‘Were we too Maga or not Maga enough?’: Republicans reckon with Arizona wipeout

When Trump was first elected, Republicans held every lever in Arizona – now they’ve been swept in a blue tidal wave, and the road to rebuild could be fraught

When Donald Trump was first elected to the White House in 2016, Republicans held every lever of statewide power in Arizona, from the governor’s office to both US Senate seats and majorities in the legislature. Over the next decade, as Trump tightened his grip on the party, Democrats began chipping away at that dominance, gradually turning the longtime GOP stronghold into a political battleground.

Then came the November midterm elections. Democrats swept every statewide office on the ballot – from governor to the obscure post of mine inspector – and secured a lawmaking trifecta unseen since 1966.

The results leave Republicans firmly locked out of power at the state level – a remarkable reversal of fortunes for the long-dominant party that was once home to Barry Goldwater’s rock-ribbed conservatism and John McCain’s maverick streak.

“I could see this coming,” said Gina Swoboda, a former chair of the Arizona Republican party. “We weren’t talking to people, we weren’t listening to people.”

Swoboda tried. This year, she ran for secretary of state, to serve as the state’s chief elections officer. She lost the Republican primary to Alexander Kolodin, a Trump acolyte who was heavily involved in efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in the state. Last Tuesday, Kolodin was trounced by the Democratic incumbent, Adrian Fontes.

In several closely watched races, Trump allies fell. Congressman Andy Biggs, a longtime supporter of the president’s Make America Great Again (Maga) movement, lost by more than 10 percentage points to Katie Hobbs, the Democratic incumbent once viewed as vulnerable.

So seismic were the gains that a 19-year-old sophomore at Arizona State University bested a tenured Republican to become the superior county clerk of Maricopa county – in charge of court records, marriage licenses, child support and other filings for the fourth largest county in America.

The Republican collapse in Arizona were part of a blue tidal wave that swept GOP officials from power in even redder states, such as South Carolina and Texas. But in Arizona, a state reshaped by decades of demographic change, a population boom in the Phoenix suburbs and a rejection of Trumpism by affluent Republican and independent voters, the GOP now faces a reckoning that many say might have come eventually but now cannot be delayed.

“The world has changed, so if there is no change from the party, we’ll be looking at minority status for a long time,” said Kirk Adams, a former Arizona house speaker who served as chief of staff to the last Republican governor. “Political parties tend to react to near-extinction events like this.”

Among the most urgent questions facing Republicans in the Grand Canyon state is how to rebuild.

Republicans hold a nearly 300,000 voter-registration advantage over Democrats in the state, but independent voters make up the largest share of the electorate, and often decide elections. This year, they broke hard against Republicans.

“Were we too Maga or not Maga enough?” Adams asked of the movement that propelled Trump twice to the White House and that many now blame for Republican losses in the state – and nationwide.

For Democrats, their midterm success was the culmination of a hard-fought political transformation from the so-called “pizza caucus” – so few were there in the state legislature, the joke went, they could share a single pizza – to a majority party.

“Now, Arizona will have a Democratic trifecta for the first time in 60 years,” Hobbs wrote on X. “We’re going to need a lot more pizza.”

Among Republicans, there is no agreement on how to chart a path forward.

Some fault their party’s leadership for ceding control to outside operations, such as Turning Point Action, the youth group founded by Charlie Kirk and headquartered in Phoenix, and Arizona’s far-right Freedom Caucus.

There are Republicans who argue the midterm wipeout was an anomaly that won’t be repeated in 2028, a presidential election year, and believe Arizona voters, still conservative at heart, will rebel again after two years of total Democratic control.

Still, others point to the hard-right Republicans who survived the blue tsunami and contend their playbook is the path to rebuilding the party.

“FYI, in many places more ‘moderate’ Republican candidates lost more ground than conservatives,” Turning Point’s chief operating officer Tyler Bowyer said in a post on social media. “Many examples of this in red states and swing states.”

Bowyer also outlined a tentative game plan for 2028, calling for early agreement on a candidate to challenge incumbent Democratic US senator Mark Kelly, scoring early funding commitments from groups such as the Club for Growth, and pursuing voters who don’t regularly vote, noting the party might need more than Republicans votes to win.

Swoboda said there was stark evidence that the Republican slate has been out of touch with the Arizona voters. She blamed tone-deaf messaging that did not focus on voter concerns about issues such as higher prices and an unwanted war.

In her view, Republicans lost control of the political battlefield by allowing Turning Point Action to play kingmaker. The party had little money compared to Turning Point, which poured millions into Republican campaigns of the party’s nominees for governor and Congress. Their endorsements backfired: all of their statewide candidates lost.

“We are in the wilderness,” Swoboda said. “Who is going to give money to a party that is run by Turning Point Action?”

The organization did not return a request for comment.

Adams said the party needs a reckoning over its leadership. But the mid-term wipeout will make it harder to rebuild quickly, he added.

“Typically you have a governor or a senator who has a political machinery in place,” he said. “We don’t have that now.”

One of the first Republican casualties in the state was the US senator, Jeff Flake, a classic conservative who announced in 2017 that he would not seek re-election after it became clear to him he could not survive a blistering primary election against a Trump disciple. The following year, McCain, one of Trump’s most vocal critics, died.

Their vacant seats were ultimately filled by Democrats. In 2020, Trump became only the second Republican presidential nominee in 50 years to lose Arizona. Still, the president’s loyalists in Arizona doubled down, elevating his allies and purging the party of his critics.

In 2022, Kari Lake, a former newscaster, ran a scorched-earth campaign for Arizona governor, declaring her success “drove a stake through the heart of the McCain machine”. Though she triumphed in the GOP primary, she lost to Hobbs, who ran as a moderate and worked to win over independents and anti-Trump Republicans. (This cycle, Hobbs even picked one to be her running mate, the Republican-turned-independent former mayor of Mesa, John Giles.)

Kurt Davis, a former party executive director who is now a registered independent, said Arizona Republicans must return to the party’s core mission: registering and talking to voters and recruiting candidates.

Davis ran the party in the mid-1980s, when Republican governor Evan Mecham’s racist comments, rescission of a Martin Luther King Jr state holiday and flawed appointees fractured the Arizona GOP. Unlike now, that rift didn’t kneecap the party: Their candidate prevailed in the election that happened in the wake of Mecham’s impeachment.

Republicans now have an opportunity to rebuild, Davis said, but they have to move fast.

“There’s a two-year clock that is running,” Davis said, pointing to the 2028 election.

Republican strategist Nathan Sproul sees the looming presidential cycle as ripe for the party’s resurrection. He believes legislative Democrats will overreach in the coming two years and the Republican voters who helped elect them – or sat out – will return to the GOP.

But first, Republicans have to stop their internal warfare and make room for dissent.

He cited Ronald Reagan’s comment that “The person who agrees with you 80% of the time is a friend and an ally – not a 20% traitor.”

Robert Graham, who was party chair a decade ago, agrees. Turning Point was “really good at beating the crap out of people”, he said, but those tactics didn’t work outside of divisive primary races.

Republicans need to talk about policies that lead to jobs, opportunity, safety and prosperity, Graham said – themes that were emphasized during his leadership.

“You have to return to retail politics,” Graham said. To win again, the party must listen and speak to people’s concerns, and resist getting sidetracked by debates over renaming the Gulf of Mexico, or character assassinations, he added.

The Arizona Republican party did not return a request for comment. But in a post-election social media post, the state GOP chair Sergio Arellano pledged to “take a hard look at what worked, what didn’t and what we need to do better.”

As national Republicans sift through the wreckage of their defeat, and chart a post-Trump future, Swoboda is urging the Arizona GOP not to accept the status quo.

“Where the party is going to go depends on what the state committee wants,” she said. “I thought the committee liked winning.”