoboda used to be the chair of the Arizona Republican Party, led them to pretty major wins here. She’s had the backing of Trump in the past but hasn’t necessarily won over that win with the GOP at this point?

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Yeah, that’s right. President Trump had endorsed her to be the head of the of the Republican Party here. But again, has not weighed in on this race specifically. And she’s actually staked out some positions that he probably wouldn’t like. Some of this DOJ involvement in our elections, trying to get voter rolls and stuff, she’s said that she’s not necessarily in favor of. States do have the power to run their own elections.

So she’s running now saying that this office needs to be nonpartisan. But it goes back to that kind of Catch-22 Republican candidates have that we talked about with the governor’s race. To in order to win over these primary voters, you have to do everything the president wants, you have to go super far right. But then that loses you general elections in Arizona, typically, we’ve seen in the past. So will Kolodin win in the primary and then just get blown out in the in the general like the last time, the last secretary of state’s race we saw? Who knows? I guess we’ll see.

LAUREN GILGER: We’ll see. OK. ... So Wayne, let’s jump back in with you and the Republican primary race for superintendent of public instruction. This is the state’s schools chief. We’ve got two political newcomers running on the Democratic side and a heated race on the Republican side with State Treasurer Kimberly Yee attempting to oust the incumbent here, Republican Tom Horne.

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Yeah, that’s right. And this is a race that has everything to do with the school voucher system, which is just a hot-button issue. Surprisingly to some Democrats and public school advocates, Treasurer Yee is accusing Tom Horne of being too aggressive in his oversight of the voucher program.

We’re talking about not allowing the extravagant purchases we’ve seen reporting on — jewelry, things that are unrelated to education. Essentially, the argument is that some of the criteria he’s put in place to get rid of some of these extravagant purchases is not actually written into state law, which means he only has the power that’s given to him by state law. So that he’s being he’s he’s going he’s kind of getting out over his skis on that. She says it’s the Legislature and the governor who have to give you that sort of power. And that’s really the central fight in this race.

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: And Yee’s sort of managed to say both things at the same time. She’s like, "Oh, well, if I were in office, nobody would be making weird purchases and buying diamond rings and lingerie and stuff like that. I wouldn’t allow that. But also, "I would never put any restrictions on ESAs." And it’s like, well, you can’t really have it both ways. But she’s acting as if she does have that power.

LAUREN GILGER: That’s very interesting. OK, so ESAs obviously the voucher thing, a very big issue on the ballot elsewhere. We’re probably going to see competing ballot measures coming on the ballot as well to do with ESAs.

Do we know what voters think about this? I mean, the costs I know have been highly reported, lots of spending on kind of outrageous purchases with ESA money. But do we know if voters are mad about this?

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: In a word, I’d say it’s a mess. I mean, voters had the opportunity to vote against vouchers a few years ago, and they did actually vote against vouchers. And then the Ledge managed to come in and universally expand the program sort of under a different name. But there are so many now competing ballot measures and things have changed so much and there’s court challenges. I think a lot of voters are just going to be extraordinarily confused with what they’re looking at.

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Yeah, and when we when the thing Camryn’s talking about where voters turned it down, it was a really close vote. Now that we have expansion and we have a lot of families using this program — maybe folks who weren’t using it before, it’s growing quite fast, over 100,000 students expected for next year — will that change that small margin? I guess we’ll see.

But I think there’s even some voucher families who really use the program, think it’s good for their kids, who are upset about these extravagant purchases because they’re like, "This is undermining a program that I’m using, and if you weaken it too much, then it might the pendulum might swing in the other direction." So it’ll be really interesting to see how those play out.

LAUREN GILGER: It does seem, though, the conversation has changed here and generally everybody agrees there needs to be some kind of oversight.

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: That’s true. Yeah, I think everyone agrees. It’s just, again, this cudgel of Horne’s being too aggressive. It almost seemed like a solution in search of a problem. They were looking to run a candidate against Tom Horne, and this was something they were able to glom onto — the the folks who are kind of behind Yee’s campaign, the Freedom Caucus, those people.

LAUREN GILGER: So let’s talk about that because is it I wondered this reading about this race. Like, is it notable that the Freedom Caucus wing, the right wing of the GOP really wanted to go after Tom Horne?

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: Yeah, I mean, I think if you listen to our conversation so far, we’ve had a lot of competitive races we’re talking about one Republican who’s aligned with MAGA and/or Turning Point and/or the Freedom Caucus, and then we have a different Republican who they’re attacking and a lot of the time attacking for not being conservative enough or being a RINO or something like that.

And I think that that influence is not really a coincidence. There is preferred slate of candidates that these folks kind of come in and recruit. And then the question is, like Wayne mentioned earlier, whether those people have a shot in the general election against these incumbent Democrats, because the Democrats don’t really have a lot of competitive primaries this year.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. OK, and we’ll get to more, I think, themes along those lines in a moment. But let’s turn and talk about a race where it’s Democrats who are going up against each other in Congressional District 1. This is Arizona’s most competitive congressional race, a seat being vacated by Congressman David Schweikert, of course, who’s running for governor.

Camryn, we’ve got four Democrats vying for the seat, and it seems to be kind of coming down to Marlene Galán-Woods and Amish Shah. Tell us about these two.

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: Yeah, they’re both Democrats who have run for this office before, and Amish Shah won the primary last time around and went up against Schweikert and, obviously, he lost. But this is a new year, and he’s still a frontrunner. Galán-Woods came in, I think, third place last time around. But this time is a little different for her. One thing that makes that change is she has a lot of high-level endorsements. She has the endorsement of the DCCC, which is a national group.

LAUREN GILGER: Democratic Campaign — Congressional Campaign Committee, yes, there you go. CCC.

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: And she has the endorsements of Mark Kelly, Kris Mayes, Adrian Fontes here. And she has been extremely aggressive in attacking Shah.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. So tell us about those attacks and what’s behind them.

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: Well, she’s going after him for his legislative record. She’s accusing him of working too often with Republicans about specific votes on specific issues from years ago, and he’s been kind of playing defense against her.

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Yeah, I’d also say that that might actually play well for him in a general election. So like we were talking about with Republican candidates in a catch-22, we’re on the other side of that with with Democrats. Now, Marlene Galán-Woods also is a former Republican, so she might be able to work that angle as well.

But you said this is a competitive district, and Republicans do hold a slight advantage. But it’s a lot of Republicans who are more of your Chamber of Commerce, your old-school type Republicans, not so much your Trump Republicans. This district has gone back and forth in support for Trump over several elections. So having a little bit of that cross-the-aisle bona fides might actually help a candidate finally win this seat for a Democrat.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. One of the things that that Amish Shah is very well known for is his door knocking on many tens of thousands of doors. And you went with him, Camryn. Let’s hear a little bit what that sounded like.

AMISH SHAH: This is my favorite activity. I this is why I do this, and why I’ve spent thousands and thousands of hours doing this, because it it means a lot to the people you reach.

LAUREN GILGER: Are there issues where these two really diverge?

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: I mean, there aren’t too many, but I think one of them is their vision for healthcare. Galán-Woods kind of backed off on saying what she supports in that arena, but Shah has a background as an ER doctor and this is definitely an area of expertise for him, and he wants universal healthcare. And he’s talked about that. So I think that maybe is important to the people in this district.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. OK, how winnable is this district? There are two Republicans also fighting for this nomination, NFL kicker Jay Feely — former NFL kicker, I should say — and State Rep. Joseph Chaplik.

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: I would say it’s extremely winnable for either side. It is a true toss-up, like you said, one of the most competitive districts in the country. All the national groups are focusing on it because it will likely be one of those seats that determines who controls Congress. Like I said, it is an affluent district, so you’ve got a lot of moderates both on the Democratic and Republican side. And so you kind of have to play towards the middle like a lot of these candidates are trying to do.

But you’ve also got a lot of — I used to cover Scottsdale, which takes up a big part of this district — you got a lot of Republicans but who are big public education supporters. So you’ve got a lot of crossover on some of these issues. So it really is a true toss-up, and it’ll again be interesting to see which candidate comes out on both sides of the aisle. If you get the Trump-endorsed candidate on the Republican side, does that end up hurting them? Really interesting race to watch.

LAUREN GILGER: Really interesting. OK, before I let you go, a couple of minutes left here, and I want to talk about a few of the themes that seem to be weaving through much of this conversation. One seems to be this in-battle in-fighting in the GOP, right? And the Freedom Caucus, some of the candidates that those folks have put up, versus some more mainstream Republicans, which is sort of a perennial divide in the party at this point.

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: Yeah, we’ve seen this over the last few cycles. And if you recall, the last time we had these statewide elections up in 2022, that slate, the Freedom Caucus slate, they did well in the primary election and then they didn’t do well in the general election. And I think if that happens again, it kind of erodes confidence in that system because there’s a certain amount of races where you do this and it doesn’t work, where candidates stop hitching their wagon to you.

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Yeah, and you’re yeah, you’re seeing these candidates it’s really going to test the strength of a lot of these so-called like influencer kingmakers on the Republican side who have kind of come in the wake of President Trump. He’s obviously No. 1 with his endorsement kind of ruling supreme in the primary election.

So it’s not only going to test the power of that Trump endorsement come general time because it hasn’t always been a great thing for a candidate in a general election here, but also some of those other groups that are aligned with the president.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. And last minute here, is the question about about the president, right? About how much Donald Trump weighs on all of these races right now on both sides, especially given his kind of tanking approval ratings.

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Yeah, I mean, I would say that like Katie Hobbs when she won in 2022 for the governor’s race, a lot of that was and the other Democrats a vote against Trump, if you remember kind of the backlash to 2020 and all that. And so we’ll see again now that we have all these other issues — the Iran war, we’ve got inflation, we’ve got gas prices, we’ve got all this stuff — whether a vote against Trump is going to carry a lot of these Democrats to victory.

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: Yeah, I think we saw a big red wave back in the last election cycle, and now we’ve heard for several months that we’ve been anticipating a blue wave. I think Democrats could get caught up in that, especially as Trump’s approval ratings remain low, and that kind of holds sway down the ballot, especially for those who associate themselves with him specifically.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. OK, we’ll leave it there for now. But lots to watch for coming next week. I’m sure you two will be very busy. That is KJZZ’s Camryn Sanchez and Wayne Schutsky, our politics desk. Thank you both. Appreciate it very much.

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Thank you.

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: Thank you.

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