PHOENIX (AP) —
Days after Donald Trump was elected to a second term, Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs headed to the Mexican border with a conciliatory message.
“Border security was a core issue of the Trump campaign,” she said. “I look forward to having conversations with the incoming president about Arizona’s needs.”
Back in Phoenix, Attorney General Kris Mayes was plotting a legal strategy that has led so far to five lawsuits against the Trump administration, on average one every 10 days since she took office.
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Both Hobbs and Mayes are Democrats who will seek reelection next year in a state that went for Trump. But they have adopted sharply different approaches to handling Trump’s return to the White House: Restrained and collaborative for Hobbs; hardened and embattled for Mayes.
The strategies encapsulate the debate consuming Democrats around the country trying to find a path back to power. In winning over working class voters, Trump scrambled political allegiances and left Democrats struggling to piece together a viable coalition.
Arizona’s two top elected officials are making different bets about what voters will be looking for next year. Hobbs and Mayes both narrowly won their offices in 2022. Mayes’ 280-vote victory was the closest in state history, and Hobbs won by less than 1 percentage point.
“I don’t think you can yield to authoritarian, anti-democratic behavior when it’s in the White House and when our country is in as much danger as it is right now,” Mayes said in a recent interview. “Our country has never been in this much peril since the Civil War.”
Hobbs declined an interview request. Her team issued a memo last week saying Arizona voters would see she “is serious about putting partisan politics aside to get things done.”
“They see her work with the Trump Administration and Republican Legislature when they share common goals, and they see her stand up to far-right proposals when they are out of touch with Arizona,” wrote Nicole DeMont, the governor’s chief political strategist.
The disparate approaches owe somewhat to their differing roles. As governor, Hobbs has to work with a Trump-friendly Republican legislature and may need to cajole the White House for federal assistance during Trump’s presidency. As attorney general, Mayes has the prerogative to fight in court.
Mayes is also prosecuting Trump aides and allies involved in his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss.
The dynamic is much the same in Michigan, another battleground state Trump won narrowly, where Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel is aggressively confronting the Trump administration both legally and rhetorically, while Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has been more restrained.
Mayes and Nessel, both serving as the chief law enforcement officers of battleground states, have started a podcast together, “Pantsuits and Lawsuits.”
In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom has been at times solicitous of Trump and Republicans as he pleads for disaster aid to recover from wildfires as Attorney General Rob Bonta sues.
To be clear, neither Hobbs nor Mayes could be mistaken for a Trump supporter. But their differing approaches began even before the election, when Mayes routinely appeared with Democrat Kamala Harris and her surrogates when they visited Arizona, while Hobbs kept her distance.
Mayes first sued Trump the day after he took office, when she joined a coalition of Democratic attorneys general suing to block an executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship.
Since then, she’s joined lawsuits challenging a blanket federal funding freeze, National Institutes of Health funding cuts, Elon Musk’s role atop the so-called Department of Government Efficiency and DOGE’s access to sensitive financial records at the U.S. Treasury.
She held a town hall meeting in Phoenix last week with the Democratic attorneys general from Minnesota, New Mexico Oregon, drawing hundreds of people concerned about Musk’s dismantling of the federal workforce.
“I would just like to see more accountability,” said Tatiana Johnson, a 24-year-old community organizer from Phoenix, who went to Mayes’ town hall. She’s skeptical that Mayes’ lawsuits will restrain Trump, but it matters to her to see someone fighting.
“It may not make a difference in the grand scheme of things of Trump actually listening to those, but it does make a difference to me,” Johnson said.
Hobbs, meanwhile, has been largely holding her fire, sometimes frustrating Democratic voters hungry for leaders to take on Trump.
Arizonans want strong leaders “who will stand up to a bully and who will protect our Constitution and their rights,” Mayes said. Voters repeatedly elected legendary Republican Sen. John McCain by wide margins, not because they always agreed with him but because “they knew he was fighting for them.”
“That’s what I’m betting on,” she said. “And we’ll find out in 2026 whether I’m right or wrong.”
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