PHOENIX — Arizona voters will finalize the matchup in a hotly contested Senate race and set the stage for congressional races that could tip the balance of power and shape the future of both parties for years to come in the House.
And Arizona’s position on the front lines of fights and conspiracy theories about election results over the last four years will take center stage once again, as a top election official in Arizona’s largest county faces a primary after having defended it from critics since 2020.
Here’s what to watch for after the polls close at 10 p.m. ET Tuesday.
Setting up a critical Senate race
Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego, who is running uncontested in his primary, will officially learn his general election opponent — though he and GOP front-runner Kari Lake have been sparring for months under the assumption she will be her party’s nominee.
Lake, who has been endorsed by Donald Trump, has steadfastly refused to mention her nearest Republican rival, Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb, on the stump. When she was questioned about whether she would be open to debating Lamb in March, Lake said: “I am focusing on the general election. We feel very confident in what those poll numbers look like.”
The closest the two came to a formal debate was on May 23, when Lake and Lamb both participated in a virtual forum and Lake, an election denier, ripped on him for not sharing her unfounded theories.
“He’s a total coward when it comes to election integrity,” Lake said of Lamb’s refusal to reject the results of the election in 2020, when Joe Biden defeated Trump in Arizona and nationally.
“I don’t think Joe Biden got 81 million votes,” Lamb said at the forum. “But I don’t live in the world of feelings and thoughts. I live in the world of evidence, what you can prove in court beyond a reasonable doubt.”
While Lake is the heavy favorite in the primary, having outraised Lamb and snagged big-name endorsements from Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., Vivek Ramaswamy and more, some in the Arizona Republican establishment have expressed skepticism that her firebrand style will be successful in a general election. She narrowly lost the governor’s race in 2022.
Republican former Gov. Jan Brewer was complimentary of Lamb in an interview with KSAZ-TV of Phoenix this summer. Talking about Lake, Brewer had less favorable things to say: “There’s a lot of people that are unhappy with her. They don’t think that she is a truth teller and that she has changed her opinion on certain things. She goes to different rallies, she says different things to different audiences.”
Looking ahead to November, Gallego launched his Latino campaign coalition, Juntos con Gallego, on Monday. Speaking afterward, he agreed to debate Lake should she clinch the GOP primary.
“Unlike her, where she didn’t debate her opponent, we will gladly debate Kari Lake,” he said.
While Lake refuses to utter Lamb’s name, she has choice words for Gallego at every campaign stop, rotating insults from “swamp rat” to “deadbeat.”
A battle over who’s more loved by Trump
One of the most closely watched GOP primaries of the election features a battle between a pair of Trump acolytes who have both made him the most prominent feature of their campaigns in the 8th Congressional District.
Blake Masters, a financier who lost his 2022 Senate bid, and Abraham Hamadeh, who lost his 2022 race for state attorney general by just 280 votes (and has made unfounded claims that the race was stolen a centerpiece of his current campaign), are the front-runners in a race crowded with several other well-known Republicans. Also running are state House Speaker Ben Toma; former Rep. Trent Franks, who served in Congress for 16 years before he abruptly resigned in 2017, acknowledging at the time that he discussed surrogacy with two former female staffers; and state Sen. Anthony Kern, who was among 18 Trump aides and allies whom an Arizona grand jury indicted in April for their roles in the effort to overturn the 2020 election results in the state.
Hamadeh and Masters have been duking it out over who remains closer to Trump. Hamadeh won Trump’s endorsement in December, though Masters had for months touted that he had won Trump’s backing during his failed 2022 Senate bid. In an unusual move, Trump recast his endorsement in this year’s primary to throw support to both of them. Masters, like Vance, won major financial support from tech billionaire Peter Thiel in 2022.
The 8th District — in the northwest valley of the metropolitan Phoenix area with an older, retired population and a large chunk of evangelical Christians — is solidly Republican. Tuesday’s winner is all but certain to defeat likely Democratic nominee Greg Whitten in November.
Two of the closest House battlegrounds in the country
Former state Sen. Kirsten Engel is running uncontested in the Democratic primary in the swing 6th District, which covers a large chunk of the southeastern part of the state, including Tucson.
The race for the seat — currently held by Republican Juan Ciscomani, who is in his first term — is considered a toss-up by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report with Amy Walter. It is one of two toss-ups in Arizona, which could help decide control of the tightly divided House.
The match-up would be a repeat of the race in 2022, when Ciscomani defeated Engel by less than 2 percentage points.
Meanwhile, GOP Rep. David Schweikert is a heavy favorite in his primary against lesser-known and lesser-funded candidates in the 1st District. But across the aisle, the Democratic primary is tight, with six candidates in contention.
Locked in battle for the Democratic nomination for the seat Schweikert barely held in 2022 are Andrei Cherny, a businessman and former chair of the Arizona Democratic Party who previously ran for Congress; Amish Shah, a former member of the state House; Conor O’Callaghan, a businessman; Marlene Galán-Woods, a former television news broadcaster; Kurt Kroemer, a former Red Cross regional CEO; and Andrew Horne, a photographer and orthodontist.
As the only woman in her party’s primary, Galán-Woods is emblematic of a larger trend in congressional politics. The Rutgers University-based Center for American Women and Politics, the pre-eminent organization tracking the topic, found fewer women are running as major-party candidates for the House this year.
The race to succeed Gallego
Arizona’s 3rd District, currently represented by Gallego, has a rich Latino history: The area sent Arizona’s first Latino member of Congress, Ed Pastor, to Washington before Gallego continued that legacy, and now former state Democratic Party chair Raquel Terán hopes to extend it.
“We are making the case that we need to make sure that we have our voices heard in Congress,” Terán said in an interview Friday.
“Of course, this is a Democratic primary, and we welcome healthy competition. But what we don’t welcome is that Republican investors, donors that have bankrolled Donald Trump, are meddling in a Democratic primary,” Terán added, swiping at her primary opponent, Yassamin Ansari.
Ansari, a former Phoenix City Council member, has been backed by $1.3 million from the Protect Progress PAC, which has spent money backing Democratic candidates around the country — but whose cryptocurrency industry funders are also supporting Trump. In an interview with NBC affiliate KPNX of Phoenix, Ansari distanced herself from the donors.
“I’m not sure what they want,” Ansari told KPNX’s Brahm Resnick of her PAC supporters. “I ran for office because I hate Donald Trump. I cannot stand MAGA extremism.”
A big election about elections
In most counties, and in a previous time, the race for county recorder would not typically generate a whole lot of hoopla. Maricopa County is not most counties.
Stephen Richer, one of the most outspoken Republican defenders of election processes in the country, is simultaneously fighting to keep his job while preparing to manage the vote this fall in Maricopa, the largest county in battleground Arizona.
The Maricopa County recorder’s administrative role is vast, including processing deeds and overseeing the voter file and other parts of elections. Since 2020, that is what has captured the most attention.
After ballot printers and vote tabulation machines malfunctioned during Arizona’s 2022 election, baseless claims of malicious activity arose, and conspiracy theories about Richer, fueled by Lake, resulted in Richer’s facing death threats.
Richer has continued to face a slew of attacks to this day. Last month, he posted a video on X of Shelby Busch, the chair of Arizona’s delegation to the Republican National Convention this month, saying she would “lynch” him if she had the chance. The video stemmed from a livestreamed event on Rumble, a conservative video platform, in Mesa on March 20.
Richer’s main primary challenger is state Rep. Justin Heap, who has dodged questions about whether the 2020 election was fraudulent. But he has been endorsed by many of Arizona’s most prominent election deniers, including Lake.
Don Hiatt, a long-shot candidate who worked in information management technology, has more explicitly sown doubt about the 2020 election.
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