Two Tucson Republicans will square off in the July 21 GOP primary for the chance to replace Republican Sen. Vince Leach, who is vacating the Legislative District 17 Senate seat.
The politically competitive district wraps around Tucson's north and east sides, from Rincon Valley and Tanque Verde north through Oro Valley and Marana to SaddleBrooke in southern Pinal County.
Christopher King, a U.S. Air Force veteran with an enthusiasm for education, will go against Anthony Dunham, an Iraq war veteran, former U.S. Bureau of Prisons officer, and Turning Point Action-endorsed candidate.
Christopher King, Anthony Dunham
LD17 is also one of Arizona’s most competitive districts in the November election. So the candidate that Republicans nominate in the primary will have a huge impact on whether the GOP is able to hold that seat in November. And winning that seat is critical for Democrats’ plans to flip control of the state Legislature this year.
The GOP senate candidates have been invited to a debate sponsored by the Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission and moderated by the Joe tonight at 6 p.m. You can tune in on Clean Elections’ YouTube channel.
The winner of the Senate GOP primary will take on Democrat Edgar Soto in the November election.
Legislative District 17.
King has the most political experience of the two Republicans. Voters elected him to the Vail Unified School District (VUSD) governing board in 2020 and again in 2024. He sits on the board of the Arizona School Boards Association and is a former Pima County Republican Party first vice chair.
According to King’s biography on the VUSD website, he retired from the military, where he was a bomb disposal expert, and became obsessed with education, earning his master’s degree and a substitute teaching certificate.
He has also been a plaintiff in two political lawsuits. He joined several other plaintiffs as part of a 2020 federal lawsuit led by Sidney Powell, who led efforts to overturn President Trump’s loss, and Republican Rep. Alexander Kolodin, who served as the local lawyer for the suit. The lawsuit alleged a “troubling, insidious, and egregious ploy” to stuff the ballot for former President Joe Biden.
A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit within days for lack of evidence and standing, and Kolodin was disciplined by the State Bar of Arizona.
King was a plaintiff in a second lawsuit that was more successful. A judge in 2024 ruled in favor of King and the Arizona Citizens Defense League when they challenged a Tucson ordinance that slapped $1,000 fines on residents who didn't report lost or stolen firearms within two days.
Dunham, a precinct committeeman, is a political newcomer who came under media scrutiny this month for temporarily losing his parental rights after he allowed his ex-wife — the stepmother of his children — to force his daughter to drink vinegar until she vomited.
Dunham told the Arizona Republic that he filed for divorce shortly after and hasn’t spoken to his ex-wife since.
The newspaper also dug up a racy Twitter post from 2022, which Dunham claimed was put there by a hacker.
Both candidates allude to Trump on their website when they describe their positions on immigration, and they both call for lowering taxes. King also calls for school choice, freedom and prosperity and defending the Constitution.
Dunham calls for housing affordability, school choice and backing law enforcement.
Whoever wins the GOP primary for the senate will face Soto, a Pima Community College vice president and a precinct committeeman who made an unsuccessful run for the Pima County Board of Supervisors in 2024.
Republicans have a roughly 10 percentage-point voter registration edge over Democrats in LD17, and the GOP outnumbers voters who aren’t registered under either party.
The district, however, has a divided representation in the House and close elections.
Leach beat Democrat John McLean by just over 1 percentage point in the 2024 election. McLean died shortly after the race when his car was struck by an alleged drunken driver.
And in the House race that year, Democrat Kevin Volk got more votes than the two GOP incumbents, Reps. Rachel Keshel and Cory McGarr, defeating McGarr and delivering one of the district’s House seats to Democrats.
Neither party faces a contested primary for the district’s two House seats.
On the Republican side, John Winchester, the senior director of government and community engagement for Arizona State University in southern Arizona, and Keshel will be the party’s nominees. Keshel has concentrated on election and family court reform during her reelection. Winchester made an unsuccessful run for the Pima County Board of Supervisors in 2016.
Volk will be joined on the November ballot by Democrat Holly Lyon, a former 7th-grade math teacher and retired Air Force colonel. Lyon made unsuccessful runs for the Legislature in 2014 and 2018.
The Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission will sponsor the debate, which will be broadcast live on the commission’s YouTube channel at 6 p.m. on Thursday.
Visit azcleanelections.gov for the full debate schedule and to submit a question for the candidates.
Yesterday, we started our day by correcting a portion of our top story — “Dems vs. Alma Hernandez” — which detailed a censure motion against the Democratic state representative in her legislative district.
We had relied on a draft version of the complaint against Hernandez that included, among other allegations, that Hernandez had backed controversial Democrat Mario Garcia in 2024.
Hernandez didn’t back Garcia, and she says she didn’t even know him.
And political consultant and Democratic Party activist Matt Capalby, who filed the complaint, ultimately scrubbed that line from the final version of his complaint.
The rest of the story was accurate.
We added a correction to yesterday’s edition. But since most of you read the email version of this newsletter, we wanted to make sure you caught it.
Hernandez’s only tie to that Dem drama back in 2024 was when she called out progressive Democratic lawmaker Analise Ortiz on Twitter after it came out Ortiz also used to be a Republican. At the time, Garcia was Ortiz’s opponent in the Democratic primary election.
But Hernandez’s criticism of Democrats’ purity test wasn’t in any way an endorsement of Garcia.
If you ever spot an error in the newsletter, send us an email at [email protected].
First time for everything: The TUSD Governing Board gave a unanimous thumbs up to Palo Verde Magnet High School adopting a four-day school week for the upcoming school year, Athena Kehoe reports for KGUN. The vote at Tuesday’s meeting came after a district payroll manager said the process was too rushed, claiming the timeline “is not just aggressive, it’s irresponsible.” Meanwhile, the board decided to wait until the next meeting to vote on a $815,000 plan to help out students of the Arizona Schools for the Deaf and Blind, which recently closed its Tucson campus, KVOA’s Jillian Bartsch reports.
Caught on camera: Mexican spotted owls were, well, spotted, near a proposed mine site in Copper Creek Canyon, a tributary of the San Pedro River. That prompted three Southern Arizona environmental groups, including the Center for Biological Diversity, to announce they intend to sue the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, per a news release. The photos show the owls live near the proposed mine, but federal officials still claimed the owls were “not present.”
A photo of Copper Creek Canyon by Russ McSpadden of the Center for Biological Diversity
The perils of tying yourself to Trump: Republican U.S. Rep. Juan Ciscomani is trailing Democrat JoAnna Mendoza in the Congressional District 6 race, per Jim Nintzel at the Tucson Sentinel. Conservatives for America commissioned a poll of 400 voters in the district, which showed 47% of voters supported Mendoza, while 44% preferred Ciscomani. Mendoza’s lead is still within the margin of error, but keep in mind she doesn’t have nearly the name recognition as the two-term incumbent.
The perils of tying yourself to the Democratic Party: After six decades of failing to flip the Arizona House, a national Democratic group is going to pump money into Arizona’s legislative races, with the Tucson-area’s Legislative District 17 right at the top of their list, the Arizona Mirror’s Jerod MacDonald-Evoy reports. The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee president said they’ve learned lessons from their previous unsuccessful campaigns in the Arizona Legislature, including the importance of announcing which races they’re targeting much earlier than they have in the past.
We’d all be better served by investing in local journalists who will be around a lot longer than most candidates.
Trying to set a limit: After months of horrific reports from ICE detention centers, Democratic U.S. Reps. Adelita Grijalva, Yassamin Ansari and Greg Stanton are trying to set a 12-hour limit on how long people can be held at holding facilities like the one near the Mesa Gateway Airport. The trio visited the holding facility recently and called it a “failure of basic humanity” in a news release.
“No one should be forced to sleep on concrete floors or share a toilet in full view of dozens of others, in confined spaces never meant for prolonged detention,” Grijalva said. “This bill restores commonsense limits, strengthens oversight, and makes clear that humane treatment is not optional — it’s the law.”
There are about a thousand things that need to be fixed with Arizona’s campaign finance system.
We won’t bore you with every single flaw. But as reporters who have tangled with this system for years, we’re confident that if regular people tried to understand who bankrolled campaigns, they’d come away with some mix of confusion, irritation, disappointment and maybe even horror.
Good news! Lawmakers are finally doing something about it. And the fixes are coming from both Republicans and Democrats. Hooray!
Wait a tick. Ummmm, they’re just trying to cover their own behinds and avoid paying late fees.
This year, a number of incumbents have been fending off legal challenges that cite a state law banning candidates from the ballot if they owe too much in late fees.
Now, a bill from Republican Rep. Jeff Weninger would stop candidates from racking up late fees on old campaign accounts, the Republic’s Ray Stern reports. Another bill from Democratic Sen. Analise Ortiz would cap late fees at $5,000 per report.
Hilariously, some lawmakers say they didn’t even know their old campaign accounts were racking up late fees. That includes Tucson Democratic Sen. Sally Ann Gonzales, who told Stern she had “no idea” she owed $663,000 in late fees.
Basically, the system is so bad that the people in charge of it don’t even know how it works.