Beatrice Torres is tired of voting for Grijalvas.
Year after year, Ms. Torres, 70, dutifully volunteered and cast her ballot for Representative Raúl M. Grijalva, a staunch Arizona progressive who was battling lung cancer when he was elected to his 12th term in November. He succumbed in March, the second of three House Democrats to die this year, bolstering the Republicans’ oh-so-slender majority.
Now, Mr. Grijalva’s oldest daughter, Adelita, has been asking Ms. Torres to vote for her in the Democratic primary on July 15, another Grijalva to take up her father’s seat. Several challengers are trying to block her, saying that Arizona needs a fresh voice and new ideas, not another Grijalva. And Ms. Torres agrees.
“Nobody is listening,” Ms. Torres said, clearly frustrated one scorching morning last week as she sat in her living room on Tucson’s working-class south side, shades drawn against the sun.
Ms. Grijalva is still likely to prevail in the heavily Democratic district — dozens of powerful Democrats have endorsed her, including the state’s two Democratic senators. But with two weeks to go, the special election in Arizona’s Seventh District is brewing into the next contest to question what the Democratic Party wants after its defeats of 2024 — experience versus generational change, left versus center, old versus new.
And beneath it all is simmering anger over the reluctance of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and other aging, ailing Democrats, like Mr. Grijalva, who died at 77, to leave office when their time had come.
“We need change,” Ms. Torres said.
Ms. Grijalva, 54, is a longtime elected official in Tucson, but to some frustrated voters, she is also the embodiment of their sclerotic party.
Then there is Deja Foxx, a 25-year-old activist and social-media influencer who screams change every chance she gets, and Daniel Hernandez, 35, a former state lawmaker running in the center, where he believes his party must be if Democrats are to win back Hispanic men who flocked to Donald J. Trump in November.
Ms. Grijalva’s challengers are each hoping to ride the anti-establishment tailwinds that propelled Zohran Mamdani to an upset win in New York City’s mayoral primary in June.
“We need a new kind of Democrat, a new kind of fighter,” Ms. Foxx said last week in Tucson as she wrapped up a road trip through southern Arizona that she named after her generation’s slang for having a meltdown: Crashout or Congress.
“Democrats,” she said, “are failing to listen to the people.”
Ms. Foxx’s extremely online campaign is fueled by young supporters and TikTok videos in which she tells her story of growing up on food stamps and working at a gas station.
Mr. Hernandez is saying that Democrats have lost their way with Latino voters by lecturing them about pronouns instead of focusing on economics.
Both say the Democratic Party needs to break with staid, legacy candidates who have left the party powerless in Washington and are being scorned by voters across the country.
As an intern in 2011, Mr. Hernandez rushed to help Representative Gabrielle Giffords after she was wounded in a mass shooting in Tucson, but past experience was not the note he struck as his mother drove him around Tucson’s south side to knock on doors: “More of the same is not going to cut it,” he said.
The analogy to the New York mayoral contest goes only so far. Ms. Grijalva may have decades of experience, as a school board member and a county supervisor, but she is not an Andrew Cuomo. Nor is she running as a play-it-safe moderate. She has positioned herself as an unapologetic progressive with the backing of Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a deep-blue district that stretches from Tucson to the Mexican border.
And unlike Mr. Mamdani’s rise during a monthslong mayoral campaign in New York, Ms. Grijalva’s challengers have barely had time to scramble together campaigns and introduce themselves to voters who have known the Grijalvas for decades.
Ms. Grijalva can also count on her longstanding ties with unions and liberal activist groups to knock on doors and make calls to turn out voters in a sleepy summertime primary election. The University of Arizona, a potential wellspring of Foxx voters in the district, has mostly emptied for the season.
There has been almost no public polling of the race, and political experts in Arizona say the low-turnout contest could be decided by whichever candidate’s supporters actually bother to vote. But observers said they had been surprised by the intense anti-establishment energy starting to bubble up from voters who had checked the name Grijalva for more than 20 years.
Ms. Grijalva has embraced her father’s legacy. She is running her campaign from an office decorated with his intricate ink drawings and shelves of Grijalva merch, including bobblehead dolls that have his salt-and-pepper goatee, and Mexican candles bearing his picture. A blue-and-white “Raúl Grijalva” campaign sign is still tacked to the front of the building, next to hers.
“I just can’t take it down,” she said.
She said her father had run for his final term in 2024 optimistic that his cancer treatments were working and that he would continue a political career that began in the 1970s, when he organized for more services in Tucson’s low-income Hispanic neighborhoods.
He sometimes discussed the possibility that she would one day run for his seat, not uncommon in a party where spouses and children often assume the mantles of fallen patriarchs and matriarchs. She had not even finished planning her father’s funeral when her phone started ringing with people urging her to run, she said.
Ms. Grijalva rejected the criticism from her rivals that she was some political nepo baby. She said she had spent years working to build housing, improve public safety and fight for public schools in Tucson and had missed just three meetings as a school board member — to give birth to each of her three children.
“Nobody’s handed me anything,” she said.
She said her family’s progressive politics had sometimes put them at odds with establishment Democrats. Mr. Grijalva was the chairman of the Progressive Caucus and was frequently ranked as one of the most liberal members of Congress. He was the second sitting Democrat in Congress to call on Mr. Biden to drop out of the 2024 presidential race.
“We’re not the Rockefellers,” she said. “We’re the Grijalvas.”
She is counting on support from voters like David Garcia, a landscaper who runs a south-side neighborhood group called Barrio Restoration (“Doing good for the ‘hood’”). He met Ms. Grijalva when she came to a cleanup five years ago and said he had known and trusted her ever since.
“She’s invested,” he said. “She’s been raised right. Raised by a good leader. The people who are running against her? I’ve never heard of these names.”
But Ms. Foxx and Mr. Hernandez are breaking through with others.
Victoria Gonzalez, 26, had not paid much attention to the race until she stumbled across Ms. Foxx’s videos on social media, where her campaign has caught fire. Ms. Foxx has 386,000 followers on TikTok, and her videos there have racked up millions of views.
Ms. Foxx’s life story of being raised by a single mother, living in public housing and being homeless as a teenager resonated with Ms. Gonzalez. Her own mother was a janitor, and while Ms. Gonzalez now works two jobs as a home-health aide, she said money is so tight she sometimes relies on donated food from churches.
“She’s somebody who knows the struggle,” Ms. Gonzalez said of Ms. Foxx. “Somebody younger. Somebody different.”
One sweaty night last week, Ms. Gonzalez and 120 other supporters packed into a cafe in Tucson’s artsy Fourth Avenue neighborhood to hear Ms. Foxx speak.
The cheers of “Foxx for AZ!” were enthusiastic as Ms. Foxx recorded videos of the crowd. Last-minute endorsements from other young Democrats were rolling in. But supporters like Elizabeth Cohen, a nonprofit consultant, said they realized the campaign was a long shot.
Still, Ms. Cohen said, the energy should send a clear message to Democratic leaders: “It’s time for fresh blood.”
Jack Healy is a Phoenix-based national correspondent for The Times who focuses on the politics and climate of the Southwest. He has worked in Iraq and Afghanistan and is a graduate of the University of Missouri’s journalism school.
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