Arizona Democrats have never had it easy at the state Capitol — they haven’t controlled either chamber of the Legislature since 1992.
While they’ve come a long way from the days of being dubbed the “Pizza Caucus” — since a single large pizza could feed all their members — and have come within striking distance of taking a majority in either chamber, it turns out the increased strength in numbers hasn’t mattered very much.
It’s as hard as ever for Democrats to get their bills heard — let alone passed. Even though 44% of the Legislature’s members are Democrats, last year only about 2% of bills that passed both chambers were sponsored by Democrats — a whopping total of 11 bills.
“It’s absolutely gotten worse. From the time I got here, Republicans have been terrible about hearing Democratic bills. That hasn’t changed,” Democratic House Minority Leader Oscar De Los Santos told us. “It’s easy to normalize this stuff if you’re here everyday, but I think if the average American knew, they’d be horrified.”
So far, not much has changed this session. While 105 Republican bills have been sent to Gov. Katie Hobbs’ desk, not a single Democratic bill has made it out of the Legislature.1 Compared to the 357 Republican bills that have passed through one chamber, only 23 of the Democrat’s bills have moved forward.
Percentage of bills passed by party in Arizona, 2026. Data via Skywolf.
To be fair, this was expected — to a degree. Of the 2,118 bills introduced this year, more than two-thirds were from Republicans. Democrats are up against serious bottlenecks when it comes to passing bills, including getting enough support from committee chairs for their bills to even be heard. That disincentivizes Democrats from filing tons of them.
But at the same time, Republicans don’t seem to feel at all disincentivized from running bills that are certain to face the greatest hurdle of all: Hobbs’ veto pen. In her first three years as governor, Hobbs swatted down a record-smashing 390 bills, and so far this year has vetoed 22. Some of them were already sent to her desk and rejected in previous years.
“We spend far too much time on bills that were previously vetoed, bills that are expected to be vetoed and bills that have been party-line votes throughout the process,” Democratic Rep. Kevin Volk, who represents a Tucson swing district, told us. “In a healthy system, we would be focused on bills that we could push forward.”
Naturally, one would expect that the party in power is going to favor their own bills. But compared to other Western states, Arizona Republicans’ use of their majority power is way more extreme than in other states like Utah — where the GOP has larger margins, comprising at least 75% of members in both chambers.
In the past decade, a substantial chunk of the bills introduced by Utah Democrats were passed, with a high of 57% in 2019 and a low this year at 26%.
Percentage of bills passed by party in Utah, 2026. Posted on March 10 by BYU political science professor Adam Brown.
Let’s compare that to Arizona: Last year, Democrats introduced 604 bills. Only 11 of them were passed, making Democrats’ bill passage rate just 1.8%.
It’s not just Utah that has a stronger culture of bipartisanship than Arizona.
“I talked to a Republican member in the Colorado Legislature who got 12 of his 13 bills passed. That already exceeds our 10 bills that passed both chambers last year,” Volk said. “It can be demoralizing. It’s hard to be fixated on running a bill under your name as the only way to have an impact.”
So what gives? Why are Arizona’s GOP leaders so stingy when it comes to allowing Dem bills to pass?
If you ask Senate President Warren Petersen, it’s because Democrats “have chosen to pander to their base for the most part” and have mainly sponsored bills that are “highly partisan” instead of more centrist bills.
“Nobody should be surprised that a chairman is not going to hear a bill that they disagree with,” Petersen said. “If they would have run more bipartisan bills, then there would have been more Democrat bills heard. It’s really that simple.”
But some, like Volk, refute the simplicity of that argument. He noted that Democrats sponsored plenty of bills that should have received bipartisan support, noting that “it’s hard to know what the support will be if we don’t have the conversation.”
Those bills include:
Democratic Rep. Cesar Aguilar’s HB2316, which would have provided more career and technical training courses for middle school and had at least 10 Republican co-sponsors in the House
Democratic Rep. Mariana Sandoval’s HB2469, which would have set up a Human Trafficking Study Committee — an issue about which Republicans are frequently vocal
But Democrats have complained that Republicans’ tight grip on power extends beyond allowing bills to be heard.
This year, Democrats adopted a new strategy to insert themselves into the debate: using strike-everything amendments, known as “strikers,” to introduce their legislation in committee hearings or on the floor.
But even that tactic hit a road bump.
De Los Santos noted that several committee chairs — the “worst offender” among them is GOP Rep. Selina Bliss — have decided they have the power to not even recognize attempts to introduce strikers, which he said was “wildly out-of-line with House rules.”
“It was especially kind of fucked up because we had members of the public ready and willing to testify on these strike-everything amendments,” De Los Santos said. “You haven’t heard our bills and now you’re gonna hear them as strike-everything amendments.”
He added that he’s not only concerned about the process, but also about the policies — saying the bills Democrats are pushing “have an impact on peoples’ everyday lives” and “would bring down the cost of living” in times of economic difficulty.
Beyond the committee chairs, De Los Santos complained that Republicans have at times applied their rules selectively, especially when it comes to submitting amendments for bills that are heard on the floor.
Amendments have to be introduced at least an hour before lawmakers go to the floor — but Republicans constantly submit them late and move the deadline back after the fact.
That’s evident in an email sent by GOP Speaker of the House Steve Montenegro on March 30 that retroactively moved a noon deadline to 1 p.m. so that an amendment that Rep. Quang Nguyen submitted at 12:49 p.m. could be considered.
“It’s like, why do you even have a deadline then?” De Los Santos asked. “If we get our stuff in late, there’s no way in hell they would ever hear it.”
Earlier this week, we asked you all to submit questions for your future lawmakers during this year’s debate series for the Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission.
And a bunch of you did!
We got loads of great questions. (And a few that definitely won’t make the cut. Remember, no personal attacks!)
Among our favorites came from reader Sophie, who wants to know:
“What is something that you have done in the past year that you regret? And what would you do differently now that you know better?”
That’s a perfect example of the kinds of questions that aren’t about policy, but tell you a lot about a candidate. (We also love policy questions, so keep them coming.) We all make mistakes — even political candidates — but owning them and learning from them is what shows you’re ready to hold office and lead.
Clean Elections is Arizona’s official, nonpartisan debate sponsor, and those debates help voters understand choices on their ballot, and give voters direct access to candidate viewpoints.
And this is your chance to help shape those debates.
So take advantage of that opportunity!
Grading on a curve: Online charter school Primavera has a long record of poor academic performance, but it’s getting a lifeline from Schools Superintendent Tom Horne, 12News’ Craig Harris reports. The State Charter Board was poised to shut it down after three consecutive “D” grades, but after previously saying he wouldn’t intervene, Horne said Primavera showed his office new records that changed those grades to “C”s, and the board can no longer shut it down.
That’s suspicious: An immigration holding facility in Mesa is routinely overcrowded and keeps detainees longer than intended, but just happened to drop near capacity ahead of a congressional visit in February, the Arizona Mirror’s Jerod MacDonald-Evoy reports. The site is meant to hold 157 people, yet regularly housed more than 500 before Democratic U.S. Reps. Yassamin Ansari and Greg Stanton announced their visit. After the notice, numbers dipped, then climbed right back up once they left.
Lawyered up: Arizona’s federal district court saw nearly 350 habeas petitions filed in March — more than in all of 2025 — as immigration attorneys increasingly turn to the Fifth Amendment-based filing to force the government to justify detention, the Phoenix New Times’ Morgan Fischer reports. Bond hearings and routine releases have largely been eliminated under the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda, so what was once a last-resort legal strategy is now becoming standard practice.
More name games: Gov. Katie Hobbs is catching heat from Senate Republicans after saying she vetoed a bill to rename Loop 202 for Charlie Kirk because it would override an existing designation honoring former Congressman Ed Pastor — which, critics note, it wouldn’t have, the Republic’s Stacey Barchenger reports. When asked about the criticism, Hobbs said the renaming should go through Arizona’s State Board on Geographic and Historic Names, as she noted in her veto letter.
Puppy problems: Legislative Republicans want to ban Arizona’s Game and Fish Department from bringing gray wolf puppies into the state, which is a key part of federal recovery efforts for the endangered species, Capitol scribe Howie Fischer reports. Republican Rep. Lupe Diaz told his colleagues they should heed a warning from Little Red Riding Hood, “that this predator’s going to get you,” but the real concern appears to be protecting livestock. Wildlife experts say Arizona’s 124 wolves are already dangerously inbred, and cutting off new pups could make that problem worse.
We at the Arizona Agenda are big fans of puppies — and of telling you when lawmakers say stupid things. Subscribe to support our work.
He gives a lot of fucks: Politics is getting more profane, and an Arizona politician is leading the trend. A New York Times analysis of six years of social media posts from governors and members of Congress found Democratic U.S. Sen. Ruben Gallego leads the pack with at least 77 F-bombs — more than double the next closest lawmaker at 35.
Per usual, GOP Rep. Alex Kolodin was getting on his colleagues’ nerves this week.
While the chamber was debating a bill that would prohibit state agencies from creating firearms registries, Democratic Rep. Nancy Gutierrez proposed an amendment that would have required gun sellers to abide by certain safety standards.
Kolodin rapped back by asking Gutierrez if she would yield to a question, and when she didn’t, he asked his question anyway — wondering aloud if her amendment would have made Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes a felon for representing an alleged gunrunner who was part of the Operation Fast and Furious scandal.
Gutierrez called a point of order and accused Kolodin of violating the House rules of debate since the odd shot at Fontes — whom Kolodin hopes to take on in the General Election — had nothing to do with the amendment.
While the chair considered the potential violation, Kolodin started talking again.
Minority Leader Oscar De Los Santos turned to Kolodin and interjected.
“You must be silent, thank you.”
“Oh, shush,” Kolodin shot back.
Later, the House gave a party-line approval to SB1148, which would require the Arizona Supreme Court to license attorneys and ban it from delegating that duty to any other organizations, like the Arizona Bar Association.
Republicans have been contemptuous of the Arizona Bar for sanctioning several right-wing lawyers who made a mockery of the law, including Kolodin.
De Los Santos managed to point that out in the last few seconds of his speech, calling Kolodin out as the “future failed candidate for secretary of state.”
1 Yesterday, the Senate was supposed to have a vote on HB 2780, which was sponsored by Democratic Rep. Sarah Liguori, but it seems those plans got scuttled by the University of Arizona men’s basketball team’s visit to the chamber floor.