On a hot morning in May, Rocque Perez and two of his supporters criss-crossed the Armory Park neighborhood just south of downtown Tucson, hoping to convince residents they’re badly represented in state government.
Their current representative, Democrat Alma Hernandez, has an independent streak and a rare ability to pass bills in a Republican-controlled legislature. After almost eight years in the state house, she’s running for state senate against Perez, a progressive former Tucson City Council member. He argues that her moderate voting record, corporate donations and pro-Israel positions are at odds with the liberal district.
Both candidates describe the race as a referendum on which kind of lawmaker best represents Tucson midway through the second Trump administration.
At one door, Perez met 73-year-old Bill Vahl, who said that concerns about the Trump administration, which he follows on cable TV, distract him from local races like Perez’s.
“With Trump in the White House, it’s like my house is burning down and you’re asking me what color decorative gravel do I want in the backyard,” he said.
Perez worked to tie Vahl’s concerns about Trump to Hernandez, pointing to her vote for a 2022 bill that would have forced Arizona courts to publish the identities of people on probation who were in the country illegally.
“Alma Hernandez agreed to give ICE data?” Vahl asked. “Wow.”
Hernandez told AZPM she doesn’t remember that bill, which never became law.
Adam Kinsey, a Democratic political consultant in Phoenix who has worked extensively in Pima County, says Perez’s challenge isn’t a one-off.
“We’ve seen this a lot in the last couple cycles, where even without term limits, voters are pushing their own term limits and kicking some folks out of office,” he said.
Kinsey said the Democratic Party’s progressive wing is flexing its power in Arizona, where a pro-clean energy slate defeated conservative candidates for seats on the Salt River Project’s board in April and a democratic socialist won election to the Tucson City Council in November.
Some Democratic primary candidates nationwide have found success with messages similar to Perez’s. Illinois Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton won a Senate primary in March partly by arguing she’d take the strongest stance against Republicans. Earlier that month in North Carolina, progressive local official Nida Allam came within about 1,000 votes of ousting an incumbent congresswoman after criticizing her support from corporate and pro-Israel PACs. In Philadelphia, left-wing candidate Chris Rabb won a May congressional primary by focusing on his opponents’ establishment ties despite agreeing with them on many policies.
Kinsey said those dynamics could make their way to Tucson, especially if statewide or national progressive groups decide to support Perez’s campaign financially.
“You see a district like 20 — very liberal, very progressive — and you see a moderate Dem. there, yeah, that’s a prime target,” he said.
Arizona’s 20th legislative district includes predominantly Latino neighborhoods on the south side, west side and Flowing Wells area as well as the University of Arizona, downtown Tucson and many of the city’s well-off, historic central neighborhoods. All of its state senators and representatives are Democrats.
Because there are no Republicans currently running for the seat, the winner of the Perez-Hernandez primary is likely to win the general election in November. According to state data, there are 55,082 registered Democrats and 18,363 registered Republicans in the district.
Working with Republicans is key to passing bills, Hernandez says##
While Tucson stands out as a liberal stronghold, Democrats haven’t controlled both chambers of Arizona’s state legislature since 1966. Hernandez said working with Republicans is the only way to get bills passed.
“My rule has always been, if I can’t even get one Republican to sponsor a bill, the likelihood of it moving is very slim,” she said.
In a press release, the 20th district’s local Democratic Party committee said Hernandez has “broken with House Democratic Caucus leadership and sided with Republican positions” more than 100 times in the last four legislative sessions. The committee released a “statement of concern” about those votes in May.
Hernandez said she often votes for Republican bills she disagrees with if she was involved in drafting amendments for them.
“My integrity is everything, and if I tell someone, ‘Please make this change,’ I’m going to have to vote for that bill,” she said.
Democrats who reach across the aisle are more likely to see their bills receive hearings and votes from Republican legislative leadership, Kinsey said.
“The thing that (Hernandez) has really going for her is that there are very few Democrats that their bills see the light of day anymore,” he said.
This legislative session, Hernandez has established a state Rare Disease Advisory Council and made it easier for people on probation to complete union apprenticeships. She also introduced a bill creating a rental assistance program, with several Republican cosponsors, which has not advanced beyond a committee vote.
Last year, in the wake of campus protests against the War in Gaza, Hernandez, who is Jewish and staunchly pro-Israel, spearheaded a bill banning encampments at universities and community colleges. That legislation hasn’t earned her many friends in some Tucson circles. In the op-ed announcing the launch of his campaign in December 2025, Perez said the law “suppresses free speech about the crisis in Gaza” and argued Hernandez places “her own political identity above the needs of her district.”
Though Hernandez touts her ability to legislate in a divided government, Perez has claimed her aisle-crossing is a sign she would not vote with Democrats if the party takes control of the state legislature in this year’s midterms, something its national organs see as a distinct possibility.
In an interview, Perez laid out a progressive vision of his own priorities: environmental sustainability incentives for data centers, ending preemption laws that bar Arizona municipalities from enacting policies like rent control, capping school voucher eligibility by family income, replacing the flat income tax with a progressive tax.
Hernandez also said she believes in reforming the flat tax and restricting school vouchers by income. Both candidates said Arizona should end its tax break for data center development — which is paused in the budget signed by Gov. Katie Hobbs this week — though Hernandez expressed less hostility to data centers than Perez.
“We can’t just say, ‘No,’ when we have unions who are working with these folks on deals to try to find work for our community,” she said.
Hernandez said that if Democrats flip the legislature, she’d be able to pass bills she’s sat on for years, including a progressive bail reform bill backed by the NAACP and a tax exemption on feminine hygiene products and diapers.
Last week, Hernandez was one of only eight Democratic representatives to [vote against Arizona’s newest annual budget](
due to its cuts to the University of Arizona and a Pima Community College adult education program.
Lawsuit and personal attacks overshadow policy in a hard-fought race##
Perez has lobbed attacks against his opponent from day one. In the Instagram post announcing his campaign, he called out Hernandez’s vocally pro-Israel stance, one she said inspired her to publicly order a custom license plate reading “ZIONIST” in 2021.
In that post, Perez wrote that the representative’s support for the Israeli government “represents a moral and political misalignment with the needs of their district” and that “criticism of government policy is not antisemitism, despite their repeated claims that it is.”
“To only focus on that issue, to me, is inherently antisemitic,” Hernandez said.
More recently, after a May Arizona Republic report, Hernandez criticized old social media posts of Perez’s calling for violence and elevated claims that he had posted pornography online. The alleged posts had been surfaced by conservative media organizations California Globe and AZ Free News in 2025.
According to archived versions of Perez’s Twitter account, in June 2020, the then-21-year-old had responded to another user’s complaint about living in a conservative family with a post stating “so kill them, do your duty baby girl.”
In October 2020, he had shared news that President Donald Trump had COVID-19 with the caption “take his life baby, get him.”
“I was 19, 20 years old during COVID, during the 2020 election, and I came of age online, like many others and I directed anger towards the Trump administration. How I went about that then is not necessarily how I would do so today. But I’m not running in a perfection contest,” Perez said about the posts.
Meanwhile, in October 2025, the California Globe published screenshots of a Twitter account appearing to promote pornographic content featuring Perez posted to the website OnlyFans. It credited the screenshots to an unnamed source. The account’s existence, past or present, could not be independently verified by AZPM.
“I’ve had to endure a lot of harassment, and unfortunately those things are a byproduct of that,” Perez said about the screenshots.
Earlier in the race, Perez had sued Hernandez over $20,355 in unpaid fees for late campaign finance reports. The two candidates appeared in Pima County Superior Court together in April for a hearing. The lawsuit was later dismissed and an appeal was denied by the Arizona Supreme Court.
Coming from opposing local political camps, Perez and Hernandez both claim to better represent the district##
The rivalry between Perez and Hernandez reflects broader political tensions, Kinsey, the consultant, said.
“It’s no secret the folks who have been associated with the Grijalvas and folks that are associated with the Hernandezes — it’s been a political civil war for over a decade now,” he said.
Perez is part of a political network that has included late congressman Raúl Grijalva, his daughter U.S. Rep. Adelita Grijalva and Tucson Mayor Regina Romero, Kinsey said. In May 2025, Perez was unanimously appointed to fill a vacancy on the Tucson City Council, where he served for seven months.
His campaign is endorsed by Romero, Adelita Grijalva and five of Tucson’s six city council members. Pima County Attorney Laura Conover has donated to his campaign and participated in fundraisers on his behalf.
“I got to work with him on public safety, and housing, and mental health and substance use disorder and I saw a guy who’s completely qualified to represent the core values of the senate seat he’s now running in,” Conover said.
Kinsey said Alma Hernandez — alongside her siblings Daniel Hernandez and state Rep. Consuelo Hernandez and current state Sen. Sally Ann Gonzales — represent a more moderate wing of the local Democratic Party that has traditionally done well in state legislative and school board races.
“I’m not a part of the establishment here, I don’t want to be, I’ve always done my own thing, I’ve been able to win my own elections on my own with union support, with support from the doctors, the nurses — those are the people I care about,” Alma Hernandez said.
She boasts endorsements from Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, several other state lawmakers and local construction union LiUNA! Local 1184.
According to her campaign finance report, Hernandez raised almost $37,000 during the first three months of 2026, including $8,600 from PACs and corporations. Eighty of her 115 individual donations came from the Phoenix area and only 19 from Tucson, with several donors listing jobs as lobbyists and attorneys. In contrast, Perez raised about $9,400 during that time period, with 86 of his 95 individual donations coming from the Tucson area, according to his campaign finance report.
Perez lists that as one of the reasons he better represents the 20th district.
“In a community where one in four families live below the poverty line, Tucsonans deserve representation who fights for them — not for utility companies, not for corporate donors, and not for agendas overseas,” Perez wrote in the op-ed announcing his campaign.
Hernandez argues Perez doesn’t know the district like she does.
“He might believe that the district is young and progressive. That is not the voters of the district that I’m talking to, because what they care about is, ‘What are you doing to help me put food on the table, what are you doing to help me find jobs, what are you doing to help me get healthcare?’” she said.
Back among the colorful, carefully restored historic houses of Armory Park, Vahl wasn’t the only voter who opened the door for Perez. At several houses with anti-Trump signs in front yards, people took his flyers and chatted with him. According to 2019 city data, most of the neighborhood’s residents had college degrees and about half its population was white.
Earlier that morning, Perez had also knocked doors in a mobile home park near West Silverlake Road and South Mission Road. There — in a heavily Hispanic neighborhood where less than 6% of residents had four-year college degrees — hardly anybody came to their doors to speak with him. He resorted to leaving behind pamphlets and flyers.
Early ballots for the July 21 primary election will be mailed to voters on June 24. The general election will take place on November 3. All seats in both chambers of Arizona’s state legislature are up for election every two years.
