In the world of Southern Arizona legislative politics, few districts carry more intrigue than Legislative District 17, which covers Oro Valley, Marana, parts of eastern Tucson and even a portion of Pinal County.
For Republicans, the area was once among the party’s most reliable footholds inside otherwise deep-blue Pima County.
While Arizona’s redistricting maps have shuffled district numbers over the years, a parade of conservative lawmakers have passed through the seat — including “Captain” Al Melvin, Vince Leach, Mark Finchem, Adam Kwasman and Justine Wadsack.
Then came 2024.
That’s when Democrat Kevin Volk defeated Republican state Rep. Cory McGarr, turning the district into a rare bipartisan delegation. Volk now serves alongside Republican state Rep. Rachel Keshel in the House.
In the state Senate, Vince Leach has been a fixture in Southern Arizona politics for years. He lost his Senate seat in LD17 in the 2022 GOP primary to further-right Justine Wadsack, but then won it back two years later.
This year, Leach is retiring (and Wadsack is running for a House seat in the Gilbert-based Legislative District 14).
Which leaves a coveted Senate seat in what we’re calling the “Spicy Seventeenth” wide open.
A map of Legislative District 17.
The Republican pile-on
With Leach stepping aside in the district’s Senate seat, the two factions of the GOP each have their eyes on installing one of their own as his successor.
Chris King and Anthony Dunham have both filed paperwork to replace Leach in the state Senate.
King, a retired Air Force veteran who serves on the Vail School District Governing Board, has been active in Pima County Republican politics for years.
Leach, an old-school business Republican, is backing King to take over his seat.
Last fall, King went head-to-head with fellow Republican Jake Hoffman after a Turning Point USA staffer made a viral claim — later debunked — that teachers in Cienega High School’s math department wore bloody Halloween costumes specifically to mock Charlie Kirk. The teachers wore the same shirt — which was a math joke, not a murder joke — for Halloween a year earlier, before Kirk was murdered.
Dunham is a pastor, a retired law enforcement officer and Iraq War veteran, but he has spent far less time in the public spotlight.
He has, however, been endorsed by Turning Point Action, the campaign arm of Kirk’s Turning Point USA. And he’s teaming up with Keshel and another House candidate as part of a MAGA slate for the district.
And for a pastor, he sure follows and comments on a lot of adult content on Twitter, bringing the spicy to our “Spicy Seventeenth.” (More on that in today’s laugh.)
On the House side, four Republicans are competing for the party’s nomination for the district’s two seats.
Keshel is seeking another term, running on her record from her first four years in the Legislature. A member of the Arizona Freedom Caucus, Keshel has backed legislation to end no-excuse early voting by mail and has cast doubts on the results of the 2020 and 2022 elections.
But it’s not entirely clear that Keshel actually lives in the district.
Internet sleuth “William Coffin” (it’s a pseudonym) recently dug up records that make a compelling case that she has moved into a new district.1
Kirk Fiehler, chair of the Pinal County Republican Party, has teamed up with Keshel and Dunham to form the district’s MAGA slate of Republicans.
Meanwhile, Republican candidate John Winchester currently serves as the senior director of government and community engagement for Arizona State University in Southern Arizona, a role that has put him at the center of regional policy and political discussions. Although he does so advocating for ASU while living in Tucson.
And Avery Block has filed to run for office a few times, but, as far as we can tell, he has never qualified for the ballot.
Republicans will decide their nominees in the July primary.
The Democrats’ full slate
Volk is seeking his second term in the House, and this time, he’s running as part of a coordinated Democratic slate aimed at flipping the district fully blue.
The focus on LD17 is part of a broader Democratic effort to take control of the Arizona Legislature, which would require picking up at least four additional seats in the House.
Volk’s victory two years ago proved the district is competitive for Democrats. But the fact that Democrats have drafted a full slate of candidates — rather than running a “single-shot” campaign — shows they’re feeling very confident heading into the November election.2
Also on the slate is Hollace “Holly” Lyon, a former seventh-grade math teacher who later served in the U.S. Air Force, retiring as a colonel. She previously ran for the House in 2014 and again in 2018.
Edgar Soto is the slate’s Senate candidate. He ran for a seat on the Pima County Board of Supervisors and currently serves as vice president of Pima Community College’s Desert Vista Campus.
The filing deadline to get on the ballot is March 23.
You just never know: The progressive-conservative partnership that derailed last year’s Prop 414 and Tucson Electric Power’s franchise agreement two years earlier didn’t have the juice to stop RTA Next, Tucson Sentinel columnist Blake Morlock writes. Tuesday’s election results showed RTA Next passing by a wide margin, and upending the conventional wisdom among the local political class.
“Everybody well known to be in-the-know just knew the RTA Next ballot questions were going to fail when voters had their say,” Morlock writes. “So once again, everyone known to know just doesn’t know squat.”
Calling all recorders: The election-denying crowd is gaining steam again and Democratic officials at the Capitol are warning county officials not to hand over unredacted voter files to the Trump administration, Sasha Hupka reports for Votebeat. Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes and Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, both Democrats, sent a letter to county recorders saying they should decline “any such illegal demands.” Their letter came shortly after Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen said he’d given the FBI the data gathered by the Cyber Ninjas as they tried to debunk the 2020 election results in Maricopa County.
One-way justice: A Tucson man pleaded guilty to breaking the taillights of an unmarked Department of Homeland Security vehicle during a protest in December, the Sentinel’s Paul Ingram reports. Ryan Michael Seal pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge and agreed to a year of probation and to pay $1,000 in restitution. Yet, no charges were filed against an ICE agent who “blasted two journalists in the face with pepper spray despite their credentials and professional camera gear (including this Tucson Sentinel reporter),” Ingram writes.
Casting a shadow: Dozens of people gathered in Marana on Tuesday to protest the planned immigration detention center there, KVOA’s John Macaluso reports. Democratic U.S. Rep. Adelita Grijalva and Pima County Supervisor Jen Allen were on hand, but the most poignant comments came from Brinley Carrillo, a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation whose father was detained at Florence when she was a child.
“There’s an entire community surrounding this detention center and everyone who is detained here, their families will only think of Marana as a detention center city and surrounding cities will see the effect of that. It’s a ripple effect of negativity and despair,” Carrillo said.
Staying informed can be a great antidote to negativity and despair. Support local news.
Cross-border cooperation: U.S. and Mexican authorities are trying to contain the spread of the New World screwworm, which pushed U.S. officials to block cattle imports from Mexico more than a year ago, KJZZ’s Nina Kravinsky reports. One facility is going up in Texas to introduce sterile flies into the wild, which helps lower the population of the flesh-eating larvae, while another facility will be built in southern Mexico.
As we were poring through social media accounts of the candidates in Legislative District 17, we couldn’t help but notice that Anthony Dunham seemingly has two Twitter accounts.3
On one account, @MADunham84, he posts normal conservative family-man stuff: He tweets about Donald Trump, prays for people and posts pics of his kids.
On the other account, @MarkAnthonyDun6, he’s much spicier: He tweets about Trump, prays for people and asks porn actresses to see their … well, here are a few examples.
Based on who he follows, this is his unofficial horny alt account.
1 For what it’s worth, the courts don’t seem to care that candidates across the state routinely lie about their addresses, even though state law requires them to live in the districts that they represent. Ironically, we just went through this four years ago, when Leach made a very compelling case that Wadsack didn’t live in the district.
2 A single-shot campaign is a tactic Democrats have long employed to maximize their chances of winning at least one of two House seats in competitive districts. The way it works is instead of fielding two Democrats for two House seats, they’ll nominate only one. Then they urge Democrats to only cast one vote, and urge independents to support one Democrat and one Republican. It helps boost the single Democrat in the race, but also ensures that they cannot win both seats in a competitive district.
3 We tried calling Dunham to have a very awkward conversation about the account, but he didn’t return our call or message. Based on the profile pics, names, context and content, it seems very clear that these are both his accounts. We also called around to people who work in politics in the district, who confirmed that both accounts appear to be the candidate. We’ll update you if we hear back from him.