It’s a critical election year for Republicans, who are looking to take back the three most powerful statewide offices — governor, secretary of state and attorney general — after Democrats won all of them in 2022.
The result has been a series of testy, competitive GOP primaries in which Republican voters will largely decide between near-right candidates or right-wing hardliners. Sending the latter into the general election would put the party on course to follow the same strategy it did in 2022, which failed, even amid expectations of a red wave.
The most dynamic of these case studies may very well be the battle over the GOP nod for the Secretary of State’s Office between Rep. Alex Kolodin and former Arizona Republican Party Chair Gina Swoboda. Whoever wins will take on Democratic incumbent Adrian Fontes.
The secretary of state, in addition to being the state’s top elections officer, manages business registrations, issues notary public commissions, processes campaign finance reports and oversees the state’s lobbyist registration system.
While there’s limited polling on the race, Chandler’s NextGen Polling said a recent survey shows Kolodin has a growing lead. But based on the pollster’s Twitter account, it has a MAGA-oriented bias, even predicting that Democratic Congressman Greg Stanton would lose his deep-blue 4th Congressional District last cycle before he won handily, and outright promoting candidates like Kari Lake.
More than a third of voters are still undecided, too.
While Kolodin has right-wing backers like Turning Point and the Freedom Caucus, Swoboda has a friendly relationship with President Donald Trump, whom she helped win Arizona in 2024. It’s probably for that reason that he — rather esoterically — endorsed her.
A recent VoteBeat analysis of the race cast it as a showdown between the “rule-following election administrator,” Swoboda, and the “bomb-throwing election attorney,” Kolodin.
But those labels only begin to capture what makes this race so interesting.
For a political writer, the race — and the difference in personalities, experience and political approaches — makes for nothing less than a feast.
So let’s dig in.
Who are these candidates?
Swoboda’s a gregarious native of Queens — something she shares with Trump, whom she seems to genuinely admire. At different times in her life, she wanted to be an Egyptologist and a music engineer. Loquacious and colorful in conversation, her hand gestures are a central and eccentric part of her speech, giving away her Italian ancestry.
That’s all evident in the freewheelin’ Q&A with Swoboda we published a few months ago.
Kolodin couldn’t be a starker contrast.
The perpetually gray-suited conservative-libertarian is guarded, caustic and verbally militant. Even if he’s a member of the Freedom Caucus, he also appears to be the lone soldier of his one-man army, a king of his own fiefdom who’s wont to express his idiosyncratic views, well, idiosyncratically. And he’s hilariously awkward.
We also loved that the New Republic’s Aaron Gell interviewed Kolodin and described his Phoenix law office as “an ADHD fever dream of half-empty soda cups and Jenga-like towers of legal briefs.” Considering Kolodin lost his car keys at the Legislature twice last year, that portrait checks out.
It’s not for nothing that Kolodin was named the Phoenix New Times’ Best Political Jester of 2025, which he earned for keeping legislative watchers on their toes. He partnered with Democrats on criminal justice reform, said that county prosecutors “killed” murdered Gilbert teen Preston Lord, pushed to make pipe bombs and machine guns legal again in Arizona and got shredded by GOP Rep. Walt Blackman for being the sole vote against a bill criminalizing stolen valor.
If Swoboda were the nerdy class president, Kolodin would be the (also nerdy) contrarian debate kid who lives for the polemic.
While Swoboda has been radically accessible to the press ever since she was chair, Kolodin’s pretty difficult to reach.
We talked to Swoboda for an hour on Wednesday, but it took several inquiries to get a response from Kolodin — who only answered specific questions via text. While he used to take calls from the press, he's been a stone wall since he announced his run.
A conversation with Kolodin, circa July 2024
After he didn't take our call yesterday, we texted Kolodin several questions, which he forwarded on to Republican Sen. Jake Hoffman — the leader of the right-wing Freedom Caucus.
Kolodin eventually answered some of the questions later in the night — but not before Hoffman called us and said he and Kolodin took issue with one of the questions concerning the genesis of the Swoboda-Kolodin rivalry.
Kolodin launched his 2025 campaign with a video that claimed Swoboda asked him to run and even endorsed him. The video uses a clip of Swoboda saying she “would be proud” to endorse Kolodin and an audio snippet of her calling him “amazing.” Then it quickly cuts to a pretty funny applause track sound effect.
On the day the video was released, Swoboda said she didn’t actually endorse Kolodin. Rather, she claims she said she would endorse him if he were to win the Republican nomination. She added that Kolodin asked her for a few things, including a recommendation for U.S. attorney, and her advice on whether he should run for secretary of state and attorney general.
“He wanted to do all three – and Alex told me that he would call me before he got in the race to have a conversation with me, because he didn’t want to run against me,” Swoboda said.
Since then, she’s called him a “disaster” and an “unethical jerk.”
But Hoffman told us that she did endorse Kolodin “at a dozen Republican events all over the state” — and that he produced Kolodin’s video.
“Gina Swoboda is a pathological liar. She is an insane person,” Hoffman told us. “She’s so full of shit it’s not even funny. She lied to the Republican Party grassroots while she was campaigning for state party chair even though she had expressed, in her own words, to dozens of senior-level party operatives her plan to run for secretary of state or higher office.”
We asked Swoboda about Hoffman’s accusation.
“Apparently (Kolodin’s) handler, Hoffman, has to call to speak up for Alex because he can’t speak for himself. I’m happy to speak for myself,” Swoboda said. “I’m running for secretary of state. Alex can’t win, and I can win.”
Kolodin, responding to the questions later, also called Swoboda’s perspective a “fanciful historical revisionism.”
“It’s unfortunate that Ms. Swoboda is staking her political reputation on whether she lied then or whether she’s lying now,” he said. “She proudly and repeatedly endorsed me before her self-serving ambitions got in the way.”
But Swoboda reiterated that as state party chair, it was her job to support every winner of the primary elections, and that hyping up Kolodin wasn’t an endorsement.
In scouring the internet, we have yet to find a clear Swoboda endorsement of Kolodin.
Swoboda also denied that she was angling to run for secretary of state when she campaigned for chair and explained her thinking.
While Swoboda was interested in the secretary of state position, President Donald Trump asked her to remain chair of the Arizona Republican Party. Trump endorsed her on stage at a Turning Point event in December 2024, "much to the chagrin of" Hoffman and Turning Point executive Tyler Bowyer, she said.
"When the president asked me to serve, I said yes.”
But why, then, did she decide to leave the chair this year to run for Arizona’s 1st Congressional District?
Swoboda said she left the post to run for Congress after she was asked to — but wouldn’t say by whom and whether or not it was the president — because Kari Lake was looking to run for the congressional seat, despite losing the vote share in that district twice.
It seems someone on the president’s team didn’t want Lake to run. Swoboda entered the congressional race with the president’s endorsement — though when GOP candidate and former NFL kicker Jay Feely threw his hat in the ring, she was told by the president’s team that Trump was going to endorse him.
That’s when she jumped ship to run for the office she said she wanted to seek all along.
What are their backgrounds?
Swoboda has years of experience as a former employee of the Secretary of State’s Office, where she worked for both a Republican and Democrat — Michele Reagan and now-Gov. Katie Hobbs, respectively.
But what’s most interesting about Swoboda is that, despite being a policy wonk with comprehensive knowledge of the office’s responsibilities and a nonpartisan approach to administration, she was somehow drafted into leading the Arizona Republican Party.
And not only that — the state’s GOP notched huge victories under her watch in 2024, delivering Arizona for Trump and growing its majority in both chambers of the Legislature.
That allowed Swoboda to add a “winning political strategist” line to her résumé, which she’s clearly aiming to bank on in the primary.
Meanwhile, Kolodin comes with a lot of baggage that Swoboda thinks would effectively guarantee Fontes’ reelection if he became the Republican nominee.
“Fontes is a very charismatic guy. As the (former) party chair, I would probably call him a dangerous candidate because Republicans have voted for him twice. Like, anyone is kidding themselves if they don't think Republicans voted for him and made him Maricopa County recorder and secretary (of state)."
It’s that kind of talk that infuriates plenty of MAGA Republicans, who find the idea of saying anything remotely nice about Fontes unacceptable.
In his Twitter bio, Kolodin styles himself first and foremost as an “election lawyer,” and, secondly, as a member of the state House, where he represents the Scottsdale area's Legislative District 3.
But his track record in election law — at least in closely watched major cases — has been less than impressive.
In fact, Kolodin was disciplined by the State Bar of Arizona in December 2023 for his role in the infamous “kraken” lawsuit that made claims of massive election fraud in the 2020 election without evidence. He was put on probation for 18 months, paid $2,700 in fines and had to take education classes on legal ethics.
Swoboda explained that, in forums that she, Kolodin and Fontes have appeared at together, the incumbent has pounced on the embarrassing reprimand.
“Fontes, at one point, was like, ‘There's only one person on this stage who's had their bar card suspended for violations — and it's not Gina Swoboda.’ And then he's like, ‘There's only one person who had to take mandatory ethics classes and it's not Gina Swoboda,’” she recalled. “So (Fontes) cut a demo of what he would do in the general election.”
When Kolodin was asked about the lawsuit during a May 14 debate on Arizona PBS, he deflected and cried bias.
“I know that PBS is a liberal media outlet, that you want to spin things and twist them and take everybody back to 2020,” Kolodin told moderator Ted Simons. “Here’s the truth: the voters of this state are tired of hearing about 2020. The voters of this state are also tired of a dysfunctional election system run by a guy (Fontes) who is totally incapable of following the law.”
Still, even after the admonishment, the Republican Party entrusted Kolodin with the responsibility of representing it in the first election lawsuit of 2024. Kolodin and the GOP claimed Maricopa County and the secretary of state improperly tested voting machines.
But as it turned out, Kolodin was wrong on several points and misunderstood the state’s election law. The Republican Party withdrew the suit and managed to get a narrow settlement that only specified which voting machines the secretary of state can test.
Still, Kolodin acted like he won, saying he was “very pleased to have been able to reach a favorable resolution on behalf of the Arizona Republican Party.”
We asked Kolodin to name specific examples of his work as an elections lawyer that he was proud of. He didn’t name any, but said he was “proud of beating radical (Fontes) in court” more than a half dozen times.
He did not respond to a follow-up question about specific cases.
How would they govern?
Kolodin’s record in the House provides a glimpse of what he would do in office.
Much like his election integrity-focused stump speeches, Kolodin spent much of his time in the House proselytizing for changes to election law. Most of his proposals didn’t make it very far, though Hobbs did sign one of his bills this year, which moved up the primary election date.
During his four years at the Legislature, Kolodin has spearheaded an effort on behalf of MAGA Republicans to make more sweeping changes to Arizona’s elections.
The result of that labor is HCR2001, a one-page piece of legislation that would make major changes to election administration in Arizona. The state's voters will decide its fate in November.
Republicans sell it as a simple, common-sense list of necessary changes that would secure elections by limiting voting in Arizona elections to United States citizens — which is already the law — by requiring voters to show valid government-issued IDs before casting a ballot. That would alter the mail-in voting process.
But even before it made the ballot in the twilight hours of this year’s legislative session, rural Republicans expressed concerns with Kolodin's ballot referral, including several county recorders.
Yavapai County Recorder Michelle Burchill said she spoke to Kolodin in March and “expressed reservations.”
Her gripe was not with voter ID and proof of citizenship — which she noted Arizona already requires. It was that the ballot referral would require all vote centers to use on-site tabulators.
“I know my voters. They are already uncomfortable with seeing an ADA marking device — they’re uncomfortable seeing a printer in their voting area. So to potentially force us to have on-site tabulators involved is where my concern was,” Burchill told us. “At this point, I’m accepting that it’s going to be up to the voters, and whatever the voters decide is going to be what we will deal with. We follow the law.”
Swoboda pointed out plenty of other flaws with Kolodin's ballot referral, like that it would likely mean Arizona’s mail-in voters would be ordered to “put a photocopy of (their) government-issued photo ID in an envelope with (their) ballot,” and eliminate the secret nature of who each ballot belongs to.
She also noted that the referral would require millions of dollars in new tabulation equipment for rural counties, which don’t even want to use them. The proposal is also vague about where the funding would come from, saying only that the Legislature “shall appropriate any monies necessary” for the new technology.
"We're all supposed to believe that if this were to pass, the Legislature's gonna come up with millions of dollars to give to the counties to buy this equipment and all?" Swoboda asked. "No. No!”
She also noted that many rural residents don’t have passports or REAL ID driver’s licenses, and that Kolodin’s referral was “kinda sorta disenfranchising voters that are (his) base.”
It’s a classic case of a simple-sounding bill that has unseen, wide-reaching implications — which the voters who support it might not even comprehend.
“I do feel that it’s being marketed in a way that my voters don’t quite understand what they’re signing on to,” Burchill said.
Kolodin didn’t directly respond to a question about the concerns, but said the referral would “meaningfully speed up results” to address Arizonans’ frustration with slow election results.
He added the measure would fund local compliance with the law. But it only creates a mechanism requiring the state to fund compliance if the referral passes; It doesn’t allocate any money for the tabulators.
As for Swoboda, she’s touting her own experience running Arizona’s elections as an employee in the office.
But she also has a platform beyond election administration.
For one, she wants to make a major overhaul to the state’s campaign system and its public database, See the Money, which she said “has been a disaster since it was originally crafted.” She’s criticized both Hobbs and Fontes (who said he would overhaul the campaign finance database and interface) for not already doing the job within their administrations.
Swoboda also wants to tie campaign finance and lobbying records together in one set of software to make it easier for the public to see the larger picture of money in Arizona politics.
She even floated the idea of moving the business services unit — which manages some commercial filings and records — to fall under the purview of the Arizona Corporation Commission and make it a one-stop shop for entrepreneurs.
“(Corporation Commissioners) Nick Myers and Kevin Thompson know (about the idea) because they've heard me say that when I'm speaking, and they're like, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa.’ I'm like, ‘I will give you my budget,’” Swoboda said. “I think for people who want to invest funds to create a business and grow a business and create jobs, we need to make it as streamlined as possible.”
Kolodin had less to say than Swoboda about the non-election-related units, but did mention he would reform the business services division.
“As a small business owner and attorney who’s dealt with the business services division for clients, I know the frustration firsthand — I’ll make that office fast, efficient, and ready to serve every Arizona entrepreneur.”
The contest is set to be a defining Republican Party race — and here at the Agenda, we’re on the edge of our seats, ready for the results to trickle in on July 21.