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Our verdict

no endorsement — and the lean, on terms

Election Day is November 3. Arizonans have been voting since October 7, when early ballots went out; early in-person voting runs through October 30, and an early ballot must be received by your county — not merely postmarked — by 7 p.m. on Election Day. This is the whole race: the platforms, the records, the worst claims against each candidate, and what the sources actually show. LiberalMind endorses neither candidate. On the evidence below, we lean — narrowly, and on terms — to the challenger. Read the research, and see why the lean is not an endorsement.

How Arizona got here

Katie Hobbs won this office by 17,117 votes in 2022 — 50.3% to Kari Lake's 49.7% — while serving as the secretary of state who oversaw the election. Lake sued; Lake lost, at every level, in every courtroom, over two and a half years. Hobbs governed anyway: a Democrat in the governor's office facing a Republican Legislature, in a state Donald Trump carried by five and a half points in 2024.

The Republican nominee is Andy Biggs of Gilbert — Arizona Senate president from 2013 to 2017, congressman from the East Valley's 5th District since 2017, former chairman of the House Freedom Caucus. He won the July 21 primary with 74% of the vote, burying fellow congressman David Schweikert, who had argued — this was the whole of his case — that Arizona Republicans keep losing statewide races with nominees "seen as too extreme." Karrin Taylor Robson, the establishment's preferred candidate, suspended her campaign in February after President Trump, having endorsed her alone in 2024, chose to endorse them both. Biggs runs with former state Sen. Sine Kerr, a Buckeye dairy farmer now serving as the Trump administration's Arizona director of the Farm Service Agency. Hobbs runs with John Giles, the former Republican mayor of Mesa, who switched his registration to independent this May after endorsing Hobbs in 2022 and speaking for Kamala Harris at the 2024 Democratic convention. This is Arizona's first governor's race with lieutenant-governor running mates, under Proposition 131. Two minor tickets are also on the ballot — the Green's Risa Lombardo, disavowed by her own party and under an Attorney General investigation into alleged fraudulent donations, and No Labels' Teri Hourihan — and they poll at one or two percent.

The raters lean to Hobbs, and so does every public poll. Cook moved the race from Toss Up to Lean Democrat in July, citing her fundraising advantage over a "polarizing" nominee; Sabato's Crystal Ball says Leans Democratic; Inside Elections says Tilt Democratic. Polling averages put Hobbs up seven to eleven points; the closest survey all cycle, from a Republican firm in August, had her ahead by one. She has raised roughly three dollars to his one — about $10.1 million to $3.2 million through June — though Turning Point PAC has poured some $18 million into attacking her and lifting him, while the Republican Governors Association has spent nothing. Hobbs also declined to debate. Her campaign announced in July that she would skip the Clean Elections debate — as she skipped Lake in 2022, breaking an Arizona tradition the Republic dates to 1954. On October 6, Biggs debated Hourihan in front of an empty chair.

The veto wall — the record's central fact

Everything about Hobbs's governorship runs through one number: 541. That is how many bills she vetoed in four years, against 993 signed — 143 in 2023, 73 in 2024, 174 in 2025, 151 in 2026. She broke Janet Napolitano's single-session record (58) in her first hundred days, then broke her own record, then passed Napolitano's career total of 181 in her second year. Doug Ducey vetoed 111 bills in eight years. Republicans need 20 of 30 Senate votes and 40 of 60 House votes to override her; they hold 17 and 33. Her vetoes are not a negotiating posture. They are structurally unbreakable, and everyone at the Capitol knows it.

Our doctrine on this is settled, and it binds us in both directions, so we state it plainly: a hostile legislature is not a governor's flaw. Arithmetic is no excuse and no demerit; the veto is the office's decisive weapon, and a governor who wields it is governing, not failing. We made that argument this cycle for a Republican in New York. It applies with equal force to a Democrat in Phoenix — and it cuts both ways. Hobbs cannot blame the Legislature for her record, because her pen is her record: the wall she built is the most complete expression of what she believes state government should stop, and voters should judge the beliefs by the vetoes. By the same token, what follows about Biggs is not "he would finally work with the Legislature." It is what each of them has provably done with power.

Katie Hobbs (Democratic)

Her platform: Lower costs and competent management. She runs on having "cut taxes each of the last four years," eliminated the tax on tips and overtime, raised the standard deduction and the senior deduction, cancelled medical debt for nearly 700,000 Arizonans, deployed the National Guard to the border, and balanced every budget. She frames Biggs as "a Washington politician who will bring Washington's cost-hiking agenda" to Arizona, and promises to protect water, public education, and abortion rights voters enshrined in the state constitution in 2024.

The record — and the claims tested:

Claim: "I have lowered taxes every single year." The Arizona Republic checked this and called it true — with a caveat the size of the claim. Before 2026, the items she counts are narrow: a one-time 2023 rebate (devised by Republican lawmakers, who pooled their budget allocations to fund it; Hobbs, the Republic reports, did not want it in the budget, then touted it), a forest-clearing exemption nine individuals claimed in 2024, a wastewater-pipe exemption worth about $94,000 a year. Her 2026 centerpiece — "$1.4 billion in middle-class tax cuts" — is a conformity package to Trump's federal tax law that she vetoed three times (January, February, May) before signing it inside the June budget; the $1.4 billion is a four-year figure, most of it conformity to federal cuts including $276 million in business breaks, extracted by a Republican Legislature that then watched her announce it under a podium sign reading "Hobbs' $1.4 billion middle class tax cut." Both things here are true: the cuts are real and Arizonans will pay less. And the signature economic achievement of her re-election campaign is a Republican tax bill she killed three times and now claims. Judge for yourself what that says about the other claims.

The ESA file. The universal voucher expansion is not her law — Doug Ducey signed it in July 2022, over the heads of voters who had rejected a similar expansion in 2018. What happened on her watch is the growth: from about 12,000 students before expansion to 102,891 by this spring, at a cost of roughly $1.1 billion a year — about one in ten Arizona schoolchildren, with the state's own quarterly report showing costs running above projection. Hobbs proposed an income cap on the program in four straight budgets (her 2026 version would have excluded households over $250,000 and saved an estimated $89 million); four straight times, the Legislature refused and she signed the budgets anyway, winning only modest guardrails. Her position is genuinely held and she has spent real capital on it. But a governor running on fiscal management owns the fiscal fact: the fastest-growing line in Arizona's budget grew, uncapped, through all four of her budgets.

The border — credit where it is documented, and the line she will not cross. The "open borders" charge (below) does not survive her record. In December 2023 she created Arizona's first Border Coordination Office and sent the National Guard to the border under Operation SECURE, billing Washington $512.5 million for it. In July 2024 she launched Task Force SAFE, embedding some 40 Guard members with Customs and Border Protection at the ports of entry; her February 2025 executive order creating Operation Desert Guardian credits that work with supporting the seizure of more than 19.5 million fentanyl pills, 6,598 pounds of other drugs, and 237 weapons. That is cartel interdiction, and it is real. Here is the limit, stated in her own actions: her office announced Desert Guardian expressly would not cooperate with ICE interior enforcement; in April 2025 she vetoed the Arizona ICE Act, which would have required state and local officials to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement and honor detainers, writing that "Arizonans, not Washington, D.C. politicians, must decide what's best for Arizona"; and in June 2026 she vetoed four more cooperation bills on the same ground. In 2024 she vetoed the Legislature's border-enforcement bill, SB 1231; Republicans sent it to the voters instead, and Arizonans passed Proposition 314 with 62.6% of the vote. Our position is not complicated: federal immigration enforcement is the law, agencies cooperating with it is normal government, and a governor may win our respect for fighting cartels at the ports while losing it for walling off her state from ICE everywhere else. The voters already overruled her on the larger question once. That is the record.

AHCCCS and the fraud she inherited. The sober-living scandal — fraudulent providers billing the state's Medicaid plan for phantom addiction treatment, recruiting Native Americans off tribal land — began in 2020 and peaked the month she took office. Her administration and Attorney General Kris Mayes launched the crackdown in May 2023: 364 providers suspended, more than 140 indictments, and billing in the targeted program down 92%, from $3.1 billion to about $230 million. Officials put the total loss at at least $2.5 billion, most of it billed before she could have stopped it. She also signed Arizona's KidsCare expansion — the first state to widen children's health coverage through a federal waiver — covering up to 10,000 more children. This is the strongest management file she has, and it is genuinely hers.

Housing and water. She vetoed the bipartisan Arizona Starter Homes Act in March 2024 — a bill that passed with Democratic votes to strip cities of the power to mandate large lots and design rules — citing firefighter concerns and the Defense Department's objection to building near military bases. The 2025 successor fixed the flaws she named and then died without a vote, under threat of her veto. She signed real bills too (casitas by right, middle housing, commercial conversions) and put a historic $150 million into the Housing Trust Fund. On water, she cancelled the Saudi-owned Fondomonte leases in Butler Valley, imposed groundwater Active Management Areas by executive action where the Legislature would not act, and this August accepted the Lower Basin Colorado River deal: Arizona gives up 760,000 acre-feet over two years — about 31% of its allocation, the largest cut of any state — which she frames, plausibly, as the alternative to forced federal cuts she says could have reached 77%. Whether that is statesmanship or surrender is the honest argument of this race, and Biggs makes the other side of it below.

The appointments end-run — a court has ruled on this one. In September 2023, after the Senate's new nominations committee rejected several of her agency directors, Hobbs withdrew 13 nominations and reinstalled the same people as "executive deputy directors," claiming they held a director's full authority without confirmation. The Senate sued. In June 2024, Judge Scott Blaney ruled she had "improperly, unilaterally appointed de facto directors" and "willfully circumvented" the confirmation statute, eliminating the Legislature's oversight role. She complied on paper; three of the unconfirmable directors were later demoted in title and kept at director pay — her DCS director at $220,000 a year. A publication that puts the Constitution first does not get to skip this: a judge found that the governor broke the appointments law on purpose. That is not a partisan characterization. It is a holding.

Sunshine Residential — what is proven, and what is not. In June 2024 the Arizona Republic reported that Sunshine Residential Homes — the state's largest group-home provider for foster children — had given $400,000 to Hobbs's political operation in 2022–23 ($300,000 to the state Democratic Party, $100,000 to her inaugural fund; the fuller tally, through May 2024 and including her legal defense fund, is $580,840), and then received increases from her Department of Child Safety taking its per-bed rate from $149.99 to $195 (May 2023) and then $234 (April 2024) — the highest rate in Arizona, up 56%. The Attorney General — a Democrat — investigated for two years, reviewed over 100,000 documents, and closed the criminal case this August: "the investigation has not uncovered any evidence of the necessary quid pro quo to support a bribery charge." Her DCS director's own email says no one from the Governor's Office ever raised the provider. We print that in full because it is the finding, and we do not call this corruption, because corruption is a claim that requires proof and the proof is not there. What is documented conduct: internal staff knew Sunshine was a donor and felt pressure ("put pressure on, I think, everybody," one told investigators — pressure the AG traced to their own knowledge, not to her office); the rate did become the state's highest while the donations flowed; and Hobbs then vetoed the contractor-donation disclosure bill twice — the modest, obvious reform her own attorney general publicly begged the Legislature to pass — and this month declined to rule out taking state contractors' donations again. The Maricopa County Attorney and the Auditor General are still investigating. The bribery charge failed. The accountability question — she took the money, kept the process opaque, and killed the transparency bill — she answered herself.

The flaw, plainly: Hobbs is not an extremist and not, on this record, corrupt. She is something more ordinary and, for our voters, more decisive: a committed party governor whose one genuinely historic governing instrument — the veto — has been used 541 times to hold Arizona where her party wants it: no ICE cooperation, no starter-homes deregulation, no election-administration changes, no cap on her own transparency obligations — while the state's fastest-growing entitlement ran uncapped through all four of her budgets and a court found she broke the appointments law to keep her people in place. Her genuine achievements (the fraud crackdown, the fentanyl work, the Fondomonte cancellation) are management. Her flaw is direction, executed with the most powerful pen in state history.

Andy Biggs (Republican)

His platform, in his own terms: "Eliminate the state income tax" — "If we want to be competitive with Texas and Nevada, we need to get to zero" — and reduce property taxes. Protect and expand Empowerment Scholarship Accounts so "families can choose the educational method that best meets the needs of their child," and opt Arizona into the new federal education tax credit. Restore a Border Strike Force, encourage every agency to join ICE's 287(g) program, and create a border czar. Repeal Hobbs's groundwater restrictions and her renewable-energy executive order, codify the repeal of what he calls her "housing moratorium," fight "for every drop of our allocated Colorado River water," and sign the election-integrity bills Hobbs vetoed — making Arizona's elections "the gold standard." End medical mandates; no vaccine requirements at state universities; over-the-counter ivermectin; raw milk. It is, plank for plank, the platform of the voters this publication serves.

His record: Fourteen years in the state Legislature, the last four-plus as Senate president, where his strongest documented credential lives: he presided over the negotiations that produced Proposition 123, the 2016 land-trust settlement that put roughly $3.5 billion into K-12 schools with voter approval — proof, when he wants it, that he can close a bipartisan deal. In Congress: Freedom Caucus chairman, a 94%-lifetime Heritage Action score, no votes on omnibus bills, continuing resolutions, and debt-limit deals across a decade — and one of the eight Republicans who voted to vacate Speaker Kevin McCarthy in 2023 for passing a spending bill without border provisions. He co-founded a bipartisan War Powers Caucus and cosponsored the FIRST STEP Act's criminal-justice reforms. This is not a performer's file; it is a conviction politician's.

The worst claims — and the record:

Claim: Hobbs vetoed 541 bills; he will sign them. The number is true — it is the Arizona Capitol Times/Republic tally, and it is the centerpiece of his campaign. His promise that "by the end of that first week… we'll be signing all of these bills" requires the Legislature to pass them again first, a detail his ads omit and his stump line elides. Small, but note the pattern; it returns below.

Claim (his and Trump's): Hobbs vetoed 18 border bills that would have helped ICE; she is an "open borders advocate." The 18-bill count is a Trump rally figure; no itemized list has been produced, and we do not print it as fact. The substance underneath is half-true: she did veto the ICE-cooperation bills (that record is above, and we scored it against her), and she did disband Ducey's Border Strike Force in 2023 — redirecting its money to local agencies, which her office counts at over $200 million for border security. The container wall came down under an agreement her predecessor reached before she took office. "Open borders" describes a governor who left the border alone. The documented governor sent the Guard, embedded troops with CBP, and built two task forces — while refusing ICE. Voters can weigh that distinction; his slogan erases it.

His signature promise — eliminate the income tax — tested the way we test anyone we might endorse. The state income tax raised $5.48 billion in fiscal 2025 — roughly a third of general-fund revenue, the largest single source the state has. Biggs says he can get to zero "without raising any other taxes," incrementally, through Medicaid waste savings, streamlining, and better use of state land and minerals. He has presented no plan that closes the arithmetic — no schedule, no replacement math, no JLBC-scored path — as of this month. Our standard is the one we applied to Steve Hilton in California and John James in Michigan: a candidate's own promise must survive checking before it can carry an endorsement. This one, today, is a direction with a number-shaped hole in it. That is not disqualifying — governors have phased in cuts before — but it is unproven in exactly the place he asks to be trusted most.

The spending brand, and its one big exception. For a decade Biggs voted no on the bills that grew the debt — until the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which he voted for twice in 2025 (House passage in May, final concurrence in July) despite independent estimates that it adds more than $4 trillion to the debt over a decade and cuts roughly $1 trillion from Medicaid and food assistance. He defended the vote as strengthening Medicaid and claimed $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction for the package. Every politician who has ever bent has a reason; the documented fact is that the man who would not suspend the debt limit "so that the Far Left can spend" voted yes when his own president's bill did the spending. His no on the CHIPS Act, with semiconductor fabs rising in his own state, and his anti-earmark stand — he co-led the fight to keep earmarks banned — cut the other way: consistency, at real cost. The record is a mostly straight line with one very large bend in it, and voters should know both.

Claim (Hobbs's): Biggs backed a 23% tax hike. Half-true. He cosponsored the Fair Tax Act, which would impose a 23% national sales tax — replacing the federal income, payroll, and estate taxes and abolishing the IRS. Her ad's "raise prices 23% more… on everything" omits the replacement. It is a serious proposal voters may reject on its merits; it is not a tax increase bolted onto the current code, and her ad says it is.

Claim (Hobbs's): He protected predators in Colorado City. The documented record: in 2013, a bill backed by the attorney general would have let the state decertify the Colorado City Marshal's Office — a department the Justice Department had sued for serving the FLDS church and Warren Jeffs. The House passed it 52–7. In Biggs's Senate it received a double committee referral and never got a hearing. The bill's sponsor, a Republican, says women and children "suffered three years longer" because he "protected the bad guys." Biggs's answer: he assigned the bill appropriately, the state's police associations opposed that version as poorly written, and he had voted for a decertification bill the year before. No source shows he ordered it killed. The documented facts are narrower and still his: as Senate president he knew, the bill died in his chamber without a vote, and the federal courts later dismantled that department anyway. It is the heaviest item in his state record, and "the process ate it" is a weaker defense than the office he seeks deserves.

Abortion — the silence where a record used to be. Biggs's congressional record is unambiguous: opposed to all elective abortion, cosponsor of the Life at Conception Act — a fetal-personhood bill — five times, most recently in January 2025. In 2024, Arizona voters wrote abortion rights to viability into the state constitution (Proposition 139, ~61%). His 2026 campaign website says nothing about abortion at all; the "Defending Life" page from his congressional site disappeared in the redirect, and when the Arizona Capitol Times asked whether he would seek repeal of Proposition 139, his campaign did not answer. His running mate, as a state senator, pushed a near-total ban in 2021. A candidate is entitled to lose an issue and move on. He is not entitled to have his record treated as a rumor. Voters who share his convictions should want to hear him say what he would do with a constitutional provision he spent a decade opposing; voters who don't should notice he won't say.

The January 6 file — in full, with his answers

There is no honest version of this race that treats this as one more attack ad, so here it is whole.

On November 6, 2020 — three days after the election, before Arizona had been called — Biggs texted White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows urging that Republican legislatures be pressed to appoint alternate electors "in the various states where there's been shenanigans," conceding it would be "highly controversial." Meadows replied: "I love it." On December 21 he attended the White House meeting where the theory that Vice President Pence could refuse to count certified electoral votes was discussed — a theory the White House counsel called "nutty." He signed the brief asking the Supreme Court to throw out four states' results. On the morning of January 6, 2021, he called Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers — a Republican, testifying later under oath — and asked him to support decertifying Arizona's electors; Bowers refused, citing his oath. That day, Biggs spoke for and voted for the objections to counting Arizona's and Pennsylvania's electoral votes, after the Capitol had been attacked and cleared. In October 2021 — after the Republican-led Maricopa County hand recount had confirmed Biden's win — he told a House hearing, "we don't know who won Arizona in the 2020 presidential election."

The January 6 Committee subpoenaed him; he refused to comply, calling it a "sham," and its final report referred him to the House Ethics Committee — for the subpoena defiance, a scope worth stating exactly. White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified that Biggs was among the members who asked about or sought presidential pardons; Biggs denies it flatly ("she is mistaken"), and no pardon was issued. Stop the Steal organizer Ali Alexander claimed Biggs helped conceive the January 6 pressure campaign; Biggs denies working with Alexander. He was not indicted in Arizona's fake-elector case — the 18 defendants were others — and no ethics sanction followed the referral. Those bounds matter, and we observe them.

What remains when every contested item is set aside is not contested at all, because it is in his own texts, his own votes, and his own words: a sitting congressman worked, from November 2020 through January 2021, to overturn a certified presidential election in his own state, and six years later he still will not say clearly that Joe Biden won it. In April 2026 he did say, and we credit it in full: "Of course, I will accept the results of the election" — his own. That pledge is welcome. It is also the whole problem stated in one sentence: the elections Andy Biggs accepts are the ones he might win.

The flaw, plainly: Biggs's direction is our direction — taxes, vouchers, enforcement, spending — carried by a real record, with one large bend (the 2025 megabill) and one signature promise whose math he has not closed. His flaw is not direction. It is the thing this publication exists to defend. A constitution is not a set of suggestions that hold when your side wins; the peaceful transfer of power is the load-bearing wall of the entire American project, and on the one day in living memory it was tested, Andy Biggs was on the other side of it — not in a speech, but in texts, meetings, phone calls, and votes. Character and constitutional conduct are not one issue among many for us. That is why this file, standing alone, is enough to deny him our endorsement — and why the verdict below carries it into the weighing at full weight, against the only thing on the other side of the scale: a complete, four-year governing record.

The verdict: no endorsement — and the lean, on terms

Two candidates. Two very different flaws.

Hobbs's flaw is direction: a proven, party-program record — 541 vetoes holding a line our voters oppose, ICE walled off, an uncapped voucher entitlement, an appointments end-run a court rebuked, and a transparency record she chose. And say plainly what those 541 vetoes are: each one is a bill the Legislature Arizonans elected had passed, set aside by a single pen — the veto used not as a check but as a method of governing, and a method that does not honor the will of the constituents who sent that Legislature to Phoenix. Nothing about it is alleged, and none of it is past. It is complete, it is current, and it is the record she is running to extend for four more years.

Biggs's flaw is the file above: proven conduct, in service, against the certification of an election — unrecanted, and joined to a signature fiscal promise he cannot yet price. Let us be exact about what that file does in our weighing, because it does two different things. It denies him our endorsement, outright: a publication that backs the Constitution first does not certify a man who worked against the count, and no list of correct positions changes that. What it does not do is end the comparison — because the comparison is not between Biggs and a clean alternative. His conduct is six years old. It is bounded: he was not indicted, no sanction followed the referral, and the contested items in the file are printed above with his denials beside them. And it is answered in part by the one thing he has said since that points the other way — his April 2026 pledge, on the record, to accept the results of his own election. A pledge is not a recantation, and we do not score it as one. But it is not nothing, and neither is the difference between a failure that is behind a man and a record that is still being written against our voters every day its author holds the pen.

So this race is weighed the way New York and California were weighed: a flawed candidate against a proven record of governing in the wrong direction. We will not certify Katie Hobbs: her program is the other side's program, and a LiberalMind endorsement of it would be a lie about who we are. We will not certify Andy Biggs either — the January 6 file and the unpriced tax promise are the reasons, stated in full above, narrower than his opponents' shouting and heavier for it. If Arizona must live with one of these flaws for four years — a governor whose pen is still holding her party's line, including against the ICE cooperation her own voters demanded over her veto, or a governor whose worst act is six years behind him, bounded, partly contested, never charged, and partly answered — live with his, and hold him to the terms below.

The lean is Biggs, narrowly, and it comes with the same must-prove terms we gave Republicans in North Carolina and New Hampshire, because the terms are the point. Biggs can strengthen this lean into something more, the way Davis in North Carolina can earn an exception: say, plainly, that the 2020 election was decided and he was wrong to work against its certification — and close the math on the tax promise. A man who did the first would be telling Arizona he serves the Constitution before the tribe; a man who did the second would be ready to be endorsed. He has had six years to do the first and a full campaign to do the second, and as of this writing he has done neither — which is why this is a lean, on terms, and not an endorsement.

Vote early. Research your candidates. Choose the best moderates, whatever their party — no extremism from either side. And encourage your friends and family to do the same.

Sources

AI-assisted article — but the sources are human, and the facts are very real.

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