GOP Sen. Shawnna Bolick (left) is trying to win election, but Democratic Rep. Judy Schweibert (right) is hoping to oust her in Legislative District 2. Photos by Jerod MacDonald-Evoy/Arizona Mirror and Gage Skidmore/Flickr via CC BY-SA 2.0
When voters in north Phoenix open their doors to find Rep. Judy Schwiebert standing on their porch, the conversation about whether to elect her to the state Senate begins with education.
“The Arizona Legislature has put our state 51st in the nation when it comes to funding and teacher salaries — and that’s a disaster not just for our state, but for our whole economy,” goes the Democrat’s preferred icebreaker.
A former public school teacher who moved from the classroom to the political arena after seeing a struggling colleague double her salary out of state, Schwiebert is running to represent a district that will help define which party takes control of the state legislature in November.
Legislative District 2 is one of only five districts considered highly competitive by the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission. While registered Republicans narrowly outnumber Democrats in the district, politically unaffiliated voters nearly equal Republicans — 46,830 to 48,211 — making the district one of the most competitive in Arizona.
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And with Democrats making their most intense push ever to win control of the legislature since Republicans assumed control in the mid-1960s, Schwiebert is among a handful of Democrats whose victories could change the power balance at the state Capitol, where Republicans currently hold one-seat majorities in each chamber.
But while the final outcome of the race between Schweibert and Shawnna Bolick, a Republican who was appointed to the Senate in 2023, remains up in the air, there’s a clear winner in the fundraising effort.
Progressive groups have injected more than $8.5 million into Arizona races, and the amount of money Schwiebert’s campaign has raised handily surpasses Bolick’s. According to the latest campaign finance reports filed last week, Schwiebert’s campaign had raised a little over $500,000, while Bolick’s campaign reported roughly $368,000.
As for policy goals, voters face a choice between two starkly different platforms.
First elected to the Arizona House of Representatives in 2020, Schwiebert has served two terms in the legislature and has focused on boosting public education, though many of her proposals have stagnated in a highly partisan legislature where GOP committee chairmen rarely consider Democratic bills. Schwiebert told the Arizona Mirror she hopes her record of championing public schools will help her appeal to voters.
“The issue that I’m working to close the deal on is education,” she said.
This year, Schwiebert spearheaded Gov. Katie Hobbs’ Prop. 123 replacement plan, a referendum that accounts for $300 million in annual K-12 funding. Initially approved by lawmakers in 2016 to settle a lawsuit against the state for failing to properly fund public schools, Prop. 123 is set to expire next year.
Lawmakers need to send an extension to voters, but disagreements between Republicans — who want to keep the funding stream at the same rate and change how its distributed to directly benefit teachers — and Democrats — who want to increase the amount of money sent to schools and widen the roster of who could see pay raises, including support staff like bus drivers and librarians —- resulted in an impasse that will need to be resolved by the new legislative body next year to prevent K-12 schools from experiencing a debilitating fiscal cliff.
The party that wins a legislative majority in November will decide what the revised Prop. 123 will look like.
Schiewbert also introduced a bill that would have prevented private schools receiving universal school vouchers from increasing tuition rates above the previous year’s inflation rate. Republicans have said they are uninterested in any new regulations or standards being imposed on the voucher system, and the bill was never heard in committee.
Democrats have long sought to regulate the vouchers, known formally as Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, that have funneled money from public schools to private schools with what they consider to be insufficient oversight. Originally sold by Republicans as a way to help students with special education needs or attending failing schools to widen their educational options, the program’s enrollment has ballooned since a universal expansion in 2022 opened it up to all students, even if they’ve never stepped foot in a public school before.
Bolick, meanwhile, is an ardent proponent of school vouchers, and she is angling to keep voters in her corner by touting her conservative bonafides. The Pittsburgh native did not respond to multiple requests for an interview but her campaign has aired ads that highlight her commitment to preserving private school vouchers and focus on border security issues — a common theme among Republican politicians this election cycle seeking to cash in on one of the top voter concerns.
Bolick was first elected to the state House in 2018 to represent Legislative District 20, which prior to redistricting covered much of the same area as LD2, after two failed campaigns in other districts. Four years later, she ran to become the GOP nominee for Arizona secretary of state, but was defeated in the primary. Before becoming an elected official, Bolick worked with conservative organizations like the Heritage Foundation and consulted for the Arizona Charter School Association and the Goldwater Institute, where her husband — current Supreme Court Justice Clint Bolick — was the top attorney.
In her career as a lawmaker, Bolick has made headlines for her election denialism. In 2021, on the heels of false claims of election fraud from former President Donald Trump, Bolick introduced a bill that would have allowed the state legislature to overturn the will of Arizona voters in presidential elections for any reason, with just a simple majority vote. And she was also one of 20 Republican lawmakers that signed onto a resolution urging Congress to either accept a slate of fake electors or reject the state’s electoral votes until the legislature could perform an audit of the results.
The so-called audit that ensued in 2021 was costly, rife with disinformation, and ultimately confirmed that President Joe Biden won the state.
Last year, Bolick was appointed to the Senate by the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors to replace outgoing Sen. Steve Kaiser. And while Bolick reportedly told Maricopa County Supervisor Bill Gates that she felt it was time for the party to move on from questioning the 2020 and 2022 elections, she continued advancing proposals grounded in election denialism once she took office.
In January, Bolick signed on as a co-sponsor of a resolution that mandated only people who prove their U.S. citizenship be allowed to vote in Arizona, which would have eliminated the state’s federal-only voting option and likely violated federal law.
Arizona operates under a bifurcated voting system that requires voters to provide proof of citizenship upon registration to be eligible to vote in state and local elections. But the courts have consistently held that the National Voter Registration Protection Act guarantees the ability of all U.S. citizens to cast ballots in federal elections even if they haven’t met the citizenship requirements of individual states like Arizona. Instead, voters must sign an attestation confirming that they are U.S. citizens, under penalty of perjury.
Strict voter-ID laws like the one backed by Bolick arise from false claims, fueled in recent years by Trump, that noncitizens are voting in the country’s elections at high rates: The former president made those claims in 2016, when he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million votes, and again in 2020, when Joe Biden handily defeated him by 7 million votes.
Federal law bans noncitizens from voting in federal elections, and multiple studies have found that the incidence of noncitizens voting in U.S. elections is extremely rare.
Bolick has centered her campaign around border security, and her ads seek to paint Schwiebert as soft on the issue. One such ad lambasts the Democrat’s opposition to Prop. 314, a referendum sent to the ballot with only Republican support that makes it a state crime for migrants to cross the southern border, gives the state unprecedented power to arrest and deport migrants, establishes criminal penalties for undocumented Arizonans who falsify records to apply for a job or public benefits and creates an entirely new class of felony offense for people convicted of selling fentanyl to someone that causes their death.
The proposal, made up of GOP wish list policies and sent directly to voters to circumvent Hobbs’ veto pen, serves as the party’s electoral pitch in an election year where concern over immigration ranks at a record high. But Latino and progressive advocacy groups have sounded the alarm over its potential to increase discrimination, while law enforcement officials have expressed disapproval over the burden it places on law enforcement agencies and its lack of funding.
Schwiebert told the Arizona Mirror the state has no authority to enforce federal immigration law, something the U.S. Constitution says is the sole purview of Congress. At the state level, she said she supports Hobbs’ strategy of allocating funding to border communities and law enforcement agencies.
Despite touting a hands off approach, however, Schwiebert’s campaign has run a TV ad promising to work to set aside more funding for border security, positioning herself as more of a border hawk, in an emerging trend from Democratic candidates seeking to appeal to red voters.
Abortion is spotlighted in the November election, as voters head to the polls to decide whether to make the procedure a constitutional right. And a turbulent year for reproductive health care in Arizona made the issue a focal point in swing district races, especially LD2, after Bolick broke from her party to preserve access to the procedure.
In April, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that a near-total abortion ban from 1864 could once again be enforced. The law mandated prison time for doctors who performed abortions for any other reason than saving a woman’s life. The ruling kicked off weeks of political scrambling and intraparty tension, as Republican lawmakers hesitated to undermine their pro-life stances to repeal the law, but also worried that leaving it in place could cost them their legislative majority in November.
Finally, two weeks later and after increasingly strident calls to repeal the Civil War era law, a handful of Republicans bucked their party to join Democrats in striking it down. Among their ranks was Bolick, whose husband was one of four Supreme Court justices that voted to reinstate the law.
In a nearly 30-minute-long floor speech explaining her vote, Bolick shared how she had received a dilation and curettage procedure when one of her pregnancies was deemed unviable by doctors. Bolick said she worried the life-saving exception in the 1864 law was too limited, and could lead to women being denied critical care that would result in permanent health complications or injuries.
“Many women don’t have textbook pregnancies,” she said at the time.
But while some voters might view Bolick’s move as setting her apart from her colleagues with more unyielding anti-abortion stances, Schwiebert said doing so would be a mistake.
“I applaud that one vote that she took to overturn the 1864 abortion ban,” Schwiebert said. “It was the right thing to do. But it’s certainly hard to say where she stands on the issue of abortion since for the most part she has voted to criminalize it and punish women as well as their doctors.”
During her floor speech, Bolick was quick to clarify that her vote to repeal the near-total ban wasn’t an indication of her support for abortion. Instead, she explained that she believed a repeal was necessary to ensure that Proposition 139, the abortion rights ballot initiative voters will consider on Nov. 5, wasn’t inadvertently handed a win. Many Republicans and political strategists foresaw a landslide victory for Prop. 139 if voters were left with a choice between no access under the 1864 law and the guarantees offered by the ballot measure.
Along with her firm opposition to Prop. 139, Bolick has a track record of backing harsh anti-abortion laws. Three years ago, she co-sponsored a bill that sought to charge doctors who perform abortions and the women who received them with homicide. And in 2022, she was one of several Republican co-sponsors who backed the 15-week gestational ban that left open the legal path to reviving the 1864 law.
In February of this year, Bolick read a proclamation on the House floor urging voters not to support Prop. 139’s effort to qualify for the ballot, decrying it as the “ending of an innocent human life”.
“From the moment of conception until the end of life, everyone should have a right to life. All lives matter or no lives matter,” she said.
Schwiebert, meanwhile, has been an advocate of reproductive rights, co-sponsoring and voting for legislation to overturn the 1864 law, eliminate invasive reporting practices abortion patients must endure and guarantee the right to contraception.
Another controversy facing Bolick as voters head to the polls is her support of a ballot measure intended to award state judges lifetime appointments. If approved, Proposition 137 would abolish the current system, under which voters decide whether to retain judges.
This year, Clint Bolick is on the ballot, and progressive groups have lobbied voters to unseat him for his role in the reinstatement of the 1864 law. But because Prop. 137 is retroactive, its passage would mean he gets to remain on the Supreme Court, even if voters separately oust him. The proposal was sent to the November ballot by Republican lawmakers earlier this year, and Bolick voted in favor of delivering it to voters, despite criticism from Democrats that she had a clear conflict of interest.
Despite their contrasting policy platforms, both Bolick and Schwiebert are keenly aware of what the outcome of the LD2 Senate race could mean for next year’s legislative body.
In a post on social media site X, formerly Twitter, Bolick blasted out-of-state funding efforts that seek to secure a Democratic majority and called on voters to keep Republicans in power to ensure action is taken on border security.
“The leftwing radical Democrats don’t care about average everyday Arizonans like you struggling to make ends meet or trying to keep food on the table or gas in their car’s gas tank to get to work,” she wrote. “Make Arizona Safe Again. Protect our legislative majority by voting Republican.”
Schwiebert reflected on proposals that were killed in the Republican controlled legislature, including ones to increase teacher salaries and another to make genetic testing more widely available, inspired by a constituent’s request after his wife died from breast cancer that could have been prevented if she’d had access to the proper medical tests.
“The one-seat Republican majority blocked them from even being heard in committee,” she lamented. “That’s just wrong. And that’s why I’m running for the state Senate, because if we can win this seat we can at least have parity. Hopefully, we can even have a new majority that will hear the concerns of the people in our district.”
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