The last meeting former Arizona Republican Party Chair Gina Swoboda presided over was a pretty good summation of the organization she’s leaving behind: internal infighting, procedural chaos and at least one furry accusation.
But after a nearly 12-hour-long Mandatory Meeting of the GOP’s state committee members, it’s Sergio Arellano’s problem now.
Republican committee members elected Arellano at Saturday’s painfully long meeting in Prescott Valley, which took so long partly because state committee members hand-counted the more than 1,000 votes.
He’s got the resume: Arellano is a senior adviser for the state House’s Republican majority, an Iraq combat veteran and a Trump campaign alum who worked on Latino outreach.
But if Saturday’s meeting was any preview, he’s inheriting Swoboda’s biggest headache: the far-right crowd doesn’t like him.
Republican committee members hold up pink slips to vote during the Mandatory Meeting.
The pre-meeting power struggle
The Arizona Republican Party meets every other year in January to elect its officers and handle official party-related business. Unofficially, the concourse turns into a political flea market, with cardboard cutouts of Donald Trump posed for photo ops and sequinned “47” jackets for sale.
Republican candidates also show up to staff their booths and court votes.
A lot of committee members complained that this year’s meeting was in Prescott, a much further drive than the usual venue at Phoenix’s Dream City Church. Still, the arena filled up with MAGA hats and political hopefuls — including the three top contenders for the GOP gubernatorial nomination.
Swoboda’s replacement was the main topic of this year’s meeting. She stepped aside to focus on a run for Arizona’s 1st Congressional District seat, newly open after U.S. Rep. David Schweikert launched a gubernatorial bid.
Since she took the gavel in 2024, Swoboda has faced steady blowback from the party’s hard-right faction. Freedom Caucus leader Sen. Jake Hoffman became one of her loudest critics, especially when she suggested Arizona’s universal school voucher program could use some oversight.
The intraparty fight followed Swoboda to the end, and it set the tone for a pretty chaotic meeting.
Arizona GOP chair Gina Swoboda holds up a boxing glove trophy that committee members presented her before she announced the first round of votes for a chair to replace her.
The night before the chair vote, Swoboda announced several people would no longer be recognized as state committee members, which would make them ineligible to run as her replacement.
She said the party had received several threats of litigation over “fractional reserve appointments,” a disputed appointment method that essentially rounds up leftover committee slots and fills them with party picks.
Hoffman and his Turning Point-aligned allies have criticized the appointment method. Coincidentally, that’s also the method that was used to appoint Arellano, who went on to win the chair race.
Arellano was one of the few contenders not clearly aligned with the far-right faction, which instead preferred former Scottsdale school board member Pam Kirby.
And while the far-righters didn’t explicitly take credit for the litigation threat that drove Swoboda to make the announcement, the legal letter came from elections lawyer Tim La Sota, who’s representing Hoffman in his fake electors case.
Before the meeting, Arellano blamed the ordeal on both Swoboda and the far-right crowd.
“There were signals of the chairwoman wanting to run and get the support to run from the floor. So I was expecting some sort of maneuver,” he told us. “And then we knew that there was a faction of the party that was trying to challenge my status in the first place.”
Ultimately, Swoboda shut down efforts by other committee members to keep her on as chair.
And committee members voted to restore the disputed appointments anyway.
A crossroads
Saturday’s meeting was messy from the start.
As the check-in process delayed the official proceedings, Republicans waiting in the crowd rumbled about the rumors: Swoboda booted Arenallo from the ballot to try to hold onto the chair position.
But others, like Southern Arizona-based Committeeman Michael Harris, were already fed up with the infighting.
“To me, all the drama just drives me nuts,” he told us. “I look at what (Swoboda) accomplished, and we did better in this last election cycle under her than we've done in my time of being a (precinct committeeman).”
But Swoboda took advantage of the delay to deliver an ad-libbed exit speech that didn’t feel anything like a reelection pitch. Instead, she implored Republicans to work together to keep Democrats out of office and candidly addressed the controversies that marked her tenure.
A sign outside the Findlay Toyota Center in Prescott, where the Arizona Republican Party held its 2026 Mandatory Meeting.
Swoboda clapped back at her critics as she explained why she supports more oversight of the school voucher program.
The vast majority of voucher recipients use them the right way, she said, but the media focuses on the salacious headlines.
“What we don't want to do, in my opinion, is say ‘Absolutely we don't need anyone to look at the fact that somebody bought a diamond ring. It's perfectly fine that you bought a steampunk leather corset,’” Swoboda said. “No, it's not perfectly fine.”
She joked about “so many attempted coups” during her chairmanship, then ended her impromptu remarks with marching orders.
“Please remember that you do care about each other,” she said. “And just try to lift each other up, no matter what happens.”
Some Republicans at the meeting didn’t take her up on that.
Before the meeting started, the arena’s screens played an attack ad against Pam Kirby and highlighted the controversies that plagued her time on the Scottsdale school board.
Former Republican Sen. Anthony Kern took to the microphone to announce that one of the candidates for Sergeant at Arms used to be a furry.
And for about two hours, committee members took turns at the microphone to litigate motions, amend motions and debate whether the motions they were debating were motions at all.
But for all the efforts by Turning Point and the Freedom Caucus types to steer the day, the broader room didn’t fully follow its lead.
After neither Arellano nor Kirby cleared the majority threshold in the first round of votes for chair, third-place candidate Kathleen Winn, who also had far-right backing, urged her supporters to vote for Arellano to end the stalemate.
And Arellano, despite the far-right’s opposition, took home the chair position in a 761-621 vote.
“Right now, our party is at a crossroads,” Arenello said during his speech before the first round of votes. “Internal division is costing us energy, donors, volunteers and victories. This has to stop.”
Talking Minneapolis: The committee members at the Arizona GOP’s meeting on Saturday weren’t too sympathetic about a Border Patrol agent shooting and killing Alex Pretti in Minneapolis that day. A woman from Kingman quoted a slogan of the right, “FAFO (Fuck Around and Find Out),” while another said “I’m sorry, if you’re at home and not interfering, you don’t get maced,” the Republic’s Stephany Murray reports. On the other side of the political aisle, the shooting helped spur Arizona’s Democratic Sens. Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego to say they’ll vote against a spending bill for the Department of Homeland Security, the parent agency of both the Border Patrol and ICE, per the Republic’s Ronald J. Hansen.
Speaking of ICE: Fear is reverberating through Arizona’s immigrant communities a year into the second Trump administration, Alisa Reznick reports for KJZZ, with some worried about disappearing if they are detained. As federal immigration agents descend on Arizona, the Phoenix Police Department sent out a news release to alleviate some of those fears, and help the public gauge who’s police and who’s ICE. That clarification comes shortly after an internal memo, obtained by the Associated Press, showed ICE has been telling its new hires they have the right to enter homes without a judge’s warrant, an assertion that flies in the face of the U.S. Constitution.
Brad’s bad news week: The Pinal County County Board of Supervisors is trying to void the 287(g) agreement that County Attorney Brad Miller cut with ICE last summer, Gloria Rebecca Gomez reports for the Arizona Mirror. Miller pushed back a few days later, saying a “press statement” from the supervisors “does not terminate a federal agreement.” The kerfuffle with the supervisors comes as the Phoenix New Times’ Stephen Lemons reports Miller has been lying about using encrypted messaging app Signal to shield his his communications from public records laws. It’s another “L” for Miller after Lemons reported that Miller had been hit with claims of sex discrimination, which happened on the same day protesters with tubas and drums drowned out Miller’s pro-ICE press conference outside the Legislature.
We’re bringin’ measles back: Twelve new measles cases have been confirmed in the first three weeks of the year, the Arizona Republic’s Stephanie Innes reports. That brings Arizona’s total to 228 cases since August. While most have been confirmed in rural Mohave County, urban centers in Maricopa, Pima and Coconino counties have recently seen cases — including one in a fully vaccinated person. It’s the first time in decades that measles has reached some of these areas.
Wouldn’t it be cool if we brought back local news
instead of formerly eliminated diseases?
Great, do Christians next: Republican Rep. John Gillette of Kingman wants to pass a formal resolution declaring the Council on American-Islamic Relations — a fairly tame organization advocating against Islamophobia — as a terrorist organization, Jerod MacDonald-Evoy of the Arizona Mirror reports. It would have no practical effect. Gillette, who represents Kingman, has been known for making a number of Islamophobic comments, including saying that Muslims are “fucking savages.”
Republicans who want to be the next attorney general of Arizona are calling on AG Kris Mayes to resign after her comments last week about how she fears that a masked, plainclothes ICE agent might get shot breaking into someone’s house, considering Arizona’s strong gun culture and strong “Stand Your Ground” laws.
And while Mayes is clearly not resigning, her police liaison did, the Republic’s Stacey Barchenger reports.
David Harvey, the office's law enforcement liaison, quit on Friday after Mayes’ comments started gaining traction online and in Republican circles.
The office won’t say why he quit.
But it’s a pretty safe assumption that Mayes’ comments had something to do with it.