Arizona Republicans Vote Today for Governor Nominee as Trump-Backed Andy Biggs Leads Crowded Field

Arizona Republicans vote today, Tuesday, July 21, in primaries that will set the GOP ticket for governor, attorney general, secretary of state and several congressional seats ahead of the November midterms.

The marquee race is for governor. President Trump has endorsed Rep. Andy Biggs, the former House Freedom Caucus chairman, who also has backing from Turning Point USA's political arm, according to Fox News. Biggs is considered the frontrunner over Rep. David Schweikert, a longtime member of Congress giving up his House seat to run statewide, plus two lesser-known candidates, concrete pumping contractor Scott Neely and business owner Ken Miceli.

Whoever wins faces Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs in November. Hobbs, who beat Kari Lake by a narrow margin four years ago, ran unopposed for her party's nomination this cycle.

Down-ballot, the Republican attorney general primary between state Senate President Warren Petersen and military attorney Rodney Glassman has turned sharply negative, per Fox News. The winner takes on Democratic incumbent Kris Mayes.

In Arizona's 1st Congressional District, the Phoenix-area swing seat Schweikert is vacating to run for governor, Trump has endorsed former NFL player and ex-CBS Sports analyst Jay Feely. He faces former state lawmaker Joseph Chaplik and businessman John Trobough for the GOP nod. On the Democratic side, former TV anchor Marlene Galán-Woods and physician and former state Rep. Amish Shah are running a rematch of their 2024 primary, which Shah won. Galán-Woods has the backing of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and Sen. Mark Kelly.

The election administration fight that almost overshadowed the vote

Separate from the candidate races, Maricopa County, Arizona's largest county and a perennial national flashpoint, spent the past year in an internal power struggle over who controls election operations. County Recorder Justin Heap, a Trump ally elected in 2024 on an election-skepticism platform, clashed with the Republican-majority Board of Supervisors after a realignment of election duties before he took office, according to The Guardian. That fight included a collapsed handshake agreement, litigation, and an investigation into the alleged removal of election equipment.

The two sides reached a truce exactly one week before today's primary, The Guardian reported. Board chair Kate Brophy McGee said she hopes the deal produces "boring elections." But Patti O'Neil, chair of the Maricopa County Democratic Party, said the truce does nothing to restore her confidence, telling The Guardian that Heap "has not proven himself to be a good-faith actor."

Whether that criticism is fair is a genuinely contested question. Heap ran and won on the argument that Arizona's post-2020 election processes needed more transparency and tighter chain-of-custody controls for ballots and equipment, a position shared by many Arizona voters who still have questions about how the 2020 and 2022 counts were run in the state's largest county. Concerns about equipment custody, audit access and communication between the recorder's office and the board are legitimate governance questions, not inherently bad-faith ones, even when they generate messy public fights. No criminal charges have been filed against Heap over the equipment dispute, and no source here documents proven wrongdoing, only an unresolved administrative and legal standoff that the truce is meant to settle before ballots are counted.

Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat who previously held the Maricopa recorder post, told The Guardian the bigger threat to the fall midterms isn't the county-level squabble at all. "The biggest threat is the president, who is lying," Fontes said, pointing to Trump's continued claims that the U.S. election system "falls catastrophically short" of being fair, a line Trump used in a primetime White House address last week, per The Guardian.

That is Fontes's characterization, not an independently verified fact about Trump's intent, and it should be read as the assessment of a Democratic official who has sparred publicly with election-skeptic Republicans in his state. Trump has not, in the sourcing available, presented new verified evidence of 2026 fraud. His comments are warnings about future vulnerability, which is a different claim than a proven finding of fraud. Whether Arizona's election system is sufficiently auditable and trusted by voters on both sides remains the open question heading into November, not something today's primary alone resolves.

What happens next

Results from today's primary will determine the general-election matchups in the governor's race, the attorney general's race, and the 1st District, among others. AP News noted Arizona's contests sit alongside a broader 2026 primary season in which Trump-endorsed candidates have won every race so far this cycle, including Ken Paxton's defeat of Sen. John Cornyn in Texas.

The truce between Heap and the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors will be t