Breaking down the results for Arizona's primary election

Election officials continue to count votes from Arizona’s primary election, but a number of races have already been called — and contests set for November’s general election.

Republican Andy Biggs won his primary convincingly against fellow Congressman David Schweikert in the race to take on Katie Hobbs for governor. State lawmaker Alexander Kolodin won his race for the GOP nomination for Secretary of State and Senate President Warren Petersen will be the Republican nominee for attorney general.

There were competitive primary races up and down the ballot, and some of those are still too close to call. KJZZ’s Wayne Schutsky from the Politics Desk joined The Show to break down the results.

Full conversation

MARK BRODIE: Wayne, good morning. I’m very impressed that your eyes are still open right now.

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Yeah, a little tired, but happy to be here.

MARK BRODIE: Well-caffeinated, I hope.

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Yeah, too much.

MARK BRODIE: Too much? All right. So before we get into the results, there had been so much talk about how this election would go because, especially in Maricopa County, because there’d been so much discord between the supervisors and the recorder over who was doing what and who had what responsibility. In the end, how’d it go?

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: It seems like it went pretty seamlessly. Make elections boring again, as Chairwoman Kate Brophy McGee said. I was out at PVCC polling place and it wasn’t super crowded there, but people were just kind of trickling in and seemingly everything was going smoothly. Saw a few little things online about alleged issues at one polling center in Scottsdale, but it seems like that was much ado about nothing, more the online folks looking for engagement.

MARK BRODIE: Interesting. All right, so let’s get to the numbers and let me start with governor. The polls had suggested that Andy Biggs would win pretty easily against David Schweikert. I’m not sure the polls thought that he would win by this much.

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: That’s right. The overall result not surprising. Andy Biggs, this was his race to lose for months and months and months. But yes, 73% is a pretty convincing victory. Though in retrospect, also not surprising. We saw Congressman Schweikert’s campaign really just stop campaigning over the past month. We didn’t really hear from them, we’d send a request for comment on different things, and their fundraising was an issue. And so it’s, I guess, not entirely surprising that their campaign kind of fizzled out towards the end.

MARK BRODIE: And we’ve already started seeing some ads from the Hobbs campaign looking ahead to the general election. What did Biggs have to say about, is he looking to maybe the proverbial pivot in the general election or is he just going to sort of stay as the Trump-endorsed Turning Point candidate?

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Yeah, I mean, he’s so closely tied to the president that I don’t know how much of a pivot he could actually make. We saw a bit of this even before the primary, as we results because, as you said, everyone knew he was kind of going to win this. So he has been trying to pitch himself as more of a, he’s still saying he’s a principled conservative, but "I’m willing to work across the aisle." He pointed to some times in his background working with folks, with Democrats from Arizona on different legislation. But he’s also said, "I’m not going to shy away. This is who I am. I’m principled, as I said." So a bit of a pivot, but there’s no way he can unattach himself completely from the president.

MARK BRODIE: All right. Before we move on from the governor’s race, I think it’s worth noting there was one more primary in the race for governor on the No Labels Party. Hugh Lytle, who had gotten a lot of attention as an independent candidate, did not win this primary.

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Yeah, it’s looking like he’s going to lose it to, I believe her name is Teri Hourihan, who is — the No Labels powers that be tried to get her to drop out of that race. Lytle was the hand-picked guy for this party to be kind of that independent check on what was expected to be Biggs and Hobbs. And he put a lot, business owner, he put a lot of his own money into this campaign. It was kind of a foregone conclusion that he was going to be there and there were questions like, who’s he going to pull more votes away from in the general election? And then this all fizzled out.

MARK BRODIE: Yeah, so he is currently losing by a little more than a thousand votes. Obviously, still some votes out there to count. No idea how many No Labels ballots are still out there.

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Yeah, and that doesn’t sound like a lot, but again, this is a very small new party. So a thousand votes in this race is not analogous to a thousand votes in a race like one of the major parties.

MARK BRODIE: Right, OK. So let’s move on to Secretary of State. This was a contest between Alexander Kolodin, a state representative, Gina Swoboda, who is a former state party chair. And Kolodin won almost 60 to 40%. Is this a surprise, this result?

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Yeah, another not particularly close race. In one sense, it’s not surprising in that he was kind of the MAGA, the Turning Point endorsed candidate. They do very well in primaries historically in Arizona. So until someone shows me that they can defeat that, then I don’t know what’s going to happen there.

Swoboda just, again, it was hard finding a lane. She pitched herself as kind of the more electable candidate in general elections, but that’s what David Schweikert did too. And for years now, we’ve seen Republican primary voters not choose that candidate. She had previously been endorsed by the president to run the state party, but she did not bring that endorsement with her into the Secretary of State’s race. And so that pitch of "I’m going to be a nonpartisan Secretary of State" was not particularly interesting to a lot of Republican primary voters who are very much buying what the president is selling about these elections are being corrupted by Democrats and things like that.

MARK BRODIE: Safe to say that election security and sort of elections in general will be a key issue in this race between Kolodin and Adrian Fontes?

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Yep, just like Gov. Hobbs, I think we’ve already seen Fontes introduce a commercial today where he is basically highlighting all of Kolodin’s positions. He’s very much an election denier, aligned with the president on these unfounded claims that the 2020 election was stolen. He filed a lot of those lawsuits challenging the results of that election. So Fontes is very much, much like Gov. Hobbs used her experience as Secretary of State during 2020 to win the governor’s race in 2022, I think Fontes is going to use his experience as an election administrator to say, "You do not want this guy running your elections."

MARK BRODIE: OK, so there was also a contested GOP primary in the race for Attorney General. This one was a little bit closer between Warren Petersen and Rodney Glassman. Petersen won this one 56 to basically 44%. Not sure if this was a surprise or not. Was the margin at all surprising?

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Yeah, this was a really interesting race because, again, if we’re going to go on name ID, Petersen probably had better name ID as the State Senate President. But state lawmakers still don’t have a great ID statewide. So it was kind of interesting to see whether that was going to help him out here.

There was no actual Trump endorsement in this race. Petersen got a shout-out at a Trump event, but then the president reposted an endorsement of Glassman from someone else, as he’s wont to do lately.

MARK BRODIE: Which he also did with Swoboda, right?

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Exactly. So it was kind of, neither had these big groups backing them. Turning Point didn’t weigh in on this race. So I think I would have given the edge to Petersen given his a little bit higher profile. He’s been able to use his position as the Senate President to kind of hit back on Attorney General Mayes, who now he will face. But wasn’t kind of, I thought this one might be a little bit closer, if only because Petersen was running like it was closer. This was a really ugly race where they were really going at each other pretty hard.

MARK BRODIE: Yeah. And would you imagine that some of the messages that Glassman had against Petersen will now be picked up by the Mayes campaign?

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Oh, definitely. His biggest attack was that Petersen isn’t qualified to be the Attorney General because he has not been a lawyer for all that long, does not have traditional experience in the courtroom, all of that kind of thing. And yeah, they basically just gift-wrapped an opening argument, as it were, for Attorney General Mayes’s campaign.

MARK BRODIE: Interesting. OK, let’s move down the ballot a little bit to the Superintendent of Public Instruction race. In this case, the incumbent Tom Horne is, I’m not sure if this race has been called yet or not, but he is losing to Kimberly Yee, the State Treasurer, who’s term-limited from that race. She was brought in by JD Kaufman, some of the Arizona Freedom Caucus folks, to run against Tom Horne. And right now she’s winning 53 to 47%.

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Yeah, not called yet. There’s about, I think, 15% of the votes left to count. And so that margin is still within, he could pick it up, but it’s trending her direction. This is another one where we’ve got, he’s the incumbent, but you really have two incumbents. As you mentioned, she’s the State Treasurer, she’s a former State Senator. So she’s really well known in Republican circles here. So the name ID was kind of a wash. They’re both long-time Arizona politicians.

So this one really came down to, I think, a personality preference. This race was really about the school voucher program, that might have played into it. She was backed by the Freedom Caucus. Not a traditional Freedom Caucus candidate, but again, having that backing may have just given her that boost. Because as we’re seeing in this race, 6% is nothing to sniff at, but it’s much closer than the margin in a lot of these other races.

MARK BRODIE: Right. On the Democratic side, there was also a contested primary, this one not particularly close. Teresa Leyba Ruiz beat Brett Newby basically 80 to 20%, so she will be the Democratic nominee. Sometimes these races, Wayne, can be like for superintendent can be a little tough because they’re down the ballot. There’s not enough oxygen necessarily for them. Do you get the sense that that might be the case in this year’s election as well?

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: It’s possible, but again, also, this is a race where Democrats tend to do better statewide, even historically before they were winning other statewide offices as frequently as they are these days, because Democratic Party is often seen as more pro-public education and that kind of thing. So it’ll be interesting to see how the school voucher part plays into this because that office obviously administers that program as well. But Teresa Leyba Ruiz, she strikes the profile of someone qualified for this office. She’s a former community college president, that kind of thing. So not surprising to see her kind of run away with the primary. It’ll just kind of be up to the voters of Arizona to see what qualifications they want leading that office.

MARK BRODIE: All right. That is Wayne Schutsky from KJZZ’s politics desk. He’s going to stick around. We’re going to talk a little bit more about some of the other contested primaries in just a moment. This is The Show.

KJZZ's The Show transcripts are created for audience accessibility. Transcripts are created on deadline with the assistance of AI tools and then edited, and may not be in their final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ's programming is the audio segment.