Hobbs secures reelection win against Andy Biggs in Arizona governor’s race

Gov. Katie Hobbs (D-AZ) on Tuesday won her bid for reelection, defeating Republican challenger Andy Biggs in Arizona’s 2026 elections.Hobbs clinched a second term in Phoenix with 56.3% of the vote compared to Biggs’s 42%, as of 3:20 a.m., with 75% of the vote counted, according to the Associated Press.The outcome in one of the country’s most pivotal battleground states comes after some polling indicated a tight race ahead of November. Hobbs first flipped the seat blue in 2022 by just 17,000 votes. The governor’s reelection victory marks her success at coalescing voters behind her candidacy in a state President Donald Trump won in 2024. As an incumbent with a money advantage, Hobbs refused to debate Biggs throughout the campaign. Republicans saw the battleground race as competitive, hoping to use the five-term U.S. House member and former state Senate president to plant new leadership in Phoenix.Biggs, endorsed by Trump, is known as a fiscally conservative congressman and has chaired the conservative House Freedom Caucus for two years. During his gubernatorial campaign, he pledged to launch a Department of Government Efficiency program in Arizona aimed at eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse. Biggs hoped to help finance his plan to slash Arizona’s 2.5% income tax by slashing fraud and abuse in Medicaid, and expressed confidence that cutting the tax would generate “more economic activity which is going to result in more tax revenue coming into the state.”He also proposed an Arizona border czar and a special task force to tackle the fentanyl overdose epidemic, while promising to sign a whole host of bills Hobbs has sidelined if he were elected, after she vetoed legislation to add more sex offender notification requirements, create tougher penalties for fentanyl crimes, expand school choice, loosen vaccine requirements for college students, and ban Arizonans from using federal welfare benefits to buy soda.Though they shared a somewhat skeptical approach to data centers, favoring the elimination of tax breaks for development, Biggs and Hobbs notably broke over education.2026 MIDTERM ELECTIONS LIVE UPDATES: LATEST NEWS, RESULTS, AND ANALYSISBiggs advocated expanding school choice initiatives by reforming the state’s Empowerment Scholarship Accounts program to ensure students in “economically disadvantaged” areas can use state education dollars as they choose. Hobbs has opposed the expansion of ESAs and tried to restrict the program over the course of her first term.Biggs’s defeat comes after he sought to appeal to independent voters with an agenda inspired by the Make America Healthy Again movement, and attacked Hobbs for what he described as her failure to tackle Medicaid fraud in state government swiftly. Hobbs announced a massive crackdown on sober living home fraud in 2023, four years after the widespread fraud likely emerged, leaving her vulnerable to criticism, with Biggs questioning her administration for not filing annual audits.