Democratic voters in Tucson’s Legislative District 20 — which is so blue that no Republican bothered to run — will decide their representation in the July 21 primary election.
Democratic voters outnumber Republicans by almost 32 percentage points in the district, which covers large chunks of Tucson, including midtown, Flowing Wells, South Tucson, Drexel Heights and the Pascua Yaqui reservation.
Six Democrats — three of them incumbents — are vying for two House seats and one seat in the Senate. All of the candidates are invited to a debate sponsored by the Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission today, which Joe will moderate.
You can tune in at 6 p.m. to watch the Dems duke it out in what has become perhaps the most contentious primary in Southern Arizona.
But first, here’s your primer to the candidates.
A fight for the Senate
Alma Hernandez, Rocque Perez
Democratic Rep. Alma Hernandez, who’s term limited in the House, is seeking a seat in the Senate.
Rocque Perez, an education advocate who served on the Tucson City Council to fill a vacancy in 2025, is challenging Hernandez for the Democratic nomination for the seat.
Perez and another plaintiff in a separate election challenge took Hernandez (and her sister Consuelo Hernandez) to court in April to challenge her candidacy, alleging the thousands of dollars in unpaid fines related to late campaign finance reports made her ineligible to run. Pima County Superior Court Judge Cynthia Kuhn ruled in Hernandez’s favor, finding that Hernandez isn’t “liable” for the fines because the Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes has not made a formal attempt to collect them.
The Arizona Supreme Court upheld the ruling on May 4.
Perez said in a written commentary in the Arizona Daily Star that it was important that he brought the lawsuit against a fellow Democrat under a Democratic secretary of state because “then the principle becomes bigger than party.”
“It reinforces that the rules apply regardless of who benefits politically in the moment,” Perez wrote.
Perez is a 26-year-old executive director of the Metropolitan Education Commission, a nonprofit that assists students with career planning. He landed an appointment to the Tucson City Council for seven months last year and participated in some high-profile decisions.
Legislative District 20
In August, Perez supported a unanimous vote to reject Project Blue, a massive data center that drew ardent public opposition. He also voted with the council’s majority in favor of a ban on camping in city-owned washes in June, telling the Arizona Daily Star he felt a clear mandate from his ward to support the measure. And in August, he voted with the majority to keep rides free on Tucson public transportation.
Hernandez won her first election in 2018 at the age of 25, the youngest age a lawmaker can serve. She’s Jewish and is known as a staunch advocate of Israel, a position that she said in an interview with KJZZ has led to death threats. Last year, she sponsored a measure prohibiting people from establishing or occupying an encampment on a university or community college campus, a direct reaction to a wave of campus protests related to the war between Israel and Hamas.
Hernandez said the people in the encampments were calling for the annihilation of Israel, among other antisemitic remarks.
That bill was one of four that Hernandez got signed into law, a high batting average for a Democrat in the Republican-controlled Legislature.
Hernandez is also known at the Capitol for working with Republicans.
During her first term in 2019, a tweet that criticized then-Gov Doug Ducey’s proposal to increase funding for school resource officers and her personal story of an SRO injuring her in high school led the governor to pull her into the development of a program for better training for the officers.
Despite (or because of) her successes in pushing legislation at the Republican-controlled Capitol, she has racked up more than a few critics within her party.
As we noted recently, Democratic activists in her district have been stewing on whether to censure her over some of her votes and generally straying from the party line.
A crowded House race
Sally Ann Gonzales, Betty Villegas, Ben Koehler, Genoveva Diaz
Four candidates — including two incumbents who are not teaming up — are seeking the district’s two House seats this year.
The House race includes Sen. Sally Ann Gonzales and Rep. Betty Villegas.
Newcomers Ben Koehler, a high school teacher, and Genoveva Diaz, a teacher with a long resume of community service, have also qualified to run.
Gonzales, Hernandez and Diaz are running as a team, leaving the incumbent Villegas to fend for herself.
Gonzales, one of the longer-serving members of the Legislature, has reached her term limits in the Senate. She served five terms between 1997 and 2015. After a few years off, she returned to the Legislature in 2019.
Gonzales is known for targeted policy-driven legislation related to women, children, low-income families and Native populations. In 2022, she sponsored a bill that allows juvenile prisoners to take the general equivalency diploma test before they’re released, which Ducey signed, an accomplishment for any Democrat in the Republican-controlled Legislature.
Villegas was appointed to the House in 2023 to fill a vacancy, and she was elected in 2024. Her main focus at the Legislature has been housing, with bills this year related to affordability, landlord-tenant disputes, housing discrimination, abandoned property and residential planning.
“My expertise in housing enables me to work on equitable housing solutions for all,” Villegas wrote in a campaign statement for the Arizona Secretary of State’s website.
Diaz is a political newcomer, but she has an inside track as a friend of the Hernandez family — Hernandez and her lawmaker sister, Consuelo Hernandez, and Daniel Hernandez, the third sibling and former lawmaker.
Diaz was the 2025 American Mothers’ Arizona Mother of the Year. In her bio, she said she was born in California and moved to Mexico at age 6, before returning to the United States in 2009 with her three children amid increasing insecurity in Mexico.
Diaz has taught folklorico dancing for years and is a public relations specialist who has created two nonprofits, Freedom Without Borders, which provides education, employment and legal support for migrants, and CreaLatinx, which recognizes Hispanic achievement.
Diaz wants to “be a voice for those who feel unheard, and fight for education, safety, economy, and access to healthcare for our community” she said in a campaign statement on the Secretary of State’s website.
Koehler is not only a newcomer to Arizona politics, he’s also a newcomer to the state. He came here from Kentucky to study law at the University of Arizona, graduated in 2024, and has been teaching high school in Tucson for the past two years.
Koehler lists his priorities as affordability, responsive government and strengthening education.
“My goal is to create public school systems that are the best choice for everyone in their communities,” Koehler said in a campaign video.
The Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission will sponsor the debate, which will be broadcast live on the commission’s YouTube channel tonight at 6 p.m.
It looks like Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos will be able to stay in his job for the foreseeable future.
After months of political and legal wrangling, the Pima County Supervisors backed off a push to remove him from office over a technicality tied to a territorial-era law that most people had probably never heard of until this year and may never want to hear about again.
The lone Republican on the board, Steve Christy, made a motion to remove Nanos and declare the office vacant, but he didn’t get a second for that motion.
Instead, supervisors voted 4 to 0 (with Christy abstaining) to send a complaint to Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes’ office suggesting that Nanos may have perjured himself in the written responses he gave to the board last month.
Supervisor Matt Heinz, perhaps Nanos’ toughest critic on the board, said in a statement after the vote that referring the perjury claim to the AG’s office was the right move.
It was always a risky move to fire Nanos under the largely untested state law that almost certainly would have ended up in court, muddying the waters about the supervisors replacing the sheriff through an appointment process.
It is unclear how much the county has already spent on outside attorneys tied to this political showdown, as the Pima County Attorney’s Office conflicted itself out of the dispute and the board hired an outside lawyer.
On paper, the PCAO represents both the PCSD and the supervisors. But when they’re at odds, that makes it impossible for the attorney to serve either office.
Nanos isn’t completely out of hot water.
He still faces an active recall effort, two high-profile lawsuits, mending fences with his deputies and a backlash from the public who hold him accountable for Nancy Guthrie still being missing for more than 100 days since her abduction.
Seeing an opening: The owners of shuttered stores in central Tucson might be sitting on a gold mine, as developers consider turning stores into housing, Gabriela Rico reports for the Arizona Daily Star. Developers see an opening right now as construction costs go through the roof, so to speak, and officials feel pressure to be more flexible with zoning rules. The most notable example might be the conversion of the former Foothills Mall into an “urban village” with apartments, entertainment, shopping and other amenities.
Digging into it: Speaking of housing, the Tucson Sentinel is taking a big swing with their coverage of homelessness in Tucson. They’re calling local homelessness the “billion-dollar problem” — citing the estimated cost of affordable housing and homeless services over the next decade — in their “Hot Town, Hard Times” series.
Victory!: Tucson’s pickleball players are celebrating after they convinced the Tucson City Council to hold off on a fee to use city-owned courts last week, Thatcher Warrick Hess reports for Arizona Public Media. They gave a lot of credit to Tucson Councilman Paul Cunningham for stopping the fee, which would have been $3.50 per player for a 90-minute pickleball session. At least one local student got a good civics lesson out of the work done by the Tucson Area Pickleball group to stop the fee.
“TAP fought, stood up and we won,” Sabino High School student Grayson Festerling said.
Frickin’ laser beams: Fort Huachuca will be one of five military installations to get advanced anti-drone systems, per the Herald/Review. The systems are making headlines as the U.S. military and Ukraine’s military look for ways to destroy armadas of cheap, deadly drones from Iran. Instead of launching a $5 million Patriot missile to down a $50,000 Shahed drone, the U.S. military is developing high-energy lasers and microwave weapons that can disable drones en masse.
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Hermosa mine gets a boost: After months of concerns over possible contamination of local streams, Arizona officials signed off on a waiver for the South32 Hermosa mine, the Nogales International’s Alessandra De Zubeldia reports. The decision by the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality ends one facet of the long-running local resistance to the mine, but the Patagonia Area Resource Alliance did score one point by getting state officials to include Goldbaum Canyon in their assessment.
Early voting for Arizona’s primary elections starts June 24, but before then, you’ll have several chances to hear from the candidates asking for your vote.
The Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission debates are underway, and the Agenda team is moderating this year’s legislative debates.
The debates kick off at 6 p.m. and will be livestreamed on the commission’s YouTube page.
Here’s the debates on tap this week:
Wednesday, May 13
Democrats Brett Newby, a behavioral health analyst and associate professor, and Teresa Leyba Ruiz, a former educator who has served on several nonprofit boards, will present their vision for Arizona’s education system as they try to take the office back from Republicans.
LD20 (which we covered in today’s edition), is turning out to be among the most contentious Democratic primaries south of the Gila River.
Thursday, May 14
Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne will attempt to fend off a challenge from State Treasurer Kimberly Yee, who is challenging Horne from the right on a platform that he’s not supportive enough of the state’s universal school voucher program.
Four Republicans are vying for two open seats in the House in this conservative Scottsdale-based district. There’s also a contested GOP Senate primary as longtime GOP Sen. John Kavanagh is attempting to fend off a challenge from Republican Robert Wallace, who works for Turning Point Action and runs a podcast about spiritual and metaphysical issues, including lizard people.
You can view the full debate schedule here.
And here’s a nifty Google Calendar that you can subscribe to for all the debates this election season.1
We’ll stop writing about the Keshel / Coffin affair just as soon as it stops being the wildest political story in Southern Arizona.
As we reported yesterday, a Pima County Superior Court judge nixed the request for a restraining order from Tucson-area state Rep. Rachel Keshel and her husband Seth Keshel, a well-known peddler of election conspiracies.
They’re trying to get an anonymous online sleuth and troll who goes by the name “William Coffin” to stop tweeting about them. But they ended up accusing a random guy whose last name was Coffin instead.
Turnabout is fair play, as they say, so “William Coffin” started digging up bankruptcy records on what he called “random Keshels,” although they might actually be Seth’s close relatives.
1 Shout-out to reader Bill for suggesting that we create a Google Calendar of this year’s debate schedule.