Arizona has been at the center of the American political universe for the past three election cycles. In 2018, now-independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema showed the country a winning formula. Democrats could win a perennial Republican stronghold if they rallied Arizona’s growing Latino population and base of young, diverse voters, while persuading independents and moderates in suburbs to vote off their dissatisfaction with Donald Trump.
A similar strategy worked in Mark Kelly’s Senate and Joe Biden’s presidential victories in 2020. In the 2022 midterms, Kelly, as well as Gov. Katie Hobbs and Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, built on this formula by contrasting themselves sharply with their more extreme GOP opponents to win over Republican voters as well.
At the center of these battles has been Maricopa County, a national political bellwether and home to Phoenix, the state’s largest city. The focus of the region, the Third Congressional District, is currently represented by Rep. Ruben Gallego (who, you might have heard, is running for Senate in 2024), but the seat will be open in the coming election cycle for the first time in nearly a decade. It’s a rare opportunity: The district is Arizona’s most Democratic region, it is majority Latino and working-class, and it has been represented by Gallego since 2014. The legendary Arizona politician Ed Pastor represented the seat for more than two decades before Gallego.
Now, the contours of a competitive primary are beginning to take form: Raquel Terán, a longtime leader in the state’s progressive and Democratic political movements and a former chair of the Arizona Democratic Party, has decided to enter the fray to succeed Gallego. She has a rival forming to her left, Phoenix vice mayor and city council member Yassamin Ansari, who announced her candidacy on Tuesday. And plenty more Arizona Democrats may still jump in.
But Terán enters the primary contest as the frontrunner. Her two-year term as the head of…
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