Something is weird about Justine Wadsack

Former state Sen. Vince Leach wants his seat back, and this time, he’s not holding back.

​​In his legislative bio, former Arizona lawmaker Vince Leach attributes his favorite quote to Thomas Jefferson’s “All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." 

Now, in a series of campaign ads, the Republican has taken on a new mantra: “Something is weird about Justine Wadsack.” 

In 2022, Leach’s eight-year stint in the state Legislature was suddenly halted by a hard-line conservative newcomer who is rarely seen without a coat of bright red lipstick and pristinely trimmed bangs. 

Leach is a 75-year-old Vietnam veteran who came to Arizona in 2009 with plans to retire from investments in church bonds. But Arizona didn’t allow people to purchase them, so he worked his way from the Arizona Corporation Commission to the governor to legalize the bonds in what he calls the beginning of his political career. Leach has chaired key committees and championed tax cuts, including the flat income tax rate lawmakers passed in 2021. 

More recently, he’s pushed bills that would have outlawed children attending drag shows and prevented municipalities from banning conversion therapy. But the goalposts have been moved, and these days, being business-friendly isn’t enough to stay in the base’s good graces.

“Since the advent of the Freedom Caucus ... I became a RINO,” he tells us.

Leach lives in the quiet community of Saddlebrook, a land of golf carts and retirees that’s technically across the county line from the district’s population base in the surrounding communities of Oro Valley, Marana and stretches of north and east Tucson. 

Wadsack is a native Tucsonan who worked for an online entertainment magazine that once featured Rob Zombie and then as a production manager for the whimsical brand of Lisa Frank, which were both clearly big influences in her sparkle-goth aesthetic. She used to play with an ’80s cover band and was part owner of The Independent Distillery, a bar that closed amid ownership issues Wadsack was sued over.

In fact, she’s sued and been sued at least 10 times. She once sought an injunction prohibiting harassment against a Vail School Board Member after Wadsack joined a group that forced their way into a school board meeting to protest mask mandates while usurping the school board and claiming to elect their own replacements. 

She spent her first term joining the far-right Freedom Caucus and pushing bills trying to keep sexually explicit material out of libraries. And she’s the only Republican senator the Arizona Chamber of Commerce didn’t endorse this year. They opted for Leach, the traditional fiscal conservative, instead. 

Leach had a strong eight-year run, and he didn’t take his 2022 loss easily.  But he’s tired of being “grumpy” about it, he told us.

“Instead of grumbling … I’m going to do something. I can, and I have the wherewithal to work at low wages,” he said.

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The race is one of the most high-profile Republican grudge matches in Arizona. 

At stake is not only one battle in the Republican civil war between MAGA and old-school conservatives, but potentially partisan control of the district and the entire state Senate. 

And Leach is giving his opponent no quarter in the fight. 

The campaign ads Leach launched point to Wadsack’s conspiracy theories about the 2022 Uvalde mass school shooting and that 9/11 was an “inside job.” 

Wadsack frequently spreads outlandish, far-right talking points. She recently doubled down on the claims, which were debunked by the National Institutes of Health, that the antiparasitic drug Ivermectin is a “remedy that beat COVID (from home).” She once Tweeted that unlike many of her conservative colleagues, she thinks “QAnon is bullshit.” But she also once tweeted the unofficial slogan of the QAnon movement. 

Wadsack told us Leach is using “Democratic talking points against me” and denied that she spread 9/11 or Uvalde conspiracies.

Both instances are documented online.¹

During their 2022 matchup, Leach’s supporters took Wadsack to court to argue she didn’t even live in the district and therefore wasn’t eligible to be its senator. But that standard of proof is notoriously hard to prove, and residency cases against accused carpetbaggers rarely succeed.  

Wadsack’s longtime family home is in neighboring LD20, a Democratic stronghold. She used that address in a failed bid for a state Senate seat in 2020 and when she began collecting nominating petitions for her 2022 race. 

But she eventually switched her address to a house just a mile from the family residence and claimed she rented a room in LD17 to protect her disabled stepdaughter and husband from Antifa. Wadsack said a member of the anti-fascist group unleashed a dog on her husband, among a variety of other absurd threats made by people wearing "masks, goggles, hoodies, helmets and backpacks."

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LD17 stretches from southern Pinal County to southeast Tucson in Pima County. It’s capped by Leach’s quiet retirement community in Saddlebrook near the northern tip, and suburban neighborhoods in Marana to the west, among wide swaths of rural land and ranches. It houses the University of Arizona’s bioscience hub in Oro Valley and military families near the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base to the east.  

A combination of redistricting, an evolving population base and shifts in conservatism has changed who the area’s voters have elected over the years. 

In the late 2000s, the area was represented by notable centrists, like Democratic Rep. Nancy Young Wright and Republican Rep. Pete Hershberger. With the rise of the Tea Party wave thereafter, the area began electing the likes of former Republican Rep. Terri Proud and her brand of problematic statements. 

The 2011 redistricting cycle made the area considerably redder. Voters elected Mark Finchem, who would become a paragon of Trumpism, to the House in 2014. And the 2021 redistricting cycle that formed current-day LD17 carved out boundaries with the most conservative voters in the area. The Southern Arizona Leadership Council and others in the business community fought and won to get a Republican stronghold in Pima County. 

But the district became so red, it seemed to outgrow the business-minded likes of Leach, and voters elected the MAGA-minded likes of Wadsack and her House seatmates Reps. Rachel Jones and Cory McGarr.

That’s all in spite of continued questions of whether Wadsack even lives in the conservative district.

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While Leach didn’t win his residency case in court last year, he’s hoping to win in the court of public opinion this year with the help of Chris Baker, a longtime political strategist and Leach’s political consultant in his comeback bid.

The Leach campaign has some additional fodder: Wadsack’s reimbursement reports for the miles she’s driving to and from the Capitol. 

Out of all 30 state Senators, Wadsack took home the fourth highest reimbursement amount from Jan. 1 to June 13 this year. Taxpayers reimbursed her $9,021 for 13,464 miles traveled to and from the Capitol, according to Senate records. 

Both Wadsack and Rep. David Cook’s home addresses are exactly 137 miles away from the Capitol. But Cook drove about half as many miles and was reimbursed about half as much. 

Based on the home address she lists on her nominating petitions, Wadsack did about 51 round trips from the Capitol and back in 24 weeks.

Last year, she took home $15,971 in mileage reimbursement. That’s on top of her salary as a public servant, and the additional $44,738 she pulled in in “per diem” pay. 

In total, Wadsack earned almost $84,000 last year from a part-time job that ostensibly pays $24,000 per year. 

In 2021, Lawmakers gave a massive raise to the “per diem” pay taxpayers issue to rural legislators, boosting out-of-town lawmakers' pay to $252 a day² from $60. The move was hailed as a way to more fairly reimburse out-of-county lawmakers for longer trips to the Capitol and finding a place to stay in Phoenix while in session.

Last year, lawmakers from outside Maricopa County made four times as much in per diem subsistence payments than those in the county, the Arizona Mirror found.

By all appearances, Wadsack is getting the best of both worlds by routinely traveling home to the Tucson area after working at the Capitol this session. That allows her to claim both the additional mileage and the additional “per diem” pay meant to make up for having to live in Phoenix part-time during the legislative session, without paying for an actual residence in town. 

In January 2023, Wadsack posted a photo that she said was from her “Tempe apartment.” She told us that was a temporary Airbnb and that she’s “not paying the rent fees, prices when I make $24,000 a year to go live in Phoenix.” 

Senate records show Wadsack made $44,003 through June 13 this year in subsistence pay and mileage reimbursements alone. 

We asked Wadsack why she made such frequent trips. 

“Because I have a frickin’ right to. Why should I have to go rent an apartment in Phoenix? Do you think that that's even worse? Doesn't that put me not living in my district at that point?” she said. 

When we asked Senate President Warren Petersen if he approved of Wadsack’s miles, which suggest she was making frequent trips from Tucson instead of Phoenix, he told us, “Of course. That's what she was doing.”

But he didn’t reply to our inquiry about whether all lawmakers are allowed to make unlimited trips on taxpayers’ dime.

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Wadsack beat Leach in the 2022 primary by just 2,168 votes. And she beat her Democratic opponent Mike Nickerson by a little over 3,000 votes in the general election. 

The margins were close enough that LD17 is now one of a handful of districts that Democrats are eyeing to take over in their plan to win control of the Legislature next year. 

But in many ways, Democrats’ chances of winning LD17’s Senate seat hinges on the primary Senate race between Leach and Wadsack. 

For two years, Democrats have been preparing their dossiers against Wadsack, whose conspiratorial tweets and strange outbursts make her a juicy target for attack ads. 

During her first year in office, Democrats ran a recall campaign against her. And while it failed to garner the necessary number of signatures to force an election, it got them fired up and organized to take her on in November. 

Demonizing Leach as a too-radical right-winger in the vein of Donald Trump will be a much harder task for Democrats. But Wadsack’s “America First” spirit is more in line with the Republican Party base these days, and as an incumbent who achieved the rare feat of ousting an incumbent, she’s still the likely frontrunner in the primary.  

She beat Leach two years ago, and she’s confident she can do it again. 

But Leach, whose tailored political skills led him to legalize the church bonds he came to Arizona to retire for, isn’t ready to hang up his suit. 

“I remember when I first started on this race, Baker (the consultant) said, ‘You really want to do this? You could retire now and just walk away and say I had a good run.’  And I did. And I was fortunate,” Leach said. “I was given an opportunity, and I took advantage of it. Now I just don't like what's happening. And so I have to get off the couch and do something.”

1. Wadsack entertained a Facebook comment that called the Uvalde shooting a “false flag” and liked several Tweets spreading 9/11 conspiracies.

2. The annual rate changes year to year, since it’s based on ​​a formula the federal government uses to pay to employees traveling on official business.