The primary power test

In the words of ABC15 reporter Garrett Archer, last night’s primary elections in Arizona were “silky smooth.”

Just a few days ago, President Donald Trump tried to convince the nation in a primetime Oval Office speech that America’s election systems were overrun by foreign interference (and that the 2020 election was stolen from him) while presenting no new evidence of that meddling.

Yet, this election ran seamlessly. We basically know most of the winners at this point — and in the GOP primaries, most of them are from the further-right wing of the party that’s been crying afoul on election integrity.

So where was all that fraud and chaos and mayhem in this primary election?

There was little to be found — but not for lack of trying. The election conspiracy crowd was fired up, vigilant and ready to prove the whole thing is cooked!

GOP operative Scott Presler said machines were down at a Mountain View voting site in Scottsdale — but it turned out that wasn’t true, per county elections officials.

Besides an internet connectivity issue affecting “about four” voters in Maricopa County, the only actual fluke seems to be that Republican Navajo County Recorder David Marshall somehow failed to get about 1,000 mail ballots to voters in Navajo County, per Bloomberg’s Jimmy Jenkins, which federal and state officials are investigating.

And, ironically, the Arizona Mirror dropped a story yesterday that disqualified Republican House candidate Neil DeSanti was indicted earlier this month for illegally voting.

That’s about it.

We’re still waiting on some of Maricopa County’s in-person Election Day votes to be tallied, but most of the big races were blowouts.

So surely, they were rigged.

As expected, it was a Bigg win for Andy.

The Associated Press called the race for Trump-backed Congressman Andy Biggs a few minutes after the first results dropped on Tuesday night.

Republican primary voters had four candidates to choose from in the race to face Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs this November, but the contest was largely viewed as a showdown between two congressmen: Biggs and David Schweikert.

And the only real question was: How bigly would Biggs win?

Prediction markets were bullish on his potential margin of victory, putting the forecast at more than a 50 percentage point margin — meaning Biggs would take, for example, 75% of the vote to Schweikert’s 25%.

It wasn’t just the contest for the gubernatorial nomination — the GOP’s Turning Point-driven right wing also notched victories for the three other most important statewide offices (though the organization didn’t technically endorse in one race).

Given Arizona’s status as a purple state and Trump’s growing unpopularity, it’s fair to assume the Democratic incumbents and candidates were celebrating that fact merrily last night.

In the battle to take on Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, Republican Rep. Alex Kolodin handily bested former state Republican Party Chair Gina Swoboda. As of last night, Kolodin led by a margin of 60%-40%.

Last week, we profiled the race, which was rich with smack talk and served as a dynamic contrast between:

The race was interesting from the very beginning: Kolodin announced his candidacy with an endorsement from Swoboda, which she insisted she didn’t actually give him.

Kolodin argued that Swoboda was a Democrat-in-disguise. Swoboda argued that Kolodin can’t possibly win a general election.

And the general consensus in that Kolodin’s chances in November are slim.

You can get to know the GOP’s nominee a little better by checking out our 2024 “Drinking with Alex Kolodin” interview, in which we knocked back a few drinks with the lawmaker, who compared himself to Socrates and insisted that former President George W. Bush stole the 2004 election (he said he knew this because Bush’s dad was a one-time director of the CIA).

In response to her loss, Swoboda sent us an unsolicited link to Crowded House’s 1986 hit “Don’t Dream It’s Over” — which she told us in a March interview she could listen to “every minute of every day” for the rest of her life and “still be happy.”

In the race to challenge Democratic Attorney General Kris Mayes, Senate President Warren Petersen is poised to hand perennial candidate Rodney Glassman yet another loss.

The margin was 56%-44% as of last night.

Both candidates have virtually no experience in prosecution. Glassman works mostly in commercial litigation and touted a bit of work in the United States Air Force Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps Reserve, in which he prosecuted cases related to service members’ misbehavior.

Petersen became a lawyer in 2023 when he was admitted to the State Bar of Arizona.

Interestingly, Petersen didn’t actually get Turning Point’s endorsement in the race against Glassman — whom he attacked by pointing to the fact that Glassman used to be a Democrat when he served on Tucson City Council.

It looks like Republican voters gave Superintendent Tom Horne the boot.

State Treasurer Kimberly Yee leads the race by a margin of 53%-47%, and she will face off against Teresa Leyba Ruiz in the general election.

Horne has been a major figure in Arizona politics for decades — he previously served as AG and superintendent before making his comeback as superintendent in 2022. He’s also been plagued by a number of scandals, such as making taxpayer-funded employees work for his campaign and getting in a hit-and-run while he was with an employee he was having an affair with — which is only known because FBI agents, who were investigating campaign finance violations, saw it.

Yee was the only other notable statewide Republican candidate to win election in 2022, which lots of GOP pundits attribute to her fairly smooth, low-key campaign.

She operated the same way in this race — but from the beginning, she had the backing of the Freedom Caucus, whose leaders think Horne isn’t doing enough to protect the controversial school voucher Empower Scholarship Accounts (ESA) program from pesky oversight.

The most jarring moment of the contest was just a few weeks ago when a racist ad attacking Yee caught everyone’s attention.

It’s looking like that note is one of the last in the beautifully bumbling symphony that is Tom Horne’s political career.

Democrats are increasingly hopeful they’ll finally wrest control of Arizona’s Legislature from Republicans this year, but a new progressive coalition is trying to shape which Democrats make up that potential majority — with mixed results.

Progressive Sen. Analise Ortiz helped organize the “No Safe Seats” campaign to oust Democratic lawmakers whom the group argues have drifted too far to the right and have voted too often with Republican lawmakers.

The effort officially backed four legislative candidates challenging more moderate Democratic incumbents across three districts.

In Ortiz's home district, the West Valley's LD24, progressives Alberto Flores and Lisbeth Arescurenaga beat incumbent Lydia Hernandez and her ally on the Cartwright Unified School District, Rosa Cantu, by a wide margin.

But the movement lost steam in Tucson, where sisters Alma and Consuelo Hernandez won the LD20 Senate and LD21 House races, respectively. Our sister newsletter, the Tucson Agenda, has more on the messy contests.

Consuelo topped the LD21 field, but the second House nomination remained too close to call. The Hernandi sister was No Safe Seats’ target, but democratic socialist Miranda Lopez could instead oust the district’s other incumbent, Stephanie Stahl Hamilton. Lopez led Stahl Hamilton by less than one percentage point Tuesday night.

While separate from No Safe Seats, similar insurgent campaigns from democratic socialists have succeeded in other states’ primaries this year. Closer to home, an openly democratic socialist candidate won a seat on the Tempe City Council earlier this year.

The progressive revolt also reached one of Arizona’s congressional seats, but activist Kai Newkirk handily lost his long-shot challenge to Democratic U.S. Rep. Greg Stanton.

Newkirk argued that the 4th Congressional District deserved a more progressive, less corporate- and AIPAC-aligned representative. Voters were apparently unconvinced: As of Tuesday night, Stanton led by 30 percentage points.

After its unsuccessful attempt to take over SRP’s board this spring, Turning Point found a much friendlier electorate in Tuesday’s Republican primary.

Its preferred candidates won or led nearly every major statewide race, perhaps most notably in its backing of Biggs for the GOP’s gubernatorial nomination.

Kolodin, a leading voice in Arizona’s election-conspiracy movement, secured the secretary of state nomination over Swoboda, who purposely positioned herself outside of Turning Point’s orbit. And Yee’s lead over Horne in the race for state superintendent suggests Turning Point successfully turned even the prospect of tighter ESA oversight into a political liability.

As Yee prepares to vacate the state treasurer’s office, Turning Point’s preferred replacement, business executive Elijah Norton, won the GOP nomination to succeed her. He defeated Arizona State Board of Education President Katherine Haley, whom Yee had endorsed as her successor.

Turning Point didn’t formally endorse in the attorney general’s race between Petersen and perennial candidate Glassman, but its PAC spent money supporting Petersen.

The Turning Point-backed former Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb — a prolific dick-pic-sender who has recently caught heat for threatening and intimidating women on the receiving end of those X-rated photos of his fleshy firearm — also easily won his primary contest in Arizona’s 5th Congressional District, even as it’s become pretty clear that he lives in Tennessee. Lamb is poised to cruise to a November victory in the deep-red district, which would make him the most notable and publicly verified swinger in Congress.

Turning Point’s influence was more uneven in the Republican primaries for legislative seats.

LD3 (Scottsdale, Fountain Hills, Cave Creek): The four-way GOP primary for LD3’s two open House seats included two Turning Point picks: George Khalaf, a longtime conservative consultant, and Cody Reim, who was appointed to replace former Rep. Joseph Chaplik after Chaplik resigned to run for Congress earlier this year.

Khalaf topped the field in early results, while former Fountain Hills Mayor Jay Schlum initially held second place before Reim pulled ahead later in the night. Schlum — who previously declined to pledge allegiance to the hard-line conservative Freedom Caucus — slipped to third, ahead of Air Force veteran Thomas Walsh.

LD7 (northeastern Arizona): Former Republican Rep. David Cook blamed his 2024 loss to MAGA Sen. Wendy Rogers on his further-right opponent securing a Trump endorsement.

This time, Cook faced two lesser-known, MAGA-aligned challengers — Andrew Costanzo and Barby Ingle — in his bid to return to the House. Early results showed Cook holding the second nomination by a wide margin, while moderate incumbent Rep. Walt Blackman led the four-way primary.

LD10 (Mesa): Last week, Turning Point-aligned activists attacked House candidate Ciara Anderson over her discharge from the Air Force, which she has previously linked to her struggles with drug addiction at the time. The smear campaign appeared to backfire, as more moderate Republicans lined up in her defense — on Twitter, at least.

At the ballot box, early results showed Anderson losing to Turning Point-backed incumbent Rep. Justin Olson, chief financial officer for the group’s advocacy arm, and James Rogers, an attorney for Stephen Miller’s America First Legal.

LD17 Senate (Tucson, Oro Valley): Christopher King won the GOP nomination over Turning Point-backed Anthony Dunham, whose campaign was dogged by child abuse allegations earlier this year.

LD27 (Glendale, west Phoenix): Republican Sen. Kevin Payne was narrowly leading fake elector and former Sen. Anthony Kern last night. Kern currently works for Turning Point Action, and earned its endorsement.

Scottsdale and North Phoenix are home to one of the country’s most closely watched congressional races — the battle to replace 16-year GOP Congressman David Schweikert, who was utterly crushed last night in his quest to be governor.

The primary contests for both parties in Arizona’s 1st Congressional District have been a fixation of political junkies across the nation. For several cycles, Democrats have dreamed of flipping the suburban, wealthy district into their column.

With Schweikert out, could it be their year?

On the Democrats’ side, emergency physician and former state Rep. Amish Shah seems to have beaten Marlene Galán-Woods, a former journalist who also lost to Shah last cycle.

Despite picking up a controversial endorsement from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee — Washington, D.C. Democrats’ campaign arm that focuses on winning swing seats — Galán-Woods was actually losing to Shah by a wider margin this year. The DCCC made the decision to pick horses in the several primaries across the country — a new strategy that left plenty of Dem politicos scratching their heads.

Outside groups spent more than $1.5 million on anti-Shah ads — ten times the amount that was spent opposing Galán-Woods.

In the end, Shah’s name recognition in the district and a prolific, years-long door-knocking operation outweighed national Dems’ air support.

Shah will take on former Trump-endorsed Republican and former NFL kicker Jay Feely — who will soundly defeat former state lawmaker and Freedom Caucus member Joseph Chaplik.

We covered the fascinating dynamics of the GOP primary in March, and Feely’s easy victory reveals quite a bit about the MAGA movement.

Chaplik accused Feely of “importing Haitians” as a reference to Feely’s humanitarian work helping Haitian migrants get documented status in the United States, playing off the 2024 cycle’s nonsense about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Ohio.

While Chaplik is arguably far more right-wing and experienced in the nitty-gritty of legislating the MAGA agenda, he was no match for Feely’s celebrity power, status as Trump’s golden candidate and long list of deep-pocketed professional sports backers.

The Feely v. Shah matchup is set to be one of the most interesting races in Arizona and across the country — not least of all because the two have actually worked together before.

The No Labels Party — which briefly rebranded as the Arizona Independent Party before being forced to change its name back — produced perhaps the night’s strangest result.

Scottsdale health care executive Hugh Lytle, who poured more than $1 million of his own money into a centrist-branded campaign, was trailing Teri Hourihan, a counselor and prolific social media poster, by more than 1,000 votes Tuesday night (or about 11 percentage points in that party’s primary).