Four Republicans have piled into the race to fill the two House seats in the Republican stronghold of Legislative District 3.
Those seats were left without elected incumbents after Republican Rep. Joseph Chaplik resigned from the Legislature to run for Congress earlier this year and Rep. Alexander Kolodin set his sights on the Secretary of State’s Office this cycle.
Republicans far outnumber Democrats in the district, so the outcome of the GOP primary will likely determine the district’s representation in the 2026 legislative session.
LD3 is a mixture of rural and suburban areas in northeast Maricopa County that covers much of northern Scottsdale and part of North Phoenix, stretching north through Fountain Hills, Anthem, New River, Cave Creek and Carefree.
We’re all set to moderate the Arizona Citizens Clean Elections debate for the GOP House primary candidates tonight, as well as Republican Sen. John Kavanagh, who is facing a challenge for his seat from Republican Robert Wallace.
You can tune in to the commission’s YouTube channel at 6 p.m. tonight to watch the debate live.
But first, here’s your lowdown on the state of the race before tonight’s showdown.
Power vacuum draws four
Republican Rep. Cody Reim
Republican Rep. Cody Reim, who owns a handyman business, is the appointed incumbent who took office about two months ago to fill Chaplik’s seat.
Reim became politically active in Arizona in 2023 when the City of Scottsdale stopped its water service to the rural, wildcat subdivision of Rio Verde Foothills, where he lives.
“I worked with people who didn’t always agree with each other. I took serious concerns to our Capitol because families deserve real solutions, not excuses,” Reim said in a video posted by House Republicans shortly after his appointment.
Reim, who is also a precinct committeeman, said his political activism actually began in 2008 in Dolores, Colorado, when he and a group of his high school friends organized a protest against the closure of trails in the San Juan National Forest. He said in an interview on Patriot Connection that the protest stopped the closure.
“It just opened my eyes to really what a big government can do negatively toward the people that elect them and the bureaucrats that actually run the tangible parts of the government,” he said. “It’s just proof the government was the problem, people weren’t having any problems with their trailways, trailheads or trail system.”
He lost a run for a seat on the Cave Creek Unified School District Governing Board in 2024.
Although Reim fought for his community on the water issue, he has also once fought with a neighbor. In 2019, Reim accused a neighbor of harassment and took him to court, but a judge ruled after a hearing that Reim didn’t prove his case, according to court records.
George Khalaf
George Khalaf, a Republican pollster, has dubbed himself an America First candidate for the campaign and has a staunchly pro-life background.
Though he’s never run for office, he’s been involved in politics as a longtime GOP pollster and consultant. He interned for U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake’s campaign, worked as the political director for the AZGOP and served as director of the Arizona Right to Life Foundation.
Khalaf said no one has done more than him to remove Republicans who have betrayed their values and that he intends to follow in the footsteps of Chaplik and Kolodin to pass conservative legislation and keep Republicans accountable.
“(I am) someone who stood up and battled against the opposing party, someone who stood up and battled against our party when they betrayed our principles and we held their feet to the fire,” Khalaf said during an interview with the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors when he was among the finalists to replace Chaplik.
But his time in politics has not been without problems.
Khalaf agreed to a judgment against him in 2024 in which he admitted that he improperly caused the U.S. Senate campaign for former Attorney General Mark Brnovich to not pay invoices from a Virginia fundraising firm in a timely manner.
The unpaid invoices left the campaign nearly $500,000 in debt, and Khalaf agreed to pay $120,000 to settle a lawsuit that alleged he hid the invoices from the campaign while submitting invoices for all of the other vendors — including his own companies, which got paid.
Khalaf said that for legal reasons he could not discuss the suit except to say it was “a payment dispute with a vendor for Mark Brnovich’s Senate campaign.”
“I decided it was better to settle the case and put it behind me, rather than pay lawyers a lot of money for years of litigation,” Khalaf told us.
Jay Schlum
Jay Schlum was the Fountain Hills mayor from 2008 to 2010, but he’s most known for his community engagement, referring to himself in a Tedx Talk as a “serial volunteer” and saying that he “absolutely loved being mayor.”
He has served on many boards and commissions, including the Fountain Hills Planning and Zoning Commission, the Maricopa Association of Governments and other community service organizations.
He encouraged people in his Tedx Talk to get engaged with their communities, and he spoke about how lifting each other up and taking care of others enriches a person’s life.
Schlum was one of five candidates seeking appointment for the vacant House seat that ultimately went to Reim.
At the precinct committee meeting in March, he made his pitch as a limited government conservative, always questioning where and how to spend and save money. He said he’s also pro-business and he’s tired of the state falling behind in economic development.
“There are smart ways to empower development and business without giving them things,” he said.
And while he said he liked the work that Chaplik did as a founding member of the Freedom Caucus — a group of ultra-conservative lawmakers — Schlum couldn’t commit to joining the Freedom Caucus.
“I will work with our leadership. I am definitely a conservative,” Schlum said. “I’m not going to make any commitment because I don’t know what we’re committing to, frankly.”
Tom Walsh
Tom Walsh, a precinct committeeman and retired dentist from Cave Creek, also vied for the appointment to the House seat in March.
He told fellow PCs in March that he would join the Freedom Caucus.
“Everything they’ve done has been for us,” Walsh said of the Freedom Caucus. “They’ve sacrificed, they’ve taken political hits, and they need all the support they can get. And that puts them in a unique position when you have a strong, tight-knit group because that’s what it’s going to take to fight against RINOS and the Democrat liberal policies.”
Incumbent vs. interdimensionalist
Republican Sen. John Kavanagh will face off against Robert Wallace, an LD3 precinct committeeman and regional manager for Turning Point Action’s Chase the Vote program. Wallace is also a leader in the Arizona chapter of Gays Against Groomers, and a former volunteer for one of Kari Lake’s campaigns, according to his campaign website.
He’s challenging the longtime lawmaker on the grounds that Kavanagh supported bloated budgets and weakened safeguards on elections.
“John Kavanagh talks like a conservative when it’s time to campaign. But his votes tell a different story,” Wallace writes on his website.
For his part, Kavanagh launched a website called weirdwallace.com, a curated archive of Wallace’s musings on topics like traveling to alternate dimensions and experiencing “hallucinations of Teletubbie & lizard-like beings.”
Among the collection of Wallace’s self-published videos and podcasts is one about “spirits who actually derive a sense of joy from a person spending an abnormally long time sitting on the toilet.”
Last week, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) announced it would put its weight behind candidate Marlene Galán-Woods in a crowded Dem primary for Arizona’s 1st Congressional District.
Now, she’s dropping hints on her campaign website that she wants her allies to go hard after another top contender, Amish Shah.
And by dropping hints, we mean very overtly spelling out what she wants her “independent" supporters to do on her behalf.
“Groups which have the capacity to go up on Phoenix broadcast should do so as soon as possible with an initial emphasis on Amish messaging,” the website reads, adding that voters need to learn that “Amish Shah’s own Democratic colleagues say he cannot be trusted to stand up for us or against MAGA” and that “in the state House, Shah sold us out to extreme Republicans.”
This not-so-subtle art of posting messaging guidance is a classic and common workaround for campaigns, which are prohibited from coordinating with “independent expenditure committees,” a type of PAC. Those PACs then usually turn around and run attack ads against a candidate’s opponent(s).
It’s a signal that the Democratic primary is heating up, and that after Shah’s weirdly aggressive start to an interview with 12News’ Brahm Resnik, Galán-Woods is going all out after Shah — who beat her two years ago in the primary.
Expect those attack ads to hit your airwaves any day now.
Can’t say we’re surprised: A new Arizona Auditor General report basically confirms the widely reported fact that the Arizona Department of Education does a terrible job overseeing the $1 billion school voucher program. The report found the department doesn’t have basic financial controls or standard procedures to monitor how parents spend voucher money, 12News’ Craig Harris reports. As Harris notes, the auditor general isn’t exactly an anti-school choice hack. The office works for the GOP-controlled Legislature.
Mayes called it: The new Arizona Auditor General report also found the state Corrections Department couldn’t fully account for how it spent $50 million in opioid settlement money, which comes with strict reporting requirements meant to ensure the funds address the effects of the opioid crisis, KJZZ’s Camryn Sanchez reports. The department said it spent the money on hepatitis C treatment, but didn’t provide proof that the inmates treated contracted hepatitis C from intravenous opioid use. In 2024, Attorney General Kris Mayes sued to block the transfer of $115 million in opioid settlement money to help backfill the corrections budget, but later dropped the case.
The tangled webs we weave: Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne and his rival for the GOP nomination, Treasurer Kimberly Yee, are going at it over whether Yee supports DEI, which is essentially rat poison for Republican candidacies. Horne says Yee served on a DEI-related committee, but Yee says “that is a lie” and apparently sent Horne a cease-and-desist letter. But Horne brought receipts — a link to this web page.
Sounded fishy from the start: The inspector general of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is investigating the $38 billion plan to buy warehouses, like the one in Surprise, and turn them into immigration detention centers, per the Wall Street Journal. Among the red flags were ICE buying buildings, instead of leasing them as it usually does, as well as paying way more than market price for the warehouses, which may have been the result of DHS officials rushing to buy as many warehouses as they could late last year.
Why say anything at all?: Maricopa County Supervisor Mark Stewart may have stretched the truth to its breaking point when he said “we attended” a memorial service for a detention officer who died in the line of duty, the New Times’ Morgan Fischer reports. It was a heartfelt message for a touching ceremony. Except it wasn’t true. Stewart’s staff attended the ceremony, but he didn’t. And now he’s having to field questions about why he would lie, especially when it’s no big deal for supervisors to not go to these ceremonies.
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“You want your bill on the board? Drop and give me 20!”
That’s the opening line in a video Republican Rep. Leo Biasiucci posted about the Arizona Legislature supporting the MAHA agenda, including reinstating the Physical Fitness Challenge for school kids.
It’s a slick video, with the “Rocky” theme playing in the background.
But we’d be a lot more convinced if the video showed lawmakers actually doing those 20 push-ups, instead of a couple quick clips of lawmakers with shaky arms doing one or two.1
It’d also help if Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr didn’t sound like he was about to keel over and die up there on the dais.
1 Fun fact: Former House Speaker Rusty Bowers once challenged a House page to a pushup contest. Bowers was 69 years old at the time, and did 59 pushups. But he still lost to the college-aged page, who did 69. Bowers demanded an audit of the final tally.