Democratic legislative candidate Brandy Reese canvasses a neighborhood in Legislative District 13 in mid-October. Photo by Caitlin Sievers | Arizona Mirror
A hotly contested race for two East Valley seats in the Arizona House of Representatives could determine which party controls the chamber for the next two years, and massive outside spending on the race shows that both parties are scrambling to eke out a victory.
Legislative District 13 covers portions of Chandler, Gilbert and Sun Lakes. Its voters lean Republican, but it was rated a highly competitive district by the Independent Redistricting Committee when it drew a new legislative map in 2021. Republicans currently have a slim one-seat majority in the state House, and if Democrats win both seats, they could take control of the chamber for the first time in almost 60 years.
Rep. Jennifer Pawlik, D-Chandler, has held one of the district’s two seats since 2018, when it was Legislative District 17, prior to redistricting. Pawlik did not run for reelection.
The other seat has long been in Republican hands. It is currently held by former emergency room nurse Rep. Julie Willoughby of Chandler, who is hoping to keep it that way. Willoughby was appointed to represent Legislative District 13 in May 2023, after Republican Rep. Liz Harris was expelled from the chamber for lying to the Ethics Committee about her knowledge that a woman she invited to speak to legislators was going to spread wild, unfounded criminal allegations about lawmakers.
Willoughby previously made two unsuccessful bids for the Arizona House, in 2018 and 2022. She has attempted to distance herself from Harris since they campaigned together in 2022.
This time around, Willoughby is running alongside former state Rep. Jeff Weninger, who Harris replaced in 2022 when he reached an eight-year term limit and ran unsuccessfully for state treasurer.
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Weninger and Willoughby are facing off against Democratic candidates Brandy Reese, a former forensic scientist who made an unsuccessful run for the House in nearby Legislative District 14 in 2022, and community planner Nicolas Gonzales.
The Democrats have out-fundraised their Republican foes, with Reese taking in $318,637 and Gonzales raising $251,590 as of Sept. 30, according to campaign finance reports. During the same time period, Weninger raised $133,713 and Willoughby garnered $122,368.
Rep. Julie Willoughby, R-Chandler, on the floor of the Arizona House of Representatives in July 2023. Photo by Gage Skidmore | Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0
But outside groups have far far outpaced the candidates’ own fundraising efforts, spending more than $1 million to support the Democrats and more than $609,000 to bolster the Republicans in the race.
“I’m definitely going to win,” Reese told the Arizona Mirror. “I have put in the work.”
Reese said she’s been focusing on reaching independents, who make up about a third of Arizona’s registered voters, and whose support is crucial for a Democratic candidate like her to win in a Republican-leaning district.
The most pressing concerns she’s been hearing from voters have changed across the election cycle, Reese said. In April, voters were anxious about reproductive rights, after the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that a near-total abortion ban dating to 1864 was enforceable. Now, she said, voters are more concerned about the economy and education, although reproductive rights are still important to many.
Reese and Gonzales both support the Arizona Abortion Access Act, a citizen-led ballot measure that will ask voters in November to enshrine the right to abortion into the state constitution.
Willoughby voted against a repeal of Arizona’s Civil War-era abortion ban in April, but it ultimately met its demise after a small handful of Republicans sided with Democrats, saying the law was too extreme.
In 2022, Weninger voted for the state’s existing abortion ban, which outlaws the procedure after 15 weeks of gestation, with exceptions only for medical emergencies. That law included language that explicitly allowed the 1864 near-total ban to go into effect after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
Neither Weninger nor Willoughby responded to multiple requests for interviews for this article.
Education
On his campaign site, Weninger said one of his top concerns is improving education. He said that he sends both his children to public schools and previously voted to increase public school funding and teacher pay. Weninger also touts his commitment to “school choice,” and voted in favor of the universal expansion of Arizona’s school voucher program, which uses taxpayer money to pay tuition at private and parochial schools, or to reimburse parents for homeschooling materials.
Opponents have criticized the Empowerment Scholarship Program, the formal name for the school voucher system, for providing public money to religious schools and for lacking oversight that has allowed the funds to be used for lavish purchases like driving lessons in luxury vehicles. But Weninger told the Arizona Republic that those were isolated incidents, and he doesn’t think any major changes in oversight are necessary.
Jeff Weninger in June 2022. Photo by Gage Skidmore (modified) | Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0
Willoughby also supports the ESA program, adding on her campaign site that the state should work on engaging disconnected students.
“When schools compete, our children win,” Willoughby said in a statement on her campaign site.
Reese’s foray into politics began with her volunteering for Save Our Schools Arizona, a nonprofit that has been fighting against the school voucher program and for better funding for public schools for years.
“Everything felt so extreme and on fire, and people were showing up at school board meetings wanting to dictate policy and wanting to ban books, and just everything felt extreme and sort of chaotic and it just felt like a need to step in and sort of take the temperature down a little bit and elect people that will work together,” Reese told the Mirror.
Reese and Gonzales both promised to continue fighting for better funding for Arizona’s public schools, some of the worst-funded in the nation, with Gonzales promising on his campaign site that he would keep Republicans from using education funding “as a bargaining chip.”
Reese said that the state’s teacher shortage was not caused by a lack of credentialed teachers, but because those teachers can get better paying jobs in other industries, where they are also better respected, and that both of those things need to change.
Economy
Weninger, who is a longtime co-owner of several restaurants in the East Valley, said on his campaign site that one way to better empower the future workforce is to educate them.
He promised to champion “legislation and reform to help entrepreneurs and future business owners accomplish their dreams by empowering the private sector and getting government out of the way.”
In a 2023 interview with the Mirror, Weninger touted his “very conservative voting record.” He has promised to continue fighting to balance the state budget and to lower taxes.
Reese agreed that better education will lead to a more successful workforce, and said that shoring up the state’s water resources, while also ensuring that its farms continue to thrive, was vital to the state’s economy.
Democratic legislative candidate Nicholas Gonzales. Photo courtesy Nicholas Gonzales
During a Clean Elections debate on Oct. 10, Gonzales said that one way to improve the economy is to ensure that Arizonans have access to affordable housing, one of his top promises, if elected.
Gonzales, a former entrepreneur, said he will work to incentivize building and work to streamline the construction process to bring more housing onto the market, as well as work to increase the state’s minimum wage.
Willoughby told the Chandler Chamber of Commerce in a September interview that she would work to ensure that Chandler has the infrastructure support and housing available to support the continued growth of the tech developer Intel.
Public safety
During her time in the House, Willoughby has focused on regulating against the potential dangers of artificial intelligence, sponsoring a bill earlier this year that would have classified AI-generated images of child exploitation as pornography. The proposal did not make it to a vote in the House, due to constitutional concerns. But Willoughby promised to continue to work on legislation that will target nefarious AI activity.
Gonzales told the Mirror that he aims to support Chandler police and ensure the department is properly funded.
“I just want to continue investing in that, continue encouraging that we promote public safety here in Chandler so it can continue to be a safe place like it was when I grew up here,” he said.
Reese told the Mirror that her background in law enforcement, working for 14 years as criminologist for the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigations, has helped her make inroads with conservative-leaning independent voters who might view Democratic candidates as anti-law enforcement.
Weninger said on his campaign site that he’s dedicated to supporting law enforcement financially so that they have the equipment they need and the pay they deserve.
Controversy
While Gonzales has touted his support for women’s rights, in particular reproductive rights, the Arizona Republic reported that he was convicted in 2021 of misdemeanor false reporting for making a fake kidnapping claim against his former partner.
The false report was part of a pattern of inappropriate and combative behavior toward his former partner and mother of his now 15-year-old child, the Republic reported, including text messages where he repeatedly cursed at her. Gonzales told the Republic that he and his former partner are “amicably co-parenting” their son, but she responded by claiming that was not true.
Gonzales briefly spoke to the Mirror for this article, but did not respond to a request to answer additional questions.
When Willoughby was appointed to the House in 2023, she told reporters that she was not an election denier like Harris, the expelled legislator she replaced. Willoughby lists honest elections as an issue of focus on her campaign site.
“As voters we should be able to know that our votes were counted and counted correctly,” Willoughby said. “Being able to ensure our elections are not being tampered with or manipulated is of the utmost importance.”
In the past year, she co-sponsored bills aimed at resolving alleged issues based on unfounded election integrity claims, including proposals that would have made voter signatures a public record and required 100% of vote tabulators to be sourced from the U.S., something that critics said was not possible.
Willoughby is featured in a Kamala Harris attack ad, funded by the pro-Trump Preserve America PAC, where she claims that she can no longer do her job as a nurse because hospitals are overrun with undocumented immigrants, blaming Harris for the circumstances. The ad came under attack from Democrats on social media, who said it was misleading. Willoughby did not disclose in the video that she is a Republican elected official.
“Hospitals everywhere are overwhelmed and American patients are paying the price,” she said in the ad. “My patients are covering the health care costs of people here illegally, while their own care is jeopardized. Kamala Harris is weak and dangerous.”
The ad ran in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, all swing states.
The Arizona Republic reported that her former employer said she left her job as chief nursing officer at Exceptional Health Care in summer 2023 for a nursing job with a different company, but the newspaper could not confirm that. Willoughby’s LinkedIn page shows that she left that position shortly after being appointed as a legislator, and currently lists state representative as her only full-time job.
There is no record that Willoughby ever filed her 2024 financial disclosure statement that is required of all legislators and other elected officials.
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