The former Arizona state senator Debbie Lesko fended off an energetic Democratic challenge to win the special congressional election on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press.
Tuesday’s special election in Arizona’s Eighth Congressional District, in the conservative suburbs outside Phoenix, revealed the depth of Republicans’ political challenges in 2018. Ms. Lesko was favored to win over Hiral Tipirneni, a Democrat and emergency room doctor, in a district that supported Donald J. Trump in 2016 by more than 20 points.
Even so, national Republicans spent more than $1 million to help Ms. Lesko. With an outcome this close in a district that should have Republicans winning big, it is another sign of Democratic enthusiasm, organizational muscle and determination to send a message about President Trump and his party.
See the drop in Republican margins in special elections since Donald J. Trump became president.
The congressional seat became vacant this year when Representative Trent Franks resigned amid reports that he pressed female aides to serve as surrogate mothers for Mr. Franks and his wife.
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It took a big money push from the Republican Party, tweets by the president and the support of the state's current and former governors, but the GOP held onto an Arizona U.S. House seat they would have never considered endangered in any other year.
Tuesday's narrow victory by Republican Debbie Lesko over a Democratic political newcomer sends a big message to Republicans nationwide: Even the reddest of districts in a red state can be in play this year. Lesko won by about 5 percentage points in Arizona's 8th Congressional District, where Donald Trump won by 21 percentage points.
The former state senator defeated Hiral Tipirneni, a former emergency room physician who had hoped to replicate surprising Democratic wins in Pennsylvania, Alabama and other states in a year where opposition to President Trump's policies have boosted Democrats' chances in Republican strongholds.
Republican political consultant Chuck Coughlin called Tuesday's special election margin "not good" for national Republicans looking at their chances in November.
Screengrab from campaign video
"They should clean house in this election," said Coughlin, longtime adviser to former Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer. "There's a drag on the midterms for Republican candidates that's being created by the national narrative. And it would be very hard to buck that trend if you're in swing districts, much less close districts, if you can't change that narrative between now and November."
Tuesday's special election determined who would replace former Rep. Trent Franks, a Republican who resigned in December after he was accused of harassment. At the time, he was faced with a House Ethics Committee investigation into whether his behavior constituted sexual harassment. Politico reported Franks offered former aides millions to birth his child, and The Associated Press reported he discussed surrogacy with former staffers.
Victories in historically red districts will be crucial for Republicans as they hope to maintain the House. According to the latest Real Clear Politics aggregation of polls, Democrats are up 5.5 points in the generic House ballot.
But after the previous representative, Trent Franks, resigned following revelations he had offered $5 million to an aide in exchange for carrying his child, Arizona Democrats rallied to Ms. Tipirneni. She outraised Ms. Lesko in what was the first high-profile congressional election since 2016 between two women.
National Democrats, however, stayed away from the race, deducing that a district that has sent only Republicans to Congress for four decades was out of reach. And any hopes Ms. Tipirneni had to win outside support may have faded this month when a local TV station reported that she had not practiced medicine since 2007 and had settled a malpractice lawsuit with a woman who blamed her for contracting tetanus.
In contrast, the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee and the Congressional Leadership Fund, the primary House Republican super PAC, each poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into the race. The investment proved critical in what became an unexpectedly close race.
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“It’s a warning shot,” Senator Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, said of the results. “Anything below a 10-point margin is not good news.”
Ms. Lesko, 59, ran as a dependable supporter of Mr. Trump and assailed Ms. Tipirneni for not backing White House priorities like the construction of a wall on the Mexican border. With help from the battery of outside Republican organizations, Ms. Lesko sought to polarize the district along traditional partisan lines, branding Ms. Tipirneni as a liberal and a puppet of Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader.
Rather than wait for the contest to tighten, the groups helped Ms. Lesko build an early advantage in a race in which the vast majority of voters cast their ballots early. Registered Republicans far outnumbered Democrats in the early voting period, and the median age was 67 among those voting before Election Day, an indication of a heavily conservative electorate.
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Ms. Tipirneni, 50, found energetic support among some women in the district who were uneasy about Mr. Trump and had been roused to get active in politics. As Representative Conor Lamb of Pennsylvania did in a special election last month, she offered herself as a moderate who would not support Ms. Pelosi for House speaker.
But unlike Mr. Lamb’s Pittsburgh-area seat — which includes an array of vote-rich, upscale suburbs — the Arizona district is full of AARP-eligible snowbirds, reliably Republican Mormons and military families who work at nearby Luke Air Force Base. And this race was a head-to-head contest — there was no Libertarian on the ballot, as in Pennsylvania, who could have allowed Ms. Tipirneni to eke out a win had it proved closer.
This was not a district that was on either party’s list of seats that will determine control of the House. But the steps conservatives took to secure victory for a former officeholder illustrate just how much the anti-Trump energy on the left is putting Republicans on the defensive across the country.
PHOENIX — Thousands of voters have made their way to the polls on Tuesday to elect a representative in an Phoenix-area congressional district after former U.S. Rep. Trent Franks resigned late last year.
Those voters will elect either Debbie Lesko, a former Arizona state senator who ran for the Republican Party, or Hiral Tipirneni, a former emergency-room physician who represented the Democratic Party.
Voting had hit a snag on Tuesday, after a printing delay prevented about 8,000 residents in the 8th Congressional District from receiving their voter registration IDs in time.
But County Recorder Adrian Fontes told ThinkProgress that it was “not that big of an impact on voters because we have redundancies in our system. Every voter already got either a ballot in the mail or they got a sample ballot in the mail.”
The district covers much of the western Phoenix suburbs, where a Democrat has not been elected in more than 35 years.
Polls for the election will close at 7 p.m., with early results expected to kick off around 8 p.m.
You can follow along with the results using the widget below.
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