Journalists’ Roundtable on Arizona primary election analysis

In this week’s episode of the Journalists’ Roundtable, three local journalists, Jeremy Duda of Axios Phoenix, as well as Laurie Roberts and Mary Jo Pitzl of “The Arizona Republic” and azcentral.com, provided an in-depth analysis of the Arizona primary election. They discussed key outcomes, voter turnout and the implications for future elections.

This discussion covered the major winners and losers, the impact of various campaign strategies and the broader political landscape in Arizona.

Kari Lake won the Republican Primary for the Arizona Senate seat, and Stephen Richer lost to Justin Heap for Maricopa County Recorder. 

“I thought it was a surprise, but upon reexamination, it’s like, ‘Who shows up in primaries?’ I mean, it’s the argument that is always made about primaries is people are more at the edges of their party, at the extreme edges, and this showed that the MAGA crowd showed up and voted for Heap. There was no question, this was not a close race at all,” Pitzl said. 

Amish Shah (D) won CD1 for the Democratic Party against Andrei Cherny (D). 

“It was a surprise to me, it’s a five-way primary; anything can happen in such a race. Not a real high-profile race. What I saw was Amish Shah did two things that some of the others didn’t do. He didn’t do a lot of negative campaigning against others, and he didn’t have a whole lot of stuff aimed at him. They were all still at each other so he kinda played under the ground that way. But the other thing that he did was knock on a lot of doors,” Roberts said. 

Duda claimed it will be more challenging for the Democrats holding the House seat. 

“Democrats came fairly close a couple of years ago to winning the Senate race and one of the House seats. They had pretty big designs to the Senate seat. It definitely makes things a lot harder for them,” Duda said.