The GOP's grip on Arizona is slipping. The East Valley shows how far

The 2026 midterm elections scuttled Republican hopes for halting Arizona’s decadelong departure from the GOP.

A close look at trends since 2016 confirms the blue wave experienced nationally accelerated the state’s exodus.

Rep. Andy Biggs, a diehard conservative with the full backing of Turning Point USA, lost to incumbent Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs by 13 percentage points.

In 2024, President Donald Trump had won the state by 5.5 percentage points. Just two years earlier, GOP nominee for governor Kari Lake had lost it by a fraction of a percent.

Electoral whiplash has become the norm in battleground Arizona. But Tuesday night’s spectacular pendulum swing turned the state a decidedly dark shade of purple.

Nowhere was spared. Not even Biggs’ hometown of Gilbert, or its equally conservative surroundings of East Valley.

A sprawling metro area that includes the suburban cities of Gilbert, Mesa, Chandler and Queen Creek, the East Valley found itself at the center of the governor’s race.

Biggs and Hobbs’ running mate, former Mesa mayor John Giles, represented parts of the region for the past decade.

They also belong to one of the region’s dominant voter blocs: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Following the trajectory Arizona started after Trump’s rise to the presidency, a majority of East Valley voted for Democrats this year for the first time in political memory.

The impact was felt up and down the ballot, fundamentally reshaping the topography of Arizona’s political landscape.

Former Pinal County sheriff Mark Lamb barely held on in his campaign to replace Biggs in the 5th Congressional District, where he had previously won by 20-point margins.

Arizona Democrats succeeded in flipping two other U.S. House seats. They also took control of both the state House and Senate for the first time in exactly 60 years.

The state still remains center-right in its political leanings, former state GOP executive director Chad Heywood said.

Voters demonstrated this by approving measures to prohibit transgender players in female school sports, cap sales tax on food and designate cartels as terrorists.

The problem is trust.

“Voters are no longer just voting for someone with an ‘R’ next to their name,” Heywood told the Deseret News.

Republicans’ historic rout prompted another round of debate among Arizona politicos about whether individual candidates, or White House policies, are to blame.

Either way, data shows the dramatic results are not a one-off, but a continual drift in Arizona away from the GOP.

Arizona’s race ... away from the GOP

A Deseret News analysis of precinct-level totals found that between 2016 and 2026, statewide election outcomes have pivoted 30 percentage points toward Democrats.

Winning margins shifted even more significantly for East Valley, which moved more than 35 points in that direction.

This marks a steady downward slope for GOP support in U.S. Senate and gubernatorial elections across six cycles.

Chandler was first to cross into Democratic territory in 2020, after sliding that way in 2018. It was followed by Maricopa County, and Arizona as a whole, in 2020.

This year, Gilbert and Mesa joined them.

Biggs lost Gilbert by 5.5 percentage points, Mesa by 9.8 and the entire East Valley by 10.6 — a 21-percentage-point shift from 2024 and a 15-point shift from 2022.

The last time a challenger upset an incumbent governor in Arizona was 1966, the year the state swerved red.

It was always going to be an uphill battle, Heywood said, as Hobbs amassed three times as much money, avoided a primary and picked through Biggs’ extensive voting record.

But the particulars matter less than the national narrative that swept the country, said Tyler Farnsworth, Biggs’ nephew, who narrowly won his own bid for state House.

“He ran into a national headwind that just shellacked Republicans from coast to coast,” Farnsworth told the Deseret News. “That’s the most important piece of this.”

Unlike 2022 and 2024, when President Joe Biden answered for a border crisis and broken economy, in 2026 it was Trump who voters faulted for financial uncertainty.

That is why Farnsworth is skeptical the drubbing dealt by Democrats signals a sustained trend in Arizona politics.

He considers Turning Point’s investment in the state — including $18.3 million for Biggs — a positive sign the GOP can reboot through door-knocking and youth outreach.

Those who frame the 2026 outcomes as proof Turning Point has ruined the Republican brand in Arizona are simply “sour grapes,” according to Farnsworth.

Some of Turning Point’s biggest critics believe just that: Biggs’ defeat proves the party needs to distance itself from the fully Trumpified tactics of Turning Point.

“I hope that if it says anything, people in the East Valley want to move beyond the vitriol and back to decency,” former Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake told the Deseret News.

The source of Arizona GOP woes, he says, is an inability to nominate someone who can win a general election — despite a 300,000-person voter registration advantage.

Biggs’ showing in East Valley highlights how his association with 2020 election denialism reflected poorly when compared with Giles’ pragmatic reputation, he said.

Giles on the ticket created a “permission structure” for Republican Latter-day Saints to vote for a Democrat, said Clint Smith, a member who ran against Biggs in 2022.

Meanwhile, it was impossible for Biggs to distance from Trump considering his prominent endorsement, Smith said.

As the recipient of Turning Point attacks, Smith hopes Biggs’ loss tells donors its work in Arizona has backfired.

A 5th District dilemma

Biggs is not the only Republican the East Valley rejected last week. They also bristled at Biggs’ replacement.

Lamb was declared the winner of Biggs’ 5th District, encompassing Gilbert, east Mesa, Queen Creek and parts of Pinal County, on Thursday night with a lead of 51.6%.

While he led his Democratic opponent by 2.6 percentage points districtwide, he trailed her by 1.5 points in the East Valley, where Biggs had won by 17 percentage points.

Biggs’ 26-year-old daughter, Mylie, running for a state Senate seat at the heart of the 5th District, also lost.

A 19-point swing toward Democrats is unprecedented for the area, said Smith, who ran there as an independent.

Some of it can likely be explained by sexual scandals reported by the Arizona Republic. But Smith, an ex-Republican, thinks it comes down to the state of the GOP.

“I have no idea how they’re going to rebuild this,” Smith told the Deseret News. “In the end, it’s just the party people are Trump people, and that’s the end of that.”

Lamb’s slim victory belies the nearly five-to-one fundraising advantage he enjoyed over Lee because the Democratic Party did not see Biggs’ seat as winnable.

Lamb himself held relatively few general election events in the district with the assumption his seat was safe.

This proved a miscalculation of anti-GOP undercurrents.

The same Latter-day Saint-run PAC mobilizing support for Hobbs and Giles in Mesa — “Arizonans Who Believe in Treating Others with Respect” — also endorsed Lee.

Over the past 20 years, the share of Latter-day Saints who identify as Republican has fallen 11 percentage points.

This drop from 68.5% to 57.5% is unique among religious groups nationally, which have grown increasingly Republican.

However, Latter-day Saint GOP identification persists as one of the strongest in the country. Midterm exit polls found between 69% and 77% of members are Republican.

Future affiliation could depend on how Democrats spend their next two years of untrammeled power in Phoenix.

Propelled by the 2026 results, state Democratic lawmakers are almost sure to “overreach,” Heywood said.

The question is whether Hobbs can keep her role as “veto queen,” he said, moderating her party as she has Republicans.

Flake, who serves as founding director of Arizona State University’s Institute of Politics, shares the same fear.

Swapping “Make America Great Again” for radical progressivism would not be an improvement in his eyes.

“I hope this will help us return to playing the game inside the 40-yard lines,” he said. “We’ve been inside the 20s in terms of how we nominate candidates and everything else.”

The midterms must serve as a message for both parties, Flake said, or the pendulum will just keep on swinging.