Primary Prepping: LD5 House Dems
A four-way fight for the House … Pay up, kids … And something is indeed weird about Justine.
Central Phoenix’s Legislative District has a solidly Democratic voter base with two unelected lawmakers representing it in the House.
The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors appointed Reps. Sarah Liguori and Charles Lucking this year to take over for resigned lawmakers Jennifer Longdon and Amish Shah, respectively.
Now, Liguori and Lucking are running1 to take on full terms in the district. But they face two Democratic challengers, Aaron Márquez and Dorri Thyden.
And although Liguori has never been elected to the state House, she’s not exactly new to it. She’s a two-time appointee who first took over for former Rep. Aaron Lieberman in 2021, but lost in the primary for a LD5 House seat in 2022.
Both incumbents haven’t been around that long to lean into a proven voter history, but they both contributed to key votes on overturning Arizona’s Civil War-era abortion ban and voting against HCR2060, which will be on the ballot this year to make crossing the border a state crime.
Thyden has years of experience in public policy, having worked for Democratic campaigns and causes since the Clinton days, but this is her first run for public office.
Márquez is a Phoenix Union High School Governing Board member. He ran a failed primary campaign for the state Senate in 2014 and came in last in the five-way primary for LD5’s two House seats in 2022.
Rep. Sarah Liguori
Liguori was appointed to take over for former Rep. Jennifer Longdon in February, and she previously took over for former Rep. Aaron Lieberman after he resigned to run for governor in 2021. She lost her bid for election to the seat in 2022 in the primary election.
What does she do?: Liguori is the current director of Impact Lending, which provides loans to nonprofits for projects with “positive societal impacts,” per her LinkedIn. She was previously an operations manager at an architectural firm and a financial representative at Northwest Mutual.
Fun fact: Liguori became a licensed financial advisor during the Great Recession.
Campaign website: www.sarahliguori.com
Rep. Charles Lucking
Lucking took over for Rep. Amish Shah after the former lawmaker resigned in February. Now, he’s seeking a full term.
Career experience: Lucking has ample experience in legal work in law firms and as a self-employed attorney. He worked for Community Legal Services, a nonprofit that focuses on housing issues. And he met his wife while serving in the Peace Corps in Samoa from 2003-2005.
Fun fact: Lucking also dubs himself a music buff and gardener.
Campaign website: www.charlesluckingaz.com
Aaron Márquez
Márquez is a Phoenix Union High School Governing Board member and U.S. Army veteran. He’s closely aligned with Ruben Gallego and challenged Gallego’s nemesis, Democratic Sen. Catherine Miranda, in 2014 with Gallego’s blessing.
Some more background: Márquez co-founded ServeNext.org, a nonprofit trying to increase participation in civilian national service programs like AmeriCorps or disaster recovery charities.
Fun fact: Márquez has worked on many political campaigns, including John Kerry’s presidential run and Terry Goddard’s 2010 campaign for Arizona governor.
Campaign website: www.aaronmarquez.com
Dorri Thyden
Thyden has an extensive background in public policy and has worked for political campaigns, law firms, city governments and the U.S. Department of State.
Plus: She’s also an artist and opened a Phoenix art gallery in 2018 to platform local artists. The gallery closed when COVID hit.
Fun fact: Thyden was all over the news for her role in getting the Crossroads detox facility in Phoenix shut down. She lived across the facility and recorded patients openly using drugs and publicly urinating.
Campaign website: www.dorri4az.com
Everyone’s got a budget crunch: School districts across Maricopa County are on the hook for repaying a collective $150 million that they received in error after the Court of Appeals ruled that homeowners overpaid on their property taxes because they were incorrectly calculated since 2015, the Republic’s Madeleine Parrish and Sasha Hupka report. For example, Scottsdale Unified School District’s bill could be nearly $28 million. And while school officials are hoping lawmakers will step in to help, lawmakers have their own budget problems to deal with.
All bark, for now: Our old friend and former Arizona communications professional Stephanie Grisham reflected on her tenure as Melania and Donald Trump’s attack dog. She told “This American Life” that she’s terrified of him winning another term because she knows how ruthless the duo is since her job was to savage their enemies for them, including the time she said General John Kelly was unequipped to handle the “genius” of Trump.
“It sounded like I worked for Kim Jong Un. Like, ‘the genius of our president?’ Who says that? I did,” Grisham said.
This saga is only getting better: The Republic’s Miguel Torres has a good explainer of the evolving scandal in Apache County, where Democratic County Attorney Micheal B. Whiting had his home and office raided by the Attorney General’s Office. Whiting told AZFamily in an email that he will not resign. Which made us curious: Who’s running against him? Well, as is often the case for small county seats, the answer is nobody. He’s unchallenged in the upcoming election, and his wife, Joy, is running unopposed for reelection to Apache County School Superintendent.
The Attorney General’s Office has never raided our home and office for misusing subscriber funds. Subscribe today!
Bruising primaries: In the race to replace U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego in the solidly Democratic Congressional District 3, the two leading progressive candidates — Raquel Terán and Yassamin Ansari — don’t vary much on policy solutions. But they have significant differences in background and style, the Phoenix New Times’ TJ L’Heureux writes in a solid profile of the primary race. Meanwhile in Southern Arizona, U.S. Rep. Juan Ciscomani’s Republican challenger, Kathleen Winn, attacked him during a debate that he didn’t attend as a “bipartisan moderate” who votes with Democrats more often than Republicans, the Tucson Sentinel’s Cris Seda Chabrier writes.
No pressure: The big question in Pinal County elections offices is can they make it through 2024 without a SNAFU? Votebeat’s Jen Fifield takes a trip to the new 53,000-square-foot elections office in Florence to assess the situation as officials settle into the new digs and prepare for the season.
“If a mistake is made, you think we don’t beat ourselves up every way until Tuesday?” Pinal County Recorder Dana Lewis said. “Oh, yes we do. We lose sleep. We care about it. We are always looking at ways to improve the efficiency and efficacy of the process.”
Art appreciation: Artist Lauren Strohacker created an installation drawing attention to how the U.S.-Mexico border wall is disrupting critical wildlife habitats by projecting some of the animals like jaguars and Mexican gray wolves onto the border wall in Nogales, Inside Climate News reports. That art might be fun to look at if you were a test subject in one of Arizona’s government-funded medical magic mushroom studies.2 But mushroom researchers worry they won’t have funding next year as lawmakers look to solve the budget deficit, Noah Cullen reports in the New Times. They’re hoping to use opioid settlement money instead.
Former Republican Sen. Vince Leach isn’t pulling any punches in his rematch campaign against Republican Sen. Justine Wadsack.
Check out the pair of ads he’s running on cable and digital streaming in the Southern Arizona district. The tagline is, appropriately, “Something is weird about Justine Wadsack.”
One notes she called 9/11 “an inside job.”
The other takes her to task on her belief that the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas was a “false flag political conspiracy.”
CORRECTION: A previous version of this post said they were running as a team. Liguori say they’re friendly, but not a running as slate
And that, kids, is how you write a transition sentence.
What you need to tell your future granting agencies is that no one delivers the news of our loony tunes state with more human snark than you do. Maintaining a very respectful level of bipartisanship/objectivity, your “ voice” is why i love to open this newspaper over coffee in the morning. It makes getting the details memorable and enjoyable.
I'm an independent voter in LD5 and CD3 who will be voting in the Democratic primary. I want candidates who support evidence-based policy, which is something hardly seen at all anymore in the GOP and but is also less common than it should be from Democrats.