Arizona Republicans fear state Senate nominee could jeopardize their hold on the chamber
emocrats are making a strong effort this fall to flip the Arizona state Senate, where Republicans hold a small 17-13 majority, and Tuesday’s primary results gave Team Blue some potentially great news. Veteran Republican state Sen. Sylvia Allen lost renomination 59-41 to perennial candidate Wendy Rogers in Legislative District 6, a competitive seat located in the Flagstaff area in the northern part of the state, and GOP leaders are very much afraid that they’ll now lose control of the district in November.
This seat backed Donald Trump 52-42, but Republican Martha McSally defeated Democrat Kyrsten Sinema just 49-48 here two years later; Allen also won re-election in 2018 by a close 51-49 margin. Republicans already were in for a tough race this fall against Democrat Felicia French, who has been a strong fundraiser, but Rogers’ victory complicates things even further.
Rogers, who is an Air Force veteran, has unsuccessfully run for office every cycle beginning in 2010 when she sought a state Senate seat based around Tempe, which is located about 150 miles south of Flagstaff. Rogers then waged two campaigns for the 9th Congressional District, which includes all of Tempe, before she announced in 2016 that she’d run from her other home in Flagstaff for the more competitive 1st Congressional District.
Rogers lost that year’s primary but won Team Red’s nomination in 2018 to face Democratic Rep. Tom O’Halleran. National Democrats took Rogers seriously and spent $1 million against her, but stopped a month before Election Day in an apparent sign of confidence. O’Halleran ended up beating Rogers 54-46 in a seat that Trump had carried 48-47 in 2016. After that loss, Rogers soon announced that she’d challenge Allen rather than run for Congress again.
Allen herself was far from a moderate, and she made news last year for a racist speech where she lamented how the "Browning of America” would make the United States “look like South American countries very quickly." However, the Arizona Republic’s Andrew Oxford writes that Rogers managed to campaign far to Allen’s right, which could make it easier for French to appeal to independent voters.
https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2020/8/7/1967502/-Arizona-Republicans-fear-state-Senate-nominee-could-jeopardize-their-hold-on-the-chamber