Moments into the ceremony certifying Arizona’s 2020 presidential election results, Gov. Doug Ducey’s phone began to play “Hail to the Chief.”

It was President Donald Trump, who was then pressing Republican officials in battleground states not to finalize Joe Biden’s victory.

Ducey, a Republican, silenced the call and signed the certification. He said days later that Trump hadn’t asked him not to sign; The Washington Post would later report that Trump privately pressed him to help overturn the results.

Seated beside him at the cloth-draped table that day was Katie Hobbs, then Arizona’s secretary of state. Almost six years later, Hobbs holds Ducey’s old job, and she isn’t sure the Republican trying to take it from her would have refused Trump’s call.

That Republican is Rep. Andy Biggs, the Trump-endorsed former chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, who tried to overturn the 2020 results. If he wins on Nov. 3, he will be the governor who signs off on Arizona’s 2028 presidential results. Republicans have also nominated 2020 deniers for secretary of state and attorney general, the two other offices whose holders must be present to certify them.

Hobbs, long considered the most vulnerable Democratic governor in the country, has made that her closing argument. At a rally in Casa Grande earlier this month, she retold the story of Ducey’s phone call and said there was “no guarantee” Biggs wouldn’t answer the same call in 2028, Punchbowl News reported.

“I think that this election is an election where we have to focus on what comes next, because, you know, if Andy Biggs is governor, then Arizona is the first swing state that has an election denier in charge,” Hobbs told MS NOW. “And Andy Biggs is not a run-of-the-mill election denier.”

The question is no longer hypothetical. Trump’s Justice Department is suing Arizona’s secretary of state for access to voter data, and in March a federal grand jury subpoenaed records from the state Senate’s 2020 audit of Maricopa County.

In December 2020, Biggs backed a long-shot lawsuit asking the Supreme Court to invalidate Biden’s victories in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. On the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, he called Rusty Bowers, then the Republican speaker of the Arizona House, and asked him to support decertifying the state’s electors, Bowers later testified. Hours after the attack on the U.S. Capitol that day, Biggs voted to reject the electoral votes from Arizona and Pennsylvania. He went on to defy a subpoena from the House select committee investigating the attack.

Biggs has also made clear what he thought of Ducey’s handling of 2020. In a TV interview late that year, unearthed by CNN’s KFILE, he complained that the governor wouldn’t dig into fraud allegations and said that Ducey “could have invalidated the election” through an audit but wasn’t interested.

Biggs has lately kept 2020 out of the center of his campaign; a spokesperson told The Washington Post this year that his focus has been Hobbs. In a Phoenix radio interview, he declined to say whether Biden legitimately won. At an early October debate that Hobbs skipped, Biggs said he would accept the outcome of this year’s election and be “happy to certify” it. When Punchbowl asked him about Hobbs’ attacks, he laughed them off. A spokesperson for Biggs’ campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment from MS NOW.

Among the party’s base, the issue still resonates. “There’s been shenanigans going on, and that’s why we’re supporting Alex Kolodin,” said Gary Olson, a volunteer with the Pima County Republican Party.

Kolodin, a state representative who has promoted Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, won the Republican nomination in July for secretary of state, the office that oversees Arizona’s elections. He is challenging Democrat Adrian Fontes, who is seeking a second term.

The two have tangled before. The day after the 2020 election, Kolodin sued Maricopa County officials, including Fontes, then the county recorder, claiming that the Sharpie markers voters had used on their ballots caused vote tabulators to malfunction. After that suit went nowhere, Kolodin was a lawyer on a sweeping federal lawsuit, crafted by former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, that accused Hobbs and Ducey, the two officials at that certification table, of “massive election fraud.” It, too, was swiftly dismissed, and the State Bar of Arizona later admonished Kolodin and placed him on probation for his role in the litigation.

Olson also had high praise for Warren Petersen, the state Senate president and Republican nominee for attorney general. It was Petersen who complied with the March grand jury subpoena, handing the FBI records from the Republican-commissioned audit, a review he had overseen as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Whether Hobbs’ argument moves voters is another question, and her own TV ads suggest she is not relying on it alone. Her campaign’s most persistent attack targets Biggs’ decision as state Senate president in 2013 to stall a bill that would have let outside law enforcement take over a local police force accused of protecting a polygamous sect. Biggs calls the ads lies.

Arizona has been here before. In 2022, Republicans nominated election deniers for the same three offices — Kari Lake for governor, Mark Finchem for secretary of state and Abe Hamadeh for attorney general. All three lost, two of them to Hobbs and Fontes.

For Arizona Republicans, refusing to accept elections their party loses has proved to be valuable currency in primaries. In general elections, it has been harder to spend. In an October 2024 survey by the States United Democracy Center, a group that tracks election deniers, just over a third of Arizonans said they would be less likely to back a candidate who claimed the 2020 election was rigged against Trump.

Hobbs’ campaign has outspent Biggs’ by about $12 million, though Turning Point, the conservative group that has become the dominant force in Arizona’s GOP, has mounted an $18 million media blitz to help close the gap, according to the Arizona Capitol Times. Trump traveled to Bullhead City this month to rally for Biggs.

Recent public polls show Hobbs ahead, by widely varying margins: about 7 points in a survey from Equis Research; and nearly 17 in a poll by HighGround, a firm that has worked for a group funding ads attacking Biggs. HighGround found Biggs winning only about 71% of Republicans and trailing among independents by more than 37 points, and Equis found roughly 1 in 10 of Trump’s 2024 voters backing Hobbs.

Chuck Coughlin, who runs HighGround and worked on John McCain’s first Senate campaign, said the state’s GOP is no longer McCain’s party.

“I don’t know that a moderate Republican exists anymore,” Coughlin said. “You know, the party’s been consumed by MAGA and the party functionally doesn’t even exist anymore out here because the party is run by Turning Point.”

Hobbs’ running mate may be proof of the point. John Giles, Mesa’s mayor from 2014 to 2025, was a longtime Republican who has since become an independent. He endorsed Biden in 2020 and spoke in support of Kamala Harris at the 2024 Democratic National Convention.

“I do feel like the party has changed over, particularly over the last few years,” Giles told MS NOW. “I’ve been a lifelong Republican, and there were always elements of the Republican Party that I didn’t feel like I aligned with. But I also felt like it was a big enough tent that it accommodated me and a lot of folks like me.”

Giles, like Biggs, is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and both men graduated from Brigham Young University. Latter-day Saints were once a reliably Republican bloc in Arizona, with a stronghold in Mesa. But in 2020, enough of them broke with Trump to help Biden carry the state, many put off by his crudeness and his attacks on immigrants, which clashed with the church’s emphasis on welcoming refugees.

“I do feel like the Republican Party has changed, in particular, in not positive ways over the last few years, and it’s kind of forced me to leave,” Giles said. He added that Hobbs’ focus on solutions, rather than partisan politics, could appeal to Arizona voters who, he said, are ready to move past 2020.

Whoever wins on Nov. 3 will sit where Ducey sat in 2028.

Ducey has said he returned Trump’s call after the ceremony. By then, the papers were signed.

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From MS Now.