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The 700-plus members of the party’s state committee were invited to join a special remote meeting to consider whether to vote Robert Branscomb out. They needed to cast a two-thirds vote of the state committee in order to oust him, a proportion equivalent to 468 votes.

On Wednesday night, only 521 members of the state committee attended the remote meeting, said ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥an Paul Eckerstrom, who chaired the meeting. That made the challenge difficult, because two-thirds of the total committee members had to vote to remove Branscomb in order to achieve the ouster – 468 votes.

Lengthy technical difficulties delayed the vote, leading to a motion to allow voting by email, but in the end, 476 of the attendees voted the official way to oust Branscomb, Eckerstrom said. That meant counting emailed votes wasn’t necessary.

Now, First Vice Chair Kim Khoury takes over the chair position until a new state committee meeting occurs on Sept. 13. It’s unclear what the status of executive director Ruff will be. The party passed a new rule in June forcing the chair to get the advice and consent of the party’s executive board in the hiring of the director.

Branscomb had won the position over incumbent Yolanda Bejarano during the party’s January meeting, as many Democrats took out their unhappiness with the 2024 election results on her. But tensions began rising behind the scenes after Branscomb fired the former director Morgan Dick and hired his friend Michael Ruff without outside consultation.

The tensions exploded into view when Branscomb wrote an email to a large group of Democratic activists in April, airing disagreements with party leaders, including Sen. Mark Kelly. Disaffection grew as the financial position of the party looked increasingly precarious, with the party spending far more than it was taking in.

Democratic state elected officials even established a plan to go around the state party and route the money they raised through the Navajo County party. It’s unclear whether those plans will go forward now that Branscomb has been removed.

Grijalva win highlights rootedness

It turns out, there’s no substitute for being deeply connected to the community where you’re a political candidate.

Deja Foxx, the young woman who appeared to be pressing a serious challenge to Adelita Grijalva, was not deeply connected in the city, ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥, where she grew up, but had only recently moved back. She had a nationwide network of supporters who supplied more than 80% of her donations and much of her enthusiastic backing.

She was an internet sensation. And to the surprise of many, she is losing the Democratic primary election in Congressional District 7 badly, by 41 percentage points.

Grijalva, on the other hand, is deeply connected, with a longstanding network of supporters and volunteers built in part by her late father, Rep. Raul Grijalva. The young challenger with the internet base, it turns out, was no challenge at all.

“It was not about social media likes,� Grijalva said at her election-night party. “It was about knocking on doors, face-to-face with community members, having real conversations about what’s important.�

Elections are about “likes� in a way. Each vote for a candidate is a sort of “like,� but they’re from a geographic community bounded by district lines. While Grijalva’s likes were largely from the district, Foxx’s likes were from the unbounded internet.

And they were based on a relatively limited appeal: Foxx delivered a practiced stump speech that hit a half-dozen points of biography over and over, slammed Grijalva for being part of the legacy establishment, and left it at that. Over time, she didn’t grow much as a candidate or deepen her appeal.

As some of her critics in the Grijalva camp said, she tended to talk about “me,� while Grijalva tended to talk about “we.�

Foxx also turned off some in the Democratic base when she hammered on the fact that three Democratic members of Congress, including the man she was running to replace, had died in office, as she called for generational change.

Hernandez stumbles badly

Perhaps the biggest disappointment in the Tuesday night primary went to former state legislator Daniel Hernandez Jr.

Hernandez had the biggest fundraising haul of any of the five Democratic candidates, but with approximately $1 million to spend, he has only managed to win about 14% of the vote so far.

Hernandez tried to position himself as the pro-jobs, pro-business Democratic candidate, expressing support for mining projects in Southern ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ that are highly controversial among Democrats.

Although it wasn’t a big campaign issue, he was also the most pro-Israel among the candidates, again not a popular position in a Democratic primary during the Gaza war.

The low point of the campaign arrived when a Grijalva supporter, ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥an Scott Blades, published video of Hernandez angrily grabbing Blades’ phone from him during an argument between Hernandez’s sister Alma and an attendee at a forum in Bisbee.

Far from posing a challenge to Grijalva, Hernandez and the three alternative candidates have only 38% of the vote so far.

Does race matter, or not?

In comments to the Star, GOP nominee Daniel Butierez, who spent years in prison, bemoaned the way prisons divide inmates, and the way society does its people.

“What they did in prison was divide us by race, by religion,� he said. “So when I walked out of prison, I saw our government was doing the same thing to the people out here in the community that the prisons were doing to the inmates in prison.’

He went on, “So I realized we got to bring everybody together, or we’re never going to get anything done.�

But his next comments seemed to undermine the point. Speaking about Foxx, he said, “Deja, she’s not Hispanic. She’s Caucasian and Filipino. She’s got no Hispanic in her, and we’re 60% Hispanic (in the district), so that’s going to hurt her.�