As the week wraps up, Arizona’s 2026 primary election is entering its twilight hour.
Nearly all of the votes have been counted and just about all races have been called.
With this cat in the bag, who better to help us dot the i’s and cross the t’s than Republican former Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer?
Richer lost his own reelection bid during a GOP primary back in 2024 — and his opponent, Justin Heap, moved on to win the general election and become recorder.
But that hasn’t stopped Richer, a political junkie, from remaining engaged and active on Twitter and never failing to add his two cents to the discourse.
He considers himself a free-market conservative of old who’s been unwilling to traffic in election conspiracy theories — which is likely what led to his undoing within the party in the 2024 primary.
“I think we’re in a particularly poignant moment in American governance, and so I continue to be drawn to that,” Richer told us. “I’m a bit of a fish out of water in the political party landscape. The party I’ve long been a part of… is wholly controlled by (President Donald Trump) right now — and I’m very much not a Trump person.”
Yesterday, TJ sat down with Richer via a podcast-format Zoom interview for a conversation about the elections — specifically, the results of the primary, the resulting matchups we’ll see in November, the recorder’s office and the horrendously low voter turnout.
At the end of the video, the two also chatted about their alma mater — the University of Chicago — where TJ got his bachelor’s degree and Richer received an MA in political science, as well as his law degree.
We’re giving you two options to tune in: a YouTube video of the chat, or an audio file (which starts at the 10-second mark).
You can also read a few of the key moments and Richer quotes from the discussion below.
On what it would take for Richer to support GOP gubernatorial nominee Andy Biggs
Among his four “moral hurdles” for supporting the Republican nominee, Richer singled out Biggs’ silence on Trump’s pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez — a convicted drug trafficker — and his inability to admit that Trump and gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake lost their elections in 2020 and 2022, respectively.
He also called out Biggs for tip-toeing around the question of whether Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs’ victory over Lake was legitimate.
“Arizonans will absolutely see through that sophistry. And it’s cowardly and it’s just, quite frankly, it’s embarrassing. I mean, oh, you know, ‘Joe Biden was in the White House.’ Yeah, we know Joe Biden was in the White House. That’s not what we’re asking, clearly. Just sack up and say it — yes or no. It’s really not that hard.”
On GOP secretary of state nominee Alex Kolodin
Discussing GOP Secretary of State nominee Alex Kolodin’s role as local counsel on the 2020 ”Kraken” lawsuit, Richer noted the suit included the theory that former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez had somehow influenced Arizona’s election results.
“The Arizona Bar Association ultimately reprimanded Alex for being part of that litigation that was wholly without any factual basis and just promoted the most ludicrous ideas about the 2020 election, including that former deceased dictator Hugo Chavez from Venezuela had a hand in manipulating the 2020 election. Just come on. You can’t file that in a real court and not expect there to be repercussions.”
On low voter turnout in this election
Richer hypothesized that moving the election up by two weeks probably cut down on participation, not to mention the ho-hum nature of many of the races.
And he called it remarkable how many seats in Congress and at the Arizona Capitol are decided in the primary, by such a small slice of the electorate.
“Henry Thompson, who’s a political science professor at ASU, recently co-authored... a paper for the Goldwater Institute in which he talked about the abysmally low turnout in odd-year school bond, school override elections… In those elections, he said the average is about 26%-27%. So we’re even below that.”
On his “bromance” with Adrian Fontes
Asked about an old Agenda article dubbing his relationship with Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes “Arizona’s weirdest bromance,” Richer joked his way through the premise before turning serious.
”I have one romance in my life. It is with my wife. If I had to have another romance, and if I had to have a romance with a guy, I would think I would go like Channing Tatum, Ryan Gosling… Andy Roddick, maybe.”
But he said their dynamic shifted after January 6, as politics became more defined by disputes over the legitimacy of the system itself rather than administrative disagreements.
On what a bad-faith “evil” county recorder could actually get away with
Asked what damage an election-denying recorder could actually do in office, Richer explained that the position has real but limited power, since most bad-faith actions would be blocked by courts almost immediately.
“I mean the sky’s the limit, but on almost all this stuff you’d get sued immediately and then you’d be positively enjoined to do it. So for instance, ‘I’m not going to process voter registration forms or I’m not going to send out mail ballots because I simply just don’t believe in mail ballots.’ Well, okay, somebody would sue you immediately and then you’d be forced to do that.”
The state’s largest county finished counting ballots yesterday (except the provisional ballots and those ballots where voters still need to verify their signatures).
And that means the 2026 primary election is finally over(ish).
None of the races we’ve been covering have flipped since Election Day, but here’s the lay of the land in the few races that have remained too close to call.
LD27 (Glendale, west Phoenix): Republican Sen. Kevin Payne narrowly beat fake elector and former Sen. Anthony Kern, who works for Turning Point Action and earned its endorsement. Payne has consistently held a narrow lead in the race. As of last night, that lead stood at 302 votes or almost 2 percentage points.
LD21 (Tucson, Nogales, Bisbee): Democratic Rep. Stephanie Stahl Hamilton is still trailing democratic socialist challenger Miranda Lopez — who had actually joined the race to take out Democratic Rep. Consuelo Hernandez, arguing she was too conservative. Stahl Hamilton is down by 214 votes.
Scottsdale’s City Council: Only left-leaning incumbent Solange Whitehead is set to win another term outright. Barry Graham, Bob Littlefield, Michelle Ugenti-Rita and Raoul Zubia will likely move on to a runoff election in November to compete for two council spots.
Calls and concessions
The Associated Press officially called CD1’s Democratic primary for Amish Shah and the Republican attorney general primary for Warren Petersen.
The runner-up in each race conceded gracefully: Rodney Glassman congratulated Petersen online despite their pretty nasty campaign, while Marlene Galán-Woods said she called Shah to congratulate him.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee — Washington Democrats’ campaign arm for winning swing seats — also congratulated Shah, despite its controversial decision to back Galán-Woods in the primary.
The AP also called the state superintendent of public instruction’s Republican primary for Treasurer Kimberly Yee on Wednesday night. No word of concession from Horne yet.
In the race few cared about before a surprise upset, No Labels gubernatorial candidate Hugh Lytle released a statement announcing his defeat and thanking his supporters.
Winner Teri Hourihan, meanwhile, told the Republic’s Stacey Barchenger that she’s “on cloud nine.” Lytle dramatically outraised her — thanks to $2 million of his own money.
“What I've been saying is, it's not about money," Hourihan said. "I hope people see that. It's about connecting. It's about the people, and a whole lot of grit and Jesus.”
Hmmmm, I’ll have the word salad, please: The governor’s race started in earnest this week with Gov. Katie Hobbs saying her Republican opponent U.S. Rep. Andy Biggs has been undermining election confidence for years, including by disputing her win in 2022. When Biggs, who tried to overturn Arizona’s presidential election results on Jan. 6, 2021, was asked on KTAR if Hobbs was legitimately elected, he didn’t say yes or no. He said this instead:
“The reality is Katie Hobbs sits in the governor’s chair right now. I think every court has said she won, and, guess what, she’s the one who set a record for vetoes. So, I’m telling you I think she’s the governor and I don’t think anybody’s questioning that she’s not the governor,” Biggs told KTAR.
Buying his ticket to the manosphere: Republican U.S. Rep. Abe Hamadeh is going to bat for the Tate brothers, per the Republic’s Laura Gersony. Andrew and Tristan Tate have promoted the “alpha male” attitude for years and now they face a slew of grotesque charges, including rape and child pornography, in Romania and the United Kingdom. The Trump administration is under pressure to extradite them to the UK, but Hamadeh says the charges are “unclear and political.” He wants the U.S. government to protect the Tates from “reckless court proceedings” in the UK and Romania.
Gonna be an issue: The winner of the Democratic primary for a justice of the peace position in Maricopa County has some serious legal baggage, the Mirror’s Caitlin Sievers reports. Last year, Deborah Ann Begay posted on Facebook that she called other judges to help her friend’s son get out of trouble for driving without a license. She mentioned three judges by name and said “everything turned out fine.” That led to a reprimand from the Commission on Judicial Conduct, which Begay is still fighting.
Getting some breathing room: Cities in the valley scored a big win after they convinced the Arizona Water Banking Authority to replenish any cuts they may face in the federal government’s Colorado River plan, which is expected next week, Alex Hager reports for KJZZ. The state agency has been storing water since the 1990s and argued the water should be stretched out as much as possible, but cities convinced the agency to make them whole — at least for the next year.
What could go wrong?: Five years after former Gov. Doug Ducey signed a law to legalize sports betting in Arizona, a new report from the Arizona Department of Gaming shows a staggering 84% of Arizonans gambled in the last 12 months, including 30% who gamble every week, Zach Prelutsky reports for AZFamily. The state’s 14 licensed operators handled $670 million in May alone.
Tuesday’s election brought us a lot of blowout races — not least among them, GOP gubernatorial nominee Andy Biggs’ commanding 74% of the vote in a four-way primary.
But that wasn’t the biggest blowout of the night.
The title of “Biggest Tidal Wave Election” goes to the Legislative District 3 GOP primary between Sen. John Kavanagh and challenger Robert Wallace.
Kavanagh holds an astounding 70-percentage-point lead in the race. Put another way, for every one Wallace voter, almost six Republicans chose Kavanagh.
TJ, being the heartless bastard that he is, couldn’t help but chat Wallace up about why Wallace thinks he had such a poor showing on Tuesday.
It may not surprise you to learn that Wallace doesn’t have full confidence in the election results.
“(Kavanagh’s) 11 wins in a row, it just smells of something odd,” Wallace told us. “And, you know, I've congratulated him. I'm not crying about election fraud or anything like that. But I am saying that — as somebody who's been on the ground here for the last five years and really been in the trenches and had my ear to the ground with the people — you can't just have, you know, a room full of people saying one thing and then for no particular reason doing the opposite at a voting booth.”
But he doesn’t think the “Weird Wallace” attack line was the reason that he lost.
“I think I would be… I would have a very low opinion of the public if I were to believe something like that. The conservative right is generally a more spiritual, religiously based crowd,” he told us.
And frankly, he doesn’t think any of this is newsworthy.
“If I got 15% of the vote, who really cares about the answer to your question? There’s a very low interest in my candidacy. I don’t even know if I would bother wasting people’s time reading that.”
Well… touché, Robert.