PHOENIX — Arizona voters will finalize the race in a tight Senate race and set the stage for congressional races that could tip the balance of power and shape the future of both parties in the coming years in the House.
And Arizona’s position on the front lines of fights and conspiracy theories over election results over the past four years will take center stage once again, as a top election official in Arizona’s largest county faces a primary after defending it from critics since 2020.
Here’s what to watch out for after polls close at 10pm ET on Tuesday. Preparing a critical Senate race
Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego, who is running uncontested in his primary, will officially meet his opponent in the general election — even though he and GOP front-runner Kari Lake have been feuding for months under the assumption that she will be his nominee. broken.
Lake, who has been endorsed by Donald Trump, flatly refused to mention her closest Republican rival, Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb, on the stump. When she was asked if she would be open to debating Lamb in March, Lake said: “I’m focusing on the general election. We feel very confident in what those poll numbers will look like.”
The closest the two came to a formal debate was on May 23, when Lake and Lamb participated in a virtual forum and Lake, an election denier, criticized him for not sharing his baseless theories.
“He’s a total coward when it comes to election integrity,” Lake said of Lamb’s refusal to reject the results of the 2020 election, 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, of what you can prove in court beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Although Lake is the heavy favorite in the primary, having bested Lamb and garnered big-name support from Sens. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., Vivek Ramaswamy and others, some in the Arizona Republican establishment have expressed skepticism that his incendiary style will be successful in the general elections. She narrowly lost the race for governor in 2022.
Former Republican Gov. Jan Brewer praised Lamb in an interview with Phoenix’s KSAZ-TV this summer. Speaking about Lake, Brewer had less favorable things to say: “There are a lot of people who are unhappy with her. They don’t think she tells the truth and that she has changed her mind about certain things. She goes to different rallies, says different things to different audiences.”
Looking ahead to November, Gallego launched his Latino campaign coalition, Juntos con Gallego, on Monday. Speaking later, he agreed to debate Lake if she won the Republican primary.
“Unlike her, where she did not debate her opponent, we will gladly debate Kari Lake,” he said.
Although Lake refuses to speak Lamb’s name, she chooses words for Gallego at every stage of the campaign, alternating insults from “swamp rat” to “deadbeat.”
A battle over who is most loved by Trump
One of the most closely watched GOP primaries features a battle between two Trump acolytes who have made him the most prominent figure in 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 made unsubstantiated claims that the race was stolen as the centerpiece of his current campaign), are the frontrunners in a crowded race with several other well-known Republicans. Also running are the president of the state House, Ben Toma; former Rep. Trent Franks, who served in Congress for 16 years before abruptly resigning in 2017, acknowledging at the time that he discussed surrogacy with two former staffers; and state Sen. Anthony Kern, who was among 18 Trump aides and allies who an Arizona grand jury indicted in April for their roles in the effort to overturn the state’s 2020 election results.
Hamadeh and Masters have been arguing over who remains closest to Trump. Hamadah won Trump’s endorsement in December, although Masters had touted for months that he had won Trump’s support during his failed 2022 Senate bid. In an unusual move, Trump reworked his support in this year’s primaries to support both. Masters, like Vance, obtained major financial support from technology billionaire Peter Thiel in 2021.
The 8th District — in the northwest valley of the Phoenix metro area, with an elderly and retired population and a large share of evangelical Christians — is solidly Republican. Tuesday’s winner will almost certainly defeat presumptive Democratic nominee Greg Whitten in November.
Two of the closest battlegrounds to the Chamber in the country
Former state Sen. Kirsten Engel is running uncontested in the Democratic primary in the 6th District, which covers a large portion of the southeastern part of the state, including Tucson.
The dispute for the seat – currently contested by Republican Juan Ciscomani, who is in his first term – is considered a bid by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report with Amy Walter. It’s one of two races in Arizona that could help decide control of the closely divided House.
The matchup would be a repeat of the 2022 race, when Ciscomani defeated Engel by less than 2 percentage points.
Meanwhile, Republican Rep. David Schweikert is a heavy favorite in his primary against lesser-known and less-funded candidates in the 1st District. But on the other side, the Democratic primaries are tight, with six candidates in the race.
Engaged in the battle for the Democratic nomination for the seat Schweikert barely held in 2022 are Andrei Cherny, a businessman and former chairman of the Arizona Democratic Party who previously ran for Congress; Amish Shah, former state House member; Conor O’Callaghan, businessman; Marlene Galán-Woods, former television announcer; Kurt Kroemer, former regional CEO of the Red Cross; and Andrew Horne, photographer and orthodontist.
As the only woman in her party’s primary, Galán-Woods is emblematic of a broader trend in congressional politics. The Rutgers University-based Center for American Women and Politics, the main organization tracking the issue, found that fewer women are running as major party House candidates 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 the former state party chair Democrat, Raquel Terán, hopes to extend it.
“We are advocating that we need to make sure our voices are heard in Congress,” Terán said in an interview Friday.
“Of course, this is a Democratic primary and we welcome healthy competition. But what we do not welcome is that Republican investors, donors who financed Donald Trump, are interfering in the Democratic primaries”, added Terán, attacking his opponent in the primaries, Yassamin Ansari.
Ansari, a former member of the Phoenix City Council, was backed by $1.3 million from the Protect Progress PAC, which has spent money supporting Democratic candidates across the country — but whose cryptocurrency industry backers also support Trump. In an interview with NBC affiliate KPNX of Phoenix, Ansari distanced himself from the donors.
“I’m not sure what they want,” Ansari said KPNX’s Brahm Resnick from his PAC supporters. “I ran for office because I hate Donald Trump. I can’t stand MAGA extremism.”
A big election about elections
In most counties, and in earlier times, the race for county recorder typically did not generate much excitement. Maricopa County is not the same as most counties.
Stephen Richer, one of the most outspoken Republican defenders of electoral processes in the country, is simultaneously fighting to keep his job and preparing to manage voting this fall in Maricopa, the largest county in battleground Arizona.
The Maricopa County Recorder’s administrative role is broad, including processing deeds and overseeing the election file and other parts of elections. Since 2020, this is what attracts the most attention.
After election printers and vote tabulation machines malfunctioned during the 2022 Arizona election, unsubstantiated allegations of malicious activity surfaced and conspiracy theories about Richer, fueled by Lake, resulted in death threats against Richer.
Richer has continued to face a series of attacks to this day. Last month, he posted a video on X from Shelby Busch, chairman of the Arizona delegation to the Republican National Convention this month, saying she would “lynch” him if given the chance. The video resulted from a live-streamed event on Rumble, a conservative video platform, in Mesa on March 20.
Richer’s main opponent is state Rep. Justin Heap, who has avoided 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, an unlikely candidate who worked in information management technology, more explicitly sowed doubt about the 2020 election.
This story originally appeared on NBCNews.com read the full story
