Yesterday was another random Tuesday in March — except in Tempe,1 where the near-East Valley suburb held its first local election since the city’s council has become haunted by a string of controversies and scandals.
But the preliminary results suggest that, controversies aside, at least one councilmember up for reelection will keep her seat: Arlene Chin.
Beyond that, there will be a runoff election in May — four candidates will duke it out for the remaining two open seats.
Let’s get into the math — bear with us, it’s far from simple.
Currently, it looks like 55,048 votes have been cast. To determine the threshold needed to win outright, you take that number and divide it by the number of seats up for grabs (three), and then divide that by two (for the >50% majority). What you get is about 9,235 votes.
If that number holds, Chin is the only candidate to top it — so she wins outright.
That leaves two seats up for grabs in the runoff election, and twice the number of candidates can compete.
Councilmembers Berdetta Hodge and Jennifer Adams qualified for the runoff ballot.
As did challengers Brooke St. George and Bobby Nichols.
Just like the election results: Arlene Chin in front as Brooke St. George creeps up behind. (TJ L’Heureux)
St. George — a progressive who used to work for Adams, whom she has publicly criticized for questionable political and personal conduct — actually got more votes than two of the incumbents, including her former boss.
That puts her in a good position to potentially knock one of them out in the runoff election.
And Nichols, a progressive leftist, didn’t trail the incumbents by much.
“I am so grateful for my volunteers, supporters, and staff,” Nichols said. “Our grassroots campaign is ready for the runoff!”
The other two challengers — MAGA-streaked entrepreneur Joe Forte and Tempe native and arts organizer Elvis Taska — followed behind. So they’re out of the running and can’t compete for the two remaining seats.
In a city of about 85,000 registered voters, turnout was extremely low — less than 25% as of last night — but that’s to be expected when elections don’t align with federal races.
Tempe has long been a mild, respectable political fiefdom with slightly left-of-center politics. But in recent years, it’s become a fascinating case study for tension between local government and residents.
The city’s councilmembers — who almost always vote in a 7-0 lockstep — have repeatedly given a cool middle finger to a vocal but growing group of constituents who oppose their operating style.
Since the last council election in 2024:
Its members were caught breaking open meetings law when they discussed a secret, taxpayer-funded program to monitor social media opposition from their residents. Specifically, they wanted to know about resistance to an initiative they were pushing that would have built a hockey arena and entertainment district in the city, which local critics painted as a land giveaway to wealthy developers.
A tape of the illegal executive session was released and showed the council members trashing their own constituents, calling one a “crazy uncle,” and laughing merrily when the consultant they hired called their critics “cave people” — based on the acronym, “citizens against virtually everything.” Juxtaposed to the council’s even-handed and proper public personas, the rhetoric revealed a Janus-faced private side to the council.
The council also garnered criticism for the city’s ongoing attempt to cite and arrest residents feeding homeless people in city parks.
But city officials eventually backed down on many of the cases, including those of local activists Ron Tapscott and Austin Davis, after intense backlash.
In July, the council voted 7-0 for a controversial new ordinance further restricting use of the parks, brazenly unfazed by the 77 people showing up to speak out against it.
And after citizens organized an initiative with enough signatures to send it to the ballot, its members backed down and repealed the law in another 7-0 vote.
The council has also founded itself in a $21 million budget shortfall pickle and hasn’t yet found a solution.
Still, none of this seems to have hurt the incumbents too badly.
Nor did a recent revelation that Hodge, a school board member, may have been involved in a hit-and-run. Records from the Tempe Police Department and the Mesa Police Department suggest as much, though the former Tempe employee she allegedly hit did not press charges and only wanted a police report written for insurance purposes.
It’s worth noting that plenty of Tempe voters had already mailed in their ballots by the time that news broke a few weeks ago.
Jack Maverik, a Tempe resident who interviewed the four challenger candidates in a spoof series channeling Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis (the incumbents declined to participate), expressed disappointment in the results.
“The overall voting base of Tempe is full of cowards who fear change and pretend to be powerless to change the status quo,” Maverik said. “This election was an opportunity for change but instead we got the same old bullshit. Pathetic.”
With the final runoff election taking place in the coming months and ending on May 18, Nichols and St. George still have the opportunity to take it to the remaining incumbents — and St. George especially appears to have a good shot with her performance yesterday.
But yesterday’s results suggest that there will not be a strong wave of revolution rising up against the current Tempe City Council. The next round is likely to be just as close.
Making 2020 Great Again: Homeland Security Investigations, a branch of ICE under the Department of Homeland Security that usually investigates cartels and human smuggling (and, more recently, busts low-level immigrants outside Home Depots), is conducting its own investigation of the 2020 election — separate from the FBI’s investigation, Yvonne Wingett Sanchez reports in the Atlantic. While the FBI subpoenaed the state Senate for Cyber Ninjas audit records, HSI sought records from the state Attorney General’s Office about former AG Mark Brnovich’s probe of the 2020 election, which also found there was no widespread fraud and Joe Biden won the state.
“The Attorney General’s Office spent 10,000 hours investigating every claim made by election deniers, from bamboo ballots imported from China to Italian spy satellites flipping votes to President Biden,” Mayes’s office said.
Guess we better be nicer to him: Republican Sen. Jake Hoffman, one of the 2020 fake electors, got his gun rights restored, USA Today reports. He’s one of 22 people who had their right to bear arms restored recently by the U.S. Justice Department — rights he lost because he’s still facing a state indictment for being a fake elector (even though Donald Trump already pardoned him for any federal crimes). And there may be a whole lot of felons getting their guns back after Trump signed an executive order last year aimed at expanding gun rights.
Speaking of Hoffman: As Turning Point USA sets its sights on the Salt River Project board, the April election will serve as a barometer of the group’s political power ahead of the November election, Politico’s Energy & Environment writes in a profile of the dynamics of the race.
“The SRP territories, they’re pretty blue,” Turning Point Action COO Tyler Bowyer said. “If we can get turnout and activate the toughest place in the state for us right now, that could play a huge role for us later on in November.”
Scary times: The Maricopa County Attorney’s Office and a judge allowed a man who allegedly shot at a Democratic Party office in Tempe multiple times in 2024 to take off his ankle bracelet as he awaits trial, the Republic’s Perry Vandell reports. Prosecutors say Jeffrey Michael Kelly was “preparing to commit an act of mass casualty,” after feds found him with a whole lot of guns and ammo, a grenade launcher and a bag of white powder labeled “poison.” Kelly has brain cancer, which his lawyers argue might explain his behavior.
Welcome to the news biz, Kyrsten: Former U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, last spotted on a marriage-wrecking psychedelic bender with her employee, has a new gig as a columnist for the conservative news site Washington Reporter, per the Washington Reporter.
Scottsdale Republican Rep. Joseph Chaplik resigned from the state Legislature to run for Congress, and the precinct committeemen in his district picked three possible replacements for him on Monday night.
The three potential new lawmakers are: Michelle Ugenti-Rita, George Khalaf and Cody Reim.
Khalaf is a longtime Republican pollster and political consultant. Reim unsuccessfully ran for a seat on the Cave Creek Unified School District Governing Board in 2024.
And Ugenti-Rita has zero chance of being appointed to the seat, even though she represented the area for more than a decade.2 3
That’s because the ultimate decision falls to the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors — and by tradition, the decision is specifically up to the supervisor who represents the same area as the lawmaker.
That would be Republican Supervisor Thomas Galvin.
Ugenti-Rita attempted to unseat Galvin in the 2024 primary election for the board of supervisors. She lost by about 13 percentage points.
But she sure did go down swinging!
Just check out her tweets about him.
1 And Pima County, which held an election on whether to renew its regional transportation tax. See our sister newsletter, the Tucson Agenda, for details.
2 In case that name rings a bell and you don’t remember why, it was probably the sexual harassment stuff. Ugenti Rita was both a victim of sexual harassment and a perpetrator of it at the Capitol. She also ran for Secretary of State in 2022, though she came in fourth place in a four-way GOP primary.
3 Ugenti pledged to not run for the seat in November, which usually gives a potential appointee a leg up, since supervisors often shy away from appointing someone who is running for the office because they don’t want to give a candidate the power of incumbency and be seen as picking winners and losers in the upcoming election. She’s running for a seat on the Scottsdale City Council in November instead.