Cook Political Report on Arizona Governor’s Race: “Factional Feuds and Problematic Candidates have Become a Pernicious Pattern for the GOP”

Cook Political Report on Arizona Governor’s Race: “Factional Feuds and Problematic Candidates have Become a Pernicious Pattern for the GOP”

New reporting from the Cook Political Report underscores how the three Republicans running for governor in Arizona are locked in an expensive, chaotic race to the right that will leave whoever they nominate “limping into a high-stakes general election.”

Cook added that “factional feuds and problematic candidates have become a pernicious pattern for the GOP,” that it is “unclear that Republicans will be unified enough” to win in November, and that there is “little doubt that GOP infighting can make a decisive difference on the margins.”

Read more from the Cook Political Report here, or check out highlights below.

Cook Political Report: Arizona Governor: Three’s a Crowd

• But in a state where factional feuds and problematic candidates have become a pernicious pattern for the GOP, it’s unclear that Republicans will be unified enough to topple a mild-mannered governor with few glaring flaws. A bruising August primary could leave the GOP’s eventual nominee limping into a high-stakes general election that currently sits in the Toss Up column. If Republicans self-destruct, Democrats stand to win a trifecta in the state for the first time in 62 years.

• Biggs, 67, is the ultimate conservative hardliner. A former Freedom Caucus chair and onetime state Senate president, he routinely casts lonely votes against government spending programs he calls wasteful or unnecessary.

• Democrats won’t have to strain to paint Biggs, who celebrated Medicaid cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and called for overhauling the Affordable Care Act as recently as November, as a foe of working families. His conspiracy-laden attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election are all but certain to make swing voters balk.

• But Robson is viewed with considerable disdain on the right, best evidenced by the chorus of boos that welcomed her to a meeting of Arizona Republican Party officials in January 2025.

• Democrats are optimistic that whomever emerges with the GOP nomination will be low on cash and forced to repair a dented image, especially since Arizona’s late Aug. 4 primary gives the eventual victor just three months to get reorganized before Election Day.

###