GOP’s Vince Leach sees lead drop to 304 votes over Dem John McLean in Tucson’s LD17 race

One day after taking his first lead in the Legislative District 17 Senate race, Republican Vince Leach saw the race against Democrat John McLean tighten.

Leach was ahead by 304 votes after a Sunday update from Pima County.

That’s a narrowing of the 396-vote lead that Leach took over McLean after Saturday’s update.

Leach, who and had captured 67,234 votes to McLean’s 66,930 votes, is a former state lawmaker who was ousted in a primary by current Sen. Justine Wadsack in 2022. Leach came back to defeat Wadsack in this year’s GOP primary.

McLean, the former CEO of a local defense contractor, is making his first run for public office.

Meanwhile, Democrat Kevin Volk was still leading the Republican incumbents Reps. Cory McGarr and Rachel Jones in the race for two House seats.

Volk had 35 percent of the vote, Jones had 33 percent and McGarr had 32 percent, with Volk ahead of McGarr by 6,311 votes.

An unknown number of votes in the heavily Republican legislative district remain to be counted.

“We put in a hell of an effort,” Volk said during the Democratic Party’s election night party at Hotel Congress. “It’s gonna be a close race. We’ve just got to give it time to go through the process and get an accurate count.”

LD17 includes precincts in Pinal County’s Saddlebrooke and Pima County’s Oro Valley and Marana, as well as Tucson’s East Side and Vail. 

The latest vote totals include all of the votes cast at polling places
on Election Day along with whatever early ballots have been tabulated. Pima County, which had counted 445,287 ballots as of Sunday, estimated it had 79442 left to count, including 3,025 ballots that needed to go through a signature-verification process and 7,618 provisional ballots that might not make the final cut. Sunday was the last day for voters to “cure” a problematic ballot.

Pinal County had counted 209,921 ballots and estimated it had 4,023 ballots left to count as of Friday night, including 3,723 provisional ballots that might not make the final cut.

Although Republicans have a 9-percentage-point voter-registration advantage in LD 17, Democrats targeted the possibility of capturing a seat or two in the district. Strategists noted that Democrats Mark Kelly, Katie Hobbs and Adrian Fontes all won LD17 in 2022 and say the district is now represented by some of the most extreme Republicans in the Legislature.

The final count across the state isn’t expected to be complete until next week as voters had until Sunday to cure their ballots if election officials have seen any irregularities.

Election officials are now in the process of validating the remaining vote-by-mail ballots via a signature check before tabulating them. That process is expected to continue into next week.

Legislative District 17 is one of three Tucson-area districts that are crucial to the balance of power in the Legislature next year. The others are Legislative Districts 16 and 23. Democrats appeared poised to lose a House seat in one of those districts and were falling short of a campaign to oust a GOP House incumbent in the other.

District 16

In GOP-leaning District 16, which now has bipartisan representation in the House of Representatives, Democratic Rep. Keith Seaman continued to trail Republican opponent Chris Lopez. As of Friday, Lopez led Seaman by 3,586 votes.

His seatmate, Republican Rep. Teresa Martinez, was ahead of both candidates in the race for two seats in the House of Representatives.

Most of District’s 16’s voters live in Pinal County, but about 17 percent live in Northwestern Pima County.

Republican Sen. T.J. Shope was ahead of Democratic challenger Stacey Seaman, the daughter of Keith Seaman, with 56 percent of the vote.

Legislative District 23

In Legislative District 23, Democrats were falling short of their campaign to oust a Republican in the Arizona House of Representatives.

In the race for two House seats in this Democrat-leaning district, Republican Michele Peña had captured 29,478 votes as of Saturday, while Democratic state Rep. Mariana Sandoval had 27,314 votes and fellow Democrat Matias Rosales had 25,690 votes.

Peña overcame the district’s Democratic voter-registration advantage to win a House seat two years ago.

Democratic incumbent Sen. Brian Fernandez had captured 51 percent of the vote against Republican Michelle Altherr.

The largest chunk of Legislative District 23’s voters—47 percent—live in Yuma County and 34 percent live in rural and suburban Maricopa County. The district stretches east into Pima County, which is home to 19 percent of the voters, including precincts across the Tohono O’odham Nation, such as in the community of Sells and around the San Xavier Mission.

Yuma County still had an estimated 29,328 votes left to count after counting 40,963 ballots as of Sunday afternoon.