Viva Grijalva

The margins were the only surprise … Grow your own tomatoes … And 1.21 gigawatts!

Former Pima County Supervisor Adelita Grijalva defeated her four Democratic rivals on Tuesday night in the Congressional District 7 election — by a landslide.

As of Wednesday morning, there are several thousand votes that have not been counted in the CD7 race. This includes the typical mail-in ballots dropped off on election day that still must be signature verified, as well as a number of provisional ballots and conditional ballots.

But the results won’t change.

Grijalva dominated the competition by a whopping 40-percentage-point spread, a margin that surprised even her supporters.

The congresswoman-in-waiting drew on her decades of public service and her father’s legacy as she addressed a packed crowd at the El Casino Ballroom in South Tucson.

“We did this,” Grijalva told the crowd, before getting personal. “Someone made me cry at least once a day, every day. And what it was, I would go to doors and people would say, ‘Your dad helped my dad’ or ‘You came into my classroom and read to my kids,’” she said.

Grijalva’s mother, Mona Grijalva, said the late congressman, Raúl Grijalva, wanted his daughter to one day take his place on Capitol Hill.

“This was his dream for a long time,” she told the crowd, fighting back her tears.

Grijalva thanked supporters Tuesday night.

Grijalva promised to focus on policies and not personalities, telling reporters later she struggled during the campaign when other candidates attacked her father.

“This campaign was not about one individual, it was not about social media likes,” Grijalva told the crowd, a not-so-subtle dig at her closest opponent, social media strategist Deja Foxx.

Foxx received barely over 20% of the votes on Tuesday night. Former lawmaker Daniel Hernandez fared even worse, racking up less than 15% of the vote. Two other Democrats in the race, Patrick Harris and Jose Malvido, each got less than 2% of the vote.

If elected in the September General Election — and in this deep-blue district, that’s not really an “if” — she said she would prioritize undoing the big, beautiful bill President Donald Trump signed on July 4th.

Foxx recorded a short video speech thanking supporters Tuesday night at her election night party.

Voter turnout for the special election was relatively low. At last count, turnout was slightly above 14%, with roughly 65,000 out of 440,000 registered voters returning their ballots for the special election.

To put that number in context, in 2024, Grijalva ran unopposed and received 55,000 votes in the primary, while his Republican opponent received nearly 25,000 votes.

As of Monday, voters returning their ballot in CD7 skewed higher with older demographics.

While we don’t have the final numbers, it doesn’t look like Foxx was able to mobilize Generation Z, which had the lowest turnout among the various demographic groups.

Analysis by Sam Almy of Uplift Campaigns of voter turnout in CD7 as of Monday, July 14.

Broadly, CD7 stretches from Yuma to the west edge of Tucson, taking in bits of Pinal County and peeking up in the north to the west end of the Phoenix area. It’s anchored in the south by the U.S.-Mexico border, snaking from Yuma to Douglas.

Bad news for border produce: The multi-billion-dollar produce industry in Santa Cruz County depends on tomatoes, and tomato importers just took a hit from the U.S. Department of Commerce, which imposed a 17% tariff on tomatoes grown in Mexico and sold in the U.S. That decision, which ended the 1996 “Tomato Suspension Agreement” against tariffing tomatoes, was based on concerns that Mexican farmers are using “unfair trade practices,” Capitol Media Service’s Howie Fischer reports. Gov. Katie Hobbs said that could kill 50,00 jobs in Arizona and Texas, and Nogales Mayor Jorge Maldonado warned of “severe consequences” for trade.

Taking it to court: Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes joined 23 other states in suing the Trump administration for withholding nearly $7 billion in school funding, the Arizona Luminaria’s Shannon Conner reported. Arizona schools were supposed to get about $132 million, including $6 million that was destined for TUSD, to pay for after-school programs, English language instruction and other programs. Mayes called the funding freeze “unlawful” and pointed to its “immediate and devastating impact.”

Taking it to the bargaining table: Another Starbucks in the Tucson area is now a union shop, KGUN’s Vanessa Gongora reports. The unanimous 16-0 vote by workers at the Starbucks location at Ina and Oracle made the store the third in Tucson, and 11th in Arizona, to unionize. Starbucks executives said they’ve been meeting with union reps and reached more than 30 agreements so far.

The election’s over, long live the election: Now that the results are coming in for the Congressional District 7 race, it’s time to really get into next year’s election in neighboring CD6 — one of Arizona’s few actually competitive races. The Tucson Sentinel’s Jim Nintzel lays out the upcoming political calendar, including CD6 Democratic candidate and immigration lawyer Mo Goldman holding a Zoom event on Monday.

The gift that keeps on giving: Former U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema announced she wasn’t running for reelection over a year ago, but she still spent $391,000 between March 31 and June 30 on expenses that stay true to her brand of legally questionable and eccentric campaign spending, NOTUS reports. Sinema’s Senate campaign committee spent $71,000 on plane tickets, almost $5,000 on event tickets and $1,300 at a North Carolina gun shop.

Sen. Sinema, we are available for $5,000-an-hour consultations on campaign finance best practices. We’ll do it for just $12 a month for everybody else.

Long road: The Center for Creative Photography is celebrating its 50th birthday, the Sentinel’s Adrian O’Farrill reports. The center was founded at the University of Arizona, after UA President John Schaefer met landscape photographer Ansel Adams at an exhibition in 1974. Adams agreed to put his archive at the UA, on the condition that other photographers could do the same.

So how much power would Project Blue and its recently unveiled second site need in terms of power?

It could be as much as 1.3 gigawatts.

Doc Brown would have freaked out. It’s more than enough to power the DeLorean.