Vulnerable Rep. David Schweikert walking a political tightrope between MAGA and moderates

Rep. David Schweikert is in his element on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, in front of a posterboard full of graphs, talking about "math."

The veteran member of Congress, in an effort he portrays as either utopic or delusional, takes to the House floor most weeks to deliver a 30-minute lecture. It's usually focused on his legislative raison d'être, reining in the national debt.

“I have how many hours on YouTube of speeches?” Schweikert, R-Ariz., said in an interview with The Arizona Republic. Sometimes, “I’d get 12 people looking at them. And the 12, I think, were all bots."

If Schweikert’s "tea party"-style politics feel quaint in an age of blood-red Trumpism, that’s intentional. He doesn’t like the direction politics is going. He says he believes politicians on both sides of the aisle sell seductively simple tales to Americans, egged on by a broken information “ecosystem” that he passionately diagnoses as a threat to democracy.

When pressed he condemns former President Donald Trump's false claims about U.S. elections, saying they are part of that flawed ecosystem.

It’s a striking admission from someone who has rarely openly criticized and at times embraced the former president. Schweikert campaigned alongside Trump in early 2020, a time when the former president’s approval ratings were strong. He accepted Trump’s endorsement in 2022 as he fended off a primary challenge. And through reasoning he insists is more sophisticated than many of his more Trump-styled partisans, he has arrived at some of their same conclusions, such as voting not to accept Pennsylvania’s electoral college votes in the 2020 presidential election.

Schweikert sees himself as strengthening American democracy through smart policy and intellectual rigor.

“What happens when the political class, and, I hate to say this, I believe the press class, often go to the ear candy, eye candy, things that are simple, because they click, they sell? ... That’s also a threat to democracy, when you can’t make public policy," he said. "Because what people know is actually not true."

To Democrats the story is simpler: Schweikert is an election denier who has enabled, or participated in, the style of politics he claims to despise.

Over his seven House terms, Schweikert has weathered storms that his detractors thought would topple him, including an ethics scandal, unfriendly redistricting and bitter primary challenges.

This year Democrats believe Schweikert may finally be on the ropes. GOP-led abortion restrictions in Arizona are expected to boost Democratic turnout across the board, and Trump’s presence on the ballot could be a liability in Schweikert's Scottsdale-area district, where Trump-aligned candidates have underperformed.

There's a crowded field of Democratic candidates itching to take him down. They've argued Schweikert has taken extreme positions and is contributing to dysfunction on Capitol Hill.

"I'm in this job to save us," Schweikert said. "I'm not in this job to be loved."

Schweikert's uneasy relationship with MAGA

Schweikert was elected to Congress in the “Republican wave” election of 2010, the year that worries over government spending fueled the fiscally conservative "tea party" movement and upended the Democrats’ unified control of Congress and the presidency.

The GOP since has remade itself in the image of Trump, who swapped the party’s fiscal anxiety for “build a wall” rhetoric that blamed many of the country’s woes on immigration and often made baseless claims about the security of U.S. elections.

Arizona fake elector scheme: It played out over social media. Prosecutors noticed

Arizona has been an epicenter for the Republican-led efforts to cast doubt on the security of U.S. elections, between the discredited “audit” of Maricopa County ballots performed by Trump allies and the effort to falsely certify that Trump had won the 2020 presidential election in Arizona.

Those politics aren’t popular in Schweikert’s well-to-do district, which encompasses most of northeastern Maricopa County, including wealthy Scottsdale and Paradise Valley.

In 2022, Kari Lake, the Trump-endorsed candidate for governor who promoted Trump’s false election claims and is now running for the U.S. Senate, lost in the 1st Congressional District at a margin five times greater than statewide.

Schweikert has long treaded cautiously on the subject of Trump. During a 2018 debate against his Democratic competitor, Anita Malik, a moderator asked Schweikert about the former president.

“I could do without the tweets,” he said of Trump. “I believe the economy, in some ways, is proof of the pudding.”

A moderator asked whether Republicans are doing enough to object to Trump's behaviors with which they disagree.

“You try to focus where you have influence,” Schweikert said. “I was not one of those people that, every afternoon, had to write a press release attacking this or criticizing that.”

Nowadays, asked what would cause him to break from the Republican Party on the issue of democracy, Schweikert says "in some ways" he already has.

He points to his decision, unique among Arizona's Republican congressmen, to vote to certify Arizona’s electoral college votes. Still he stuck with most Republicans in voting against certifying Pennsylvania’s votes, arguing there was a procedural issue with the state’s process of referring its electoral college votes.

Schweikert said that his vote was informed by advice from constitutional attorneys, though numerous recounts, reviews and forensic audits, including ones conducted in Pennsylvania, have affirmed that the 2020 presidential election results are legitimate.

Since then Schweikert has wondered about the FBI's role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and, along with Arizona’s other Republican House members, voted against creating a bipartisan commission to review the events of Jan. 6.

Where Schweikert feels he’s tried to be “straightforward” on the issue, his Democratic critics see political gymnastics to satisfy the anti-Trump portions of his base without alienating the more Trump-friendly wing of the party. In the ongoing election cycle, several of the candidates running against him for the Democratic nomination have pointed to his Pennsylvania electoral vote to argue he is an election denier.

Schweikert bristles at the suggestion that he’s enabled misinformation about election security. With protest in his voice he says he’s done presentations laying out, in detail, why he voted the way that he did.

"There is no other Republican in Arizona who has been more steadfast in saying, ‘Here’s how the system actually works. No, the machines aren’t …'" he trails off. “We have a whole presentation.”

Speaking with The Republic in April, the day after Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes announced charges against Arizona’s fake electors, Schweikert said he disagrees with many of his GOP colleagues who said the indictment was politically motivated.

“I don’t think it is (a weaponization of the justice system). I think it is one of those situations where, let’s first understand what actually happened,” he said. “Some folks want to see this as a legal issue. I’m sort of fascinated: Was this the exploitation of some of the political system, and information, and misinformation?”

He condemns “anyone that says things that can’t be backed up factually, whether it be the former president, whether it be, you know, facts first.”

Pressed on whether that includes Trump, Schweikert pauses for a moment.

“Yeah,” he said. “My instinct is we have an entire ecosystem out there that is exploiting people monetarily, intellectually, emotionally."

Malik, Schweikert’s Democratic challenger in 2018, argued in an interview that Schweikert invoked math and complex theory to dodge questions during their debate.

“You get that non-answer back, or something that came back would be numbers,” she said.

“I do think he actually is passionate about the math. But … a lot of times there’s no merit to it. It is just trying to take people away, and confuse them."

Speaking with The Republic, Schweikert repeatedly declined to directly say whether he would vote for or against a national abortion ban. Instead, he argued such a law would be unconstitutional and won't cross his desk.

Likewise for the recent Senate-brokered immigration deal, which other Republicans in Arizona’s delegation spoke out against. He said the full text of the bill never came to the House floor, so he never studied it in its entirety, only suggesting that it would not be sufficient to solve the country’s big-picture population and workforce development issues.

Will Schweikert survive 2024?

The consensus among Schweikert’s critics is that he’s on borrowed time. The long-serving Schweikert has survived black marks and political headwinds that his detractors each cycle forecast would prove his electoral downfall.

In 2020, Schweikert admitted to 11 violations of House ethics rules, including undisclosed loans and campaign contributions; misuse of campaign funds for personal purposes; improper spending by his office; and an environment where office staffers were pressured to do political work.

Then his district became more competitive when Arizona redrew its congressional districts ahead of the 2022 election cycle.

Add to that the fact that the GOP’s new Trump-aligned identity is relatively unpopular in Schweikert’s district.

“I have a lot of people who don't like me personally, because I've taken $24 million of headbutts the last two years,” he said. “And I have a job approval off the charts.”

Still Schweikert’s margin of victory has been shrinking. In 2022, he won by less than a percentage point against Democrat Jevin Hodge, who subsequently was appointed to the Arizona Legislature but resigned after Arizona Republic reporting revealed allegations of sexual misconduct in his past.

Jon Sutton, a Democratic political consultant who worked as an adviser to Hodge’s campaign, chalks Schweikert’s victories up to sheer luck.

He said during the 2022 election, for example, redistricting spared Schweikert some of the electoral blowback from the House ethics scandal, because it exposed him to a partially new population of voters. And he noted that Hodge’s campaign didn’t receive much help from the national Democratic organizations that often assist candidates in competitive races.

“There’s this belief in some Arizona political circles that he’s like Teflon. Kind of like Trump. Stuff doesn’t stick to him. Could not be further from the truth,” Sutton said.

Schweikert doesn’t flinch at the argument that he’s a dead man walking. He greets it with a smile.

"They have written my epitaph multiple times," he said. "And yet today, my polling is better in this district than it was two years ago."

A field of Democratic candidates are running to challenge Schweikert in the Nov. 5 general election. They believe in particular the issue of abortion can topple him and other vulnerable incumbents at a time when Arizona's recent GOP-led restrictions on the procedure are expected to create a backlash against Republicans.

The candidates in the packed primary field include Andrei Cherny, a former Arizona Democratic Party chair; Marlene Galán-Woods, a former journalist and the widow of former Arizona Attorney General Grant Woods; Amish Shah, a doctor and a state representative; Conor O'Callaghan, who works in finance; Andrew Horne, an orthodontist; and Kurt Kroemer, a former nonprofit executive.

Several of the candidates took aim at Schweikert during a recent debate in Cave Creek, arguing that he represents a "dystopian" vision for America and slamming him over supporting the Trump-led tax cut package that added trillions to the national debt.

Out of nearly 492,000 voters registered in the Arizona district, most are Republicans, followed by people who don't designate a party and then Democrats. Kyle Kondik, an analyst with the University of Virginia Center for Politics, said Schweikert's district has grown "less red" over time but is still a "toss up." He noted that Schweikert's is one of the few Republican-held congressional seats whose voters chose President Joe Biden in 2020.

"There's been some erosion for Republicans in suburban areas, particularly across the Sun Belt," he said. "We've seen it in Maricopa (County) in general. This district covers some of that turf."

That trend is more pronounced in areas that have higher four-year college attainment rates, such as Schweikert's district, Kondik said.

Schweikert has survived several primary challenges, too, though not without a cost. In 2022, facing a challenge from GOP candidate Elijah Norton, Schweikert and his campaign allies were sued over ads they put out depicting Norton and another man looking into the camera with arms around each other, captioned “Elijah Norton Isn’t Being Straight With You.”

Likewise in 2012, Schweikert’s campaign put out a mailer suggesting that his primary opponent, then-Rep. Ben Quayle, R-Ariz., “goes both ways,” a phrase Quayle allies said was a sleazy insinuation that he is bisexual. In 2014 Schweikert's campaign used the term “pansies,” an anti-gay slur, in an invitation to a “garden party” fundraiser, prompting similar allegations. The campaign insisted the references were innocent.

“I’ll give Schweikert credit: He is a fighter. He is scrappy, dirty. And I say that with respect,” Sutton said. “He’s a hard campaigner, and I don’t begrudge anybody for doing that. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

“I think David Schweikert is not a resilient politician. I think he is the luckiest politician, certainly in the Arizona political history that I know.”

Schweikert considers himself lucky, too. But for different reasons. By his assessment, talking so much about policy is a luxury he’s afforded by the district he represents.

“The people I represent are freaky smart,” he said. “Welcome to Scottsdale.”

As the interview draws to a close Schweikert speculates that’s what has allowed him to keep his policy-driven political style, even as the party’s terrain shifts around him and away from his priorities. He says his constituents haven't raised the issue of American democracy. They like the approach he’s taking.

At Schweikert’s shoulder his longtime political adviser, Chris Baker, checks his watch.

Laura Gersony covers national politics for The Arizona Republic. Contact her at lgersony@gannett.com or 480-372-0389.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Can Rep. David Schweikert win reelection in Arizona's 1st district?