As of this writing, Katie Hobbs has been re-elected, 55.6 percent to 42.7 as of Wednesday morning, a lead of nearly 278,000 votes. In 2022 she beat Kari Lake by just 17,000 votes. She is also the first Democrat to win re-election as Arizona governor since Janet Napolitano in 2006.
Andy Biggs was the Turning Point candidate in every way that mattered. Turning Point Action supplied the turnout machinery behind his primary win, where he took 73.4 percent with Trump’s endorsement.1 Right-wing groups, including Turning Point USA, spent more than $18 million in ads. The pitch was simple: nominate the true believer, mobilize the base, and the electorate expands in your favor. Arizona was supposed to be the proof of concept.
It was the exam. The primary was practice.
Hobbs raised roughly $15 million to Biggs’ $5.8 million, and the Republican Governors Association didn’t come to his aid. That tells you what the people who write checks for a living thought of the odds. They were right.
Then there is the rest of the ticket:
Attorney General: Kris Mayes beat Senate President Warren Petersen 58 to 42.
Secretary of State: Adrian Fontes beat Alex Kolodin 57 to 41.2
Governor: Hobbs by roughly 13 points, in a state Trump carried by about five and a half in 2024.
Biggs ran about even with the rest of the Republican slate. That is not a defense. The whole slate lost by double digits.
The legislature is where it gets ugly. Republicans came in leading the House 33-27 and the Senate 17-13. As of Thursday, unofficial counts had 20 Democrats and 10 Republicans in position to take Senate seats, and 37 Democrats and 23 Republicans in the House. If that holds, Republicans lose seven Senate seats and ten House seats, and Democrats get majorities in the Legislature for the first time in more than 60 years. Combined with Hobbs, that is a trifecta. Her first term was spent warring with a GOP-controlled House and Senate that sought to block her at every turn. The vetoes were the whole story. Now there is no one left to veto.
You may be thinking that “well, it was a Democratic wave. Democrats swept competitive districts across the country and took control of both chambers of Congress.” But a wave explains the direction, not the size. The model never pitched itself as weather-dependent. It claimed to move the electorate, and didn’t.
The warning was public, too. Schweikert argued all spring that Biggs was unelectable and would continue a decade of backsliding for Republicans. Primary voters heard him out and went the other way, by a wide margin.
The blame doesn’t belong to “the Republican Party,” a phrase that excuses everyone. It belongs totally to Turning Point Action, which sold a theory of winning, got the nominee it wanted, and watched a sitting governor everyone called vulnerable win by 13.
Something to remember the next time Turning Point asks for your eyeballs and your dollars.
Schweikert finished behind him and is owed a phone call.
Kolodin spent part of the campaign calling Fontes a “Sinaloa cartel lawyer.” The voters were unmoved.