Adrian Fontes has an enormous responsibility in his campaign against his Republican opponent, Mark Finchem, who is perhaps the most hardline election denier and conspiracy theorist on the ballot for a major office this November.
PHOENIX—For someone who feels nothing less than the weight of “the republic and the free world” on his shoulders every day, Adrian Fontes is having a pretty good time.
“I do it with some semblance of joy,” Fontes said, sipping a margarita on ice. “Because if I really didn't approach it with a bit of grace, then it would be very, very heavy.” The possibility of quelling those forces is what spurred Fontes into this race. A Mexican-American former Marine from the border town of Nogales, he experienced the outbreak of election denialism firsthand. In 2020, he was the top elections official in Maricopa County, home to 2.5 million voters.
“I would be lying to you if I said that I didn’t actually secretly hope that it would happen,” he said of Republicans nominating Finchem. “Facing major challenges is something that very few people get to do, and facing a challenge as significant as this, really, it means a great deal.” During his tenure, Fontes heavily promoted vote-by-mail measures in response to the COVID-19 pandemic; in March 2020, a court blocked his plan to send a ballot to every Maricopa County voter.
That night, Finchem had a platform—but Fontes had one, too, and he said leveraging it was crucial to “identify a very bright difference between the two of us” to Arizona voters. Onstage, the Democrat executed his plan to the letter, calmly taking apart Finchem’s conspiratorial claims, and putting him on the defensive.
“I don’t know that I would have made the same decision, but I’m not running against Kari Lake, and I’m not Katie Hobbs, so it’s not fair for me to say whether or not she was right or wrong,” he said. “But the fair answer for you is, I do think that was a missed opportunity.”
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The Democrat Trying to Save Arizona Elections From a Big Lie FanaticAdrian Fontes has an enormous responsibility in his campaign against his Republican opponent, Mark Finchem, who is perhaps the most hardline election denier and conspiracy theorist on the ballot for a major office this November.
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