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'The Fighter We Need': Progressive Adelita Grijalva Wins Special Primary for Her Late Father's Seat
"Adelita's victory tonight isn't just a win for families in Southern Arizona," said the national director of the Working Families Party. "It's a win for all those who believe in a government that works for everyday people."
Jul 16, 2025
Adelita Grijalva prevailed Tuesday in an Arizona Democratic primary race to fill the U.S. House seat left vacant by the death of her father, progressive stalwart Raúl Grijalva.
Grijalva previously served on the Pima County Board of Supervisors and the Tucson Unified School District Governing Board, and her congressional bid is backed by prominent progressive lawmakers and organizations including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC, National Nurses United, and the Working Families Party.
Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, implored Arizona voters to turn out for Grijalva in a video message posted on the morning of the primary contest, calling her "the fighter we need to take on Trump and the establishment."
With more than three-quarters of the vote tallied, Grijalva has 62% support. Deja Foxx, a 25-year-old activist and Grijalva's closest competitor, has received 21% of the vote as of this writing, according to The Associated Press.
"This is a victory not for me, but for our community and the progressive movement my dad started in Southern Arizona more than 50 years ago," Grijalva said following her decisive win.
"We know that Adelita is going to be a fearless fighter for working families in her district."
Arizona's 7th Congressional District is heavily Democratic, so Grijalva—who campaigned on defending Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security from Republican attacks, bolstering workers' right to unionize, and lowering housing costs—is virtually guaranteed to win the September special election.
"Adelita's victory tonight isn't just a win for families in Southern Arizona. It's a win for all those who believe in a government that works for everyday people," Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, said in a statement late Tuesday. "Voters are tired of politicians who hide in the pockets of their billionaire donors. We know that Adelita is going to be a fearless fighter for working families in her district."
"There's real energy right now for a different kind of politics, one that puts working people first," Mitchell added. "That's exactly why the Working Families Party was founded—to take on the corporate interests and billionaires who are rigging our economy and taking a wrecking ball to our democracy."
The New York Times faced backlash for its specious coverage of the race's outcome, which characterized Grijalva's win as a blow to progressive momentum generated by Zohran Mamdani's victory in New York City's Democratic mayoral primary.
The newspaper, whose coverage of Mamdani's mayoral bid has been a frequent source of outrage and ridicule, described Foxx as "a Gen Z activist who tried to recreate the youthful magic" of Mamdani's campaign, glossing over ideological differences and other factors.
Mamdani did not weigh in on the race, and many of the progressive lawmakers and groups that supported the New York City democratic socialist backed Grijalva. Foxx, who has a large social media following, was endorsed by a PAC founded by activist David Hogg.
"This is where superficial generational discourse gets you," writer Adam Johnson observed on social media in response to the Times coverage of the Arizona contest. "An AOC and Bernie-endorsed candidate wins and it's somehow an indictment on Mamdani—who didn't endorse anyone and has nothing to do with the race."
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Arizona Democratic Party Moves to Stop Billionaires From Buying Primaries
"Congratulations to the Arizona Democrats for getting the ball rolling on this enormously important issue," said U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders. "Other states should follow suit."
Jun 10, 2025
The Arizona Democratic Party moved over the weekend to bar billionaires and corporations from using their wealth to purchase primary elections, a key step for progressives who have been pushing the Democratic Party nationwide to curb the political influence of ultra-rich donors.
A newly approved resolution, passed by voice vote at the Arizona Democratic Party's State Committee meeting on Saturday, instructs the party to "establish a 'People's Primary' policy to bar, to the greatest extent possible, the use of massive private wealth to buy or unduly influence our primary elections."
Organizers and supporters said the resolution's passage marks a significant victory for progressives who have been pushing Democratic leaders to target the outsize influence of big money on primary contests. The weekend vote marked the first time a state Democratic Party has formally committed to challenging big money in primaries, according to organizers.
"This is a major win for working-class Arizonans and for every voter who's tired of watching billionaires spend millions to elect candidates who will screw over the 99% to make them even richer," said Kai Newkirk, co-chair of the Arizona Democratic Party Progressive Council. "Arizona Democrats just sent a message: Our primaries are going to be decided by the people, not the highest bidder. And the days of billionaires and corporations trying to buy them are numbered."
Saturday's vote set in motion the process of crafting party policy changes that are expected to face a final vote later this year.
The resolution, organized by the Stop Big Money AZ campaign, states that the chair of the Arizona Democratic Party's rules panel "shall form an ad-hoc committee" to develop new policies to achieve the resolution's objective to "ensure, to the greatest extent possible, that candidates in Democratic primaries are not benefited by, dependent on, or elected due to outside or independent electioneering spending funded by big donors."
We did it! AZ Dems made history today. We are the first state party in our nation to commit to ban billionaires and corporations from buying our primary elections! Thank you to everyone who helped make it happen from our amazing @stopbigmoneyaz organizing team to @BernieSanders! pic.twitter.com/IkbzQ0bIce
— Kai Newkirk (@kai_newkirk) June 8, 2025
While the resolution doesn't mention super PACs explicitly, it targets wealthy donors "who are circumventing legal limits on direct contributions to a candidate's campaign fund to spend tens or hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars of private wealth to elect the candidates of their choice."
Super PACs, an outgrowth of the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision, are allowed to raise unlimited sums from individuals, corporations, and other organizations, provided that they don't coordinate directly with the candidates they are supporting—a restriction that is often flouted, or impossible to detect, in practice.
A report published earlier this year found that the top 100 billionaire families in the U.S. pumped a record-shattering $2.6 billion into federal elections in 2024—which amounted to one of every six dollars spent by all candidates, parties, and campaign committees in total. The overwhelming majority of that spending flowed into the coffers of super PACs.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a vocal supporter of banning super PAC spending in Democratic primaries, applauded the Arizona Democratic Party's passage of the "People's Primary" resolution.
"Congratulations to the Arizona Democrats for getting the ball rolling on this enormously important issue," Sanders said Monday. "Billionaires must not be allowed to buy Democratic primary elections. Other states should follow suit."
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When Given a Chance, Voters Choose to Increase Equality and Redistribute Wealth
A recent report on citizen-driven initiatives found that people in red and blue states vote for policies that are egalitarian and economically redistributive.
Apr 29, 2025
On the evening of November 5, 2024, I sat at a gathering of organizers and volunteers from the campaign to pass Proposition 139, a citizen-driven initiative in Arizona seeking to enshrine abortion access in the state constitution.
After an hour or so of waiting with bated breath, the bulk of Arizona’s ballot initiative results had been counted and posted online. Our hard work had paid off! Prop 139 had amassed 66% voter support (a number that would decrease to a still impressive 61% by the final tally.) After a significant round of applause and the shedding of a few tears, the party settled into a pleasant thrum.
At first I expected shouting, screaming, and crying—we had won a massive victory! But I quickly understood that the celebration was more subdued than expected because the results were exactly what the lead organizers of the campaign hadanticipated: a win.
Healthcare Rising and Prop 139 won because they refused to partake in party politics and instead tailored their campaign toward fighting for issues that were resonant and supported in their constituency and across the political spectrum.
Ultimately, it was unsurprising that this initiative to enshrine abortion access passed in Arizona, despite voters in the state supporting anti-abortion candidate and now U.S. President Donald Trump, because reproductive freedom itself as a policy has proven to be overwhelmingly popular when put to a vote by the electorate.
A recent report from our team at the Center for Work and Democracy uses data from citizen-driven initiatives—ballot initiatives that are drafted, petitioned, and voted on by citizens themselves—from the last 15 years to see where patterns in voting emerge. Put very briefly, we found that people vote for policies that are egalitarian and economically redistributive.
Egalitarian measures—which equalize rights, resources, and decision-making power in society—pass at a rate of 65.63% across blue and red states alike. Initiatives supporting reproductive rights, for example, are considered egalitarian and prove to be extremely successful at the polls. Despite a difficult loss in Florida in the 2024 election and a complicated voting stalemate in Nebraska, abortion access has been protected by voters in 14 out of 17 cases since the fall of Roe v. Wade.
Redistributive measures are a subsect of egalitarian initiatives that specifically focus on the redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor, like raising the minimum wage. With an even greater passage rate than other egalitarian measures, redistributive ballot measures clock in with an impressive win rate of 75%. In red states, this number rises all the way to a whopping 92% compared to 61.29% in blue states. (We found that blue states’ averages are skewed down by California’s initiative results, which are far less progressive than the state’s image.)
When Healthcare Rising Arizona and the other co-organizers of the campaign for Prop 139 set out to get the initiative on the ballot and enshrined in the state constitution, they knew that party politics were not going to help their cause. From day one, the campaign for 139 was clear that their organizing would be strictly nonpartisan because they knew that abortion as a policy was more popular than any individual Democratic candidates, despite those Democrats being vocally pro-choice.
The strategy worked. The Arizona for Abortion Access Act passed with 417,427 more votes than former Vice President Kamala Harris received in Arizona, proving that egalitarian policies like reproductive rights are simply more popular than pro-choice candidates.
Healthcare Rising and Prop 139 won because they refused to partake in party politics and instead tailored their campaign toward fighting for issues that were resonant and supported in their constituency and across the political spectrum.
Our data tells us that egalitarian and redistributive measures are exceedingly popular with red and blue voters alike. So if Republican and Democrat voters both want many of the same things—policies that equalize rights, break down wealth inequality, and support the decision-making power of everyday people—why won’t politicians just give the people what they want?
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