Republicans maintain total control of the Arizona Legislature. Here’s what you need to know.

Democrats in the state legislature will face a Republican majority even more conservative than last election cycle, and bipartisan teamwork is unlikely to happen.

Republicans expanded their majority in the House by two seats and won an additional seat in the Senate, according to unofficial election results.

Ahead of Election Day, Arizona Democrats were two seats away in each chamber from a Democratic majority legislature and “Democratic trifecta” in the state — controlling the offices of the governor, secretary of state, and attorney general.

Instead, they ended up on the minority side once again — and Republicans will stay the majority party, dominating the House 33-17 and the Senate 17-13.

Maintaining conservative control

Who was ousted and who replaced them signals a legislative body moving further to the right. Sen. Christine Marsh, for example, a public education advocate and schoolteacher, was replaced by Carine Werner, an advocate for far-right propaganda produced by PragerU to be used in schools.

“My only regret is that I wanted to accomplish so much more. I had hoped that I would serve in the majority party during my tenure as your state senator,” Marsh wrote in a concession statement.

Except for a few scattered years, Republicans have controlled both chambers of the Arizona legislature since the mid-1960s, and the governor’s office almost exclusively since 1991, with the exceptions of former Gov. Janet Napolitano from 2003 to 2009 and Gov. Katie Hobbs in 2022.

Despite voters’ decision to keep Republicans in control, Democratic legislators like House Minority Leader Oscar De Los Santos believe much of the state’s problems stem from their decades-long stranglehold over the Capitol.

“They [Republicans] have been in control of the state legislature for decades, we are now the worst in the country for public school funding, they’ve done next to nothing for decades to protect our groundwater, our water resources,” said De Los Santos. “I mean, if they don’t come to the table and negotiate and compromise, they are jeopardizing our future.”

Stemming the tide of the red wave

The Arizona Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (ADLCC) was created in 2012 by then-Senate leader Hobbs and House leader Eric Myer, when Arizona’s legislature was controlled by a Republican supermajority.

It was created to flip Arizona’s legislature to Democratic control — and they came close. From the time the ADLCC was formed to the present, the Republican supermajority was whittled down from a 12-seat majority in the Senate and a 20-seat majority in the House to a one-seat majority in both chambers by 2020. That razor-thin majority stayed the same in 2022, and Democrats were confident they could take over both chambers this time around.

Democrats outspent Republican candidates in several swing district races, and the ADLCC reported record-breaking fundraising this election cycle — yet the party still lost seats to the GOP.

Hobbs spent significant time campaigning for Democrats running in swing districts leading up to the election, and fundraised $500,000 to elect Democrats to the legislature.

Had these investments not been made, the outcome would have been even more favorable to the Republican party, De Los Santos told The Copper Courier.

“I have every expectation that in 2026 we’re going to mount an even bigger challenge and effort to flip the legislature,” De Los Santos said.

What districts changed?

Republican Gains

• LD16 – rural Pinal County: Former Democratic House Rep. Keith Seaman lost his reelection bid to political newcomer Republican Chris Lopez.
• LD13 – Chandler: Republican Jeff Weninger won outgoing Democratic Rep. Jennifer Pawlik’s seat, after four years of split representation.
• LD4 – Scottsdale and Phoenix: former Democratic Sen. Christine Marsh lost her reelection bid to Republican Cerine Werner, and Republican Pamela Carter won an open seat, formerly held by Democrat Laura Terech.

Democratic Gains

• LD17 – Tucson: Democrat Kevin Volk won one House seat, ousting Republican Rep. Cory McGarr.

Like De Los Santos, Senate Minority Leader and ADLCC co-chair Priya Sundareshan, D-Tucson, believes there will be a more favorable outcome for Democrats in two years.

Both House and Senate Republicans did not respond to a request for comment or interview from The Copper Courier.

What can voters expect?

Arizona’s next legislative session begins on January 13, 2025.

As the majority party, Republicans once again have complete control over what bills to hear in committees and who chairs each committee.

This means that Democrats will propose bills that may have no chance of being heard before a committee, and might never receive a vote — and Republicans will pass bills that will likely face veto from Hobbs.

“They [Republicans] can waste their time by trying to be extremists and trying to sow division and trying to sow chaos, but the fact is that they’re not going to be successful at it, because the governor is just not going to sign those bills,” De Los Santos said.

Hobbs vetoed 216 Republican-backed bills during her first two years in office, and broke former Democratic Gov. Janet Napolitano’s veto record, which was set across the span of seven years.

Voters should expect more ballot referrals to come out of this legislative session, which is a way that Republicans can circumvent Hobbs’ veto and send bills to the voters, like Proposition 314, Senate Minority Assistant Leader Flavio Bravo, D-Phoenix, told The Copper Courier.

“They’re [voters] gonna have to expect more power plays, more self-serving policies, and some short mindedness,” Bravo said.

Hobbs’ state agency picks will have a difficult time being confirmed — Republican Sen. Jake Hoffman, a fake elector and the chairman of the far-right Arizona Freedom Caucus, is the chairman of the Committee on Director Nominations. The committee had not existed in the past, and was established once Hobbs took office for the explicit purpose of hampering her effectiveness.

De Los Santos believes that going to extreme lengths to sow division, like creating entire committees to grind government to a halt, is not what voters want.

But because Republicans not only maintained their majority, but consolidated power within the most far-right faction of the party, Sundarashen predicts that compromise and bipartisanship will be even harder to find.

Republicans have been obsessed with going after and attacking these identity issues and attacking vulnerable populations, Sundareshan added, and they will continue to bring forward extreme legislation that targets these groups.

That’s the worst part, according to Bravo: with total Republican control, there will be little Democrats can do to offer solutions and counterbalance what Republicans bring to the table.

“The real lasting effect is that we just won’t see a lot of proactive measures that we would have seen if we had even flipped just one chamber,” Bravo said.