Photos by Gage Skidmore (modified) | Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0
Republican state Sen. Wendy Rogers appears to have fended off a primary challenge from David Cook, a fellow GOP legislator, with early results showing her with a solid lead.
Rogers and Cook, who serves in the state House of Representatives, are two of the most dissimilar Republican lawmakers working in the legislature at the moment.
While Rogers, who has represented Legislative District 7 since 2021, built a national profile on election denialism after former President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, Cook is more moderate throwback to what Republican elected officials were like before Trump dominated the GOP.
Wendy Rogers said white nationalists are ‘patriots’ and called for hanging political enemies
Cook is a rancher who has served in the House of Representatives since 2016 and is chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, while Rogers is a former Air Force pilot and chair of the controversial Senate Elections Committee. The committee has entertained presentations from conspiracy theorists and approved bills that would have upended Arizona’s elections, with proposals that would have forced hand counts and banned no-excuse early voting.
Rogers, a member of the far-right extremist group the Oath Keepers, has been mired in controversy virtually since she took office. She faced an ethics complaint for mistreating a staffer in early 2021 that was later dismissed, and was censured by the Senate in 2022 after she threatened her colleagues with political retribution when some of them criticized her for speaking at a white nationalist conference and calling for her enemies to be hanged.
But Cook has also faced the ire of his own party, as one of the few Republicans in the legislature that sometimes openly sympathizes with Democratic causes or votes alongside them, against the rest of his party.
Cook is term-limited in the House, and told the Mirror that he decided to run for Senate this year because he just can’t take the idea of Rogers representing the district where he and his friends live and work.
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