The heat sweltered outside on a late August afternoon as Adelita Grijalva stood in the crowded dining room of Paloma Mexican Street Food restaurant in Avondale, Arizona, about 20 miles west of Phoenix. Grijalva had already won the Democratic primary and was headed to a special election for a U.S. House seat in Arizona. Though she had never held federal elected office—earlier this year, she’d resigned from the Pima County Board of Supervisors to run for Congress—voters knew her name. For 22 years, the seat she was running for had been held by her father, Raúl Grijalva, a towering figure in Arizona politics and a leading progressive voice in the national Democratic Party until his death in March. But Grijalva wasn’t coasting on name recognition. She was baking in the hot Arizona summer sun to make certain she would follow in her father’s footsteps, make history as her state’s first Latina member of Congress, and give her party an extra vote that could be pivotal this fall—and beyond.
Indeed, Grijalva crushed her Republican opponent by 39 points just a few weeks later on September 23. That night, she called her win, which surpassed her father’s last margin of victory in a reelection bid against the same opponent a year ago, “a loud message” that voters “reject the MAGA agenda, and we demand a Congress that will hold this administration accountable.” In the short term, her most important contribution will be numerical: Her election narrows the Republicans’ already slim majority in the House. On election night, she announced that she would follow through on her promise to force a vote on the release of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s case files, which had previously been short one signature.
Her win also provides early lessons for Democrats as they prepare for the 2026 midterms and work to win over Latino voters who backed Donald Trump in 2024. Grijalva aggressively courted Latino voters, who turned out for her in droves, and all the while she stuck to her progressive roots. Grijalva’s last name played a role in her victory, but so did her politics. Her message, built around concerns over affordability and anger at Trump’s immigration policy, is one that can win over Latinos—and others—outside of Arizona as well. Moved by her calls for lower housing prices and protecting Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and immigrants’ rights, voters brushed aside attacks—from Republicans and Democrats as well, especially during the primary campaign earlier this year—that alleged she was a legacy candidate. Indeed, they not only were unbothered by her connection to her father, but seemed to appreciate her commitment to issues he championed, such as schools, the environment, and Indigenous rights. In a battleground state that typically has favored centrist, middle-of-the-road Democrats, Grijalva’s huge win gives the national party something to consider as it regroups, tries to win back voters, and attempts to confront Trump’s increasingly unconstrained and polarizing second term.
“We did the work,” Grijalva told me in August at her campaign headquarters, just east of downtown Tucson. The message from her race, she said, is to know and listen to your constituents. “Not all of us are going to fit this perfect mold that you think would be a great candidate, but you have to look at what this community believes in,” she said. “I was told early on, ‘I don’t know that you should lean into your dad’s legacy.’ I’m like, ‘It is mine, too.’ I am part of his legacy, and I also have my own chops.”
Grijalva, 54, has long, dark hair and an open face with an easy smile. Her office features several framed photographs of her parents; her husband, Sol; their three children; and other family members. There are also some of her late father’s drawings and a giant poster of the 1970s-era Lynda Carter on TV’s Wonder Woman—a gift from her dad. She was born and raised in Tucson, a desert city of roughly half a million people about an hour from the Mexican border. It’s the home of the University of Arizona.
If her detractors got one thing right, it’s that her father’s influence on her was profound. Grijalva grew up around politics and political campaigns. From the time she was one, her dad was running for or in elected office. Long before she even thought about running for office herself, the elder Grijalva predicted that she would. She told him, “Dad, I just graduated. I’m 18 years old. I don’t even want to think about any of this stuff.”
When Grijalva graduated from the University of Arizona with a degree in political science in 1995, she was interested in working with “young people who’d had a misstep—had been arrested.” She initially applied to be a probation officer at juvenile court. Then she got a job with a nonprofit called Pima Prevention Partnership, which ran a juvenile diversion program called Pima County Teen Court that tried to keep students in school by putting them before a jury of peers rather than expelling them. Eventually, she became its director. In 2002, the same year her father first ran for Congress, Grijalva fulfilled his prophecy and was elected to the Tucson Unified School District board, where she served for 20 years.
Then in 2020, Grijalva ran for the Pima County Board of Supervisors, and she eventually becoming its chairwoman. It may not have been the path she planned, but she already had been in the two jobs that started her father’s political career: the Tucson Unified School District board and the county supervisory board.
After her father’s funeral in March, Grijalva started having serious conversations with her family about running for her father’s seat, and how a campaign might affect their lives as they processed his loss. “It was my youngest who said, ‘Well, Mom, if you don’t run, who’s going to?’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know.’ And he said, ‘So doesn’t that make you worried?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah.’”
She admits that campaigning while grieving was both “torturous” and “helpful.” The primary got personal at times and hurtful, particularly as the grief was still fresh. “I just didn’t know if I’d be able to get through anything without crying. And then I just sort of embraced it,” she said. “Someone told me that tears are liquid prayers, and you shouldn’t hold on to them.”
Given Grijalva’s relationship with her father—and the fact that she was almost 30 years older than her main primary rival—it was easy to see the race in terms of a generational battle. Because of the seat’s importance in narrowing the majority, the primary race in July drew national, if somewhat confused, attention. Grijalva won the backing of leading progressives like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders during that race. But others—most notably David Hogg, the former co-vice chair of the Democratic National Committee—supported Grijalva’s 25-year-old opponent and attempted to make the race a referendum on an aging party establishment. That criticism centered on a call for a change from the old guard, in part because Grijalva’s father was one of three House Democrats to die in office this year—tragedies that were also stark reminders of the 2024 presidential election, when concerns about Joe Biden’s advanced age helped doom Democrats nationwide.
When she won, The New York Times depicted her victory as a triumph for the party’s establishment that contrasted with the democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s recent victory in New York City’s mayoral primary. In reality, Grijalva is a fierce progressive who is, at 54, younger than the median age of Democratic members of the House.
Grijalva, for her part, was forthright in response to attacks that she was coasting on her father’s name. There is a difference, she said, between having deep roots in a place and shared political commitments and belonging to an entrenched political establishment. “There’s nothing ‘establishment’ about me or my dad,” she said, apart from the fact that they’re both deeply “established in this community.” “The only time you ever heard Grijalva and establishment in the same sentence was ‘Grijalva fights against the establishment.’”
Arizona, a relatively new swing state, has one of the fastest-growing populations among U.S. states, raising the stakes for politicians who want to run here. The Latino population has grown rapidly, and politicians and strategists are trying to determine how to reach this segment of the electorate. Young Latino voters, for instance, are a major part of the state’s explosive growth and are credited with helping to elect new U.S. Senator Ruben Gallego.
Arizona’s 7th Congressional District, where Grijalva serves, is one of three in the state held by a Democrat. It is also arguably the bluest, including much of Tucson, the U.S. border with Mexico, Nogales, and parts of several tribal lands. About 61 percent of the population identifies as Hispanic, 28 percent as white alone, and about 4 percent as Black, with remaining groups making up about 8 percent. The median household income is about $61,000, with 17 percent of residents living below the poverty line.
According to the UCLA Latino Policy & Politics Institute, the number of eligible voters of Latino background in Arizona has more than doubled since 2000. Arizona now has the fifth-largest number of eligible voters of Latino heritage in the United States, at around 1.3 million, or about a quarter of the state’s electorate. The four states ahead of it—California, Texas, Florida, and New York—are all significantly more populous. Most of Arizona’s Latinos are young and not necessarily aligned with a political party. That creates an opportunity for both parties as they try to figure out how to win this rising segment of the electorate, said Stella Rouse, director of the Hispanic Research Center and professor of political science at Arizona State University in Tempe.
“What it means to be Latino is changing,” said Rouse, author of Latinos in the Legislative Process: Interests and Influence. “They look more like a general American electorate than a Latino electorate that we’ve traditionally thought about.”
Most young Latinos were born in the United States, their language is English-dominant, and they feel more distant from the immigrant experience that may have defined the politics of their parents or grandparents, Rouse said. They care about issues like climate change and affordability. “I think both parties need to understand what that young electorate cares about,” she said. “Right now, it just seems to be candidate-driven.” Democrats have struggled to reach these voters—something Grijalva is making a priority.
The moment is a critical juncture and requires a shift for both parties vying for a rising, young, Latino electorate, said Mike Madrid, a veteran political consultant who has worked for Republican and Democratic candidates. He is the author of The Latino Century: How America’s Largest Minority Is Transforming Democracy.
“The answer is it’s not ideological,” Madrid said. “The right-left spectrum no longer exists…. They are emerging as something entirely unique. These voters will redefine their own Latino agenda, and the parties will come to them. That’s my hope.”
Back in Avondale, Grijalva drew frequent applause when she spoke about her commitment to working people, public education, and democracy. High school senior Julian Torres, 17, was among about 30 people who came out to meet Grijalva. Wearing a black-and-white T-shirt featuring the face of Senator Bernie Sanders, he told me he had just joined Grijalva’s campaign as a volunteer because, he said, he liked her progressive ideas.
Torres was upset about cuts to Arizona’s public schools. Some of his teachers had left, he told me, because they didn’t make enough to live. “They’re really great people who are undervalued.” When he asked Grijalva about public education, she told him that she adamantly opposes vouchers and the use of taxpayer money to fund private schools, and that she wants to codify a ban on using public money for private education. She also spoke about the transformational power of public education in her own family. Her paternal grandfather came to the United States in 1945 as a ranch hand through the federal Bracero program, which sought temporary workers from Mexico, and he sent all three of his children to college, including the future congressman. “I am here because of public education,” Grijalva told the crowd.
Grijalva knows the Congress she enters is different from the institution her father joined nearly 23 years ago. For Democrats, winning at least one chamber of Congress is a necessity that grows more existential by the day.
“I think we have to change up some of the members,” she said. “It’s very difficult to collaborate with extremists. And so, if we have people that have pledged allegiance to Trump, and that’s it, it doesn’t matter what their community says, then … our responsibility is to go to those communities and highlight how their member of Congress or their senator is voting against their best interests. It’s our job to let them know.”
There are tenets she learned from her dad about how to approach the job. “His advice was always, ‘Do your homework. Be prepared for anything and remember where you’re from. You don’t let anyone push you around,’ which I never do,” she said. “Be dignified. And remember to be humble, because Congress can change people.” She said he would sit in their front yard, hang out at coffee shops for hours on a Sunday, and have conversations with people. “He was very open to it all the time,” she said. “What we heard consistently about my dad is that he was present in this community all the time. And that is something that I took as ‘this is how you’re supposed to do this.’” That is how Grijalva won in a landslide in September. It’s an approach she’ll now take to Washington, D.C., where she will enter a fiercely partisan, bitterly divided House of Representatives in the middle of a term. Bruce Burke, a Tucson attorney who served with Grijalva for several years on the school board, said she would adapt well to Congress and develop as a strong voice there. “I think she emerges from her dad’s shadow very quickly,” he said. “Adelita is very much her own person.”
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