The tipping point came in March, when temperatures in Arizona set national records for the month by hitting 112 near Martinez Lake and Fort Yuma.
Arizonans know the ritual of the long summer — the thermostat nudged to 82, the vacation skipped, bracing for the electricity bill. What they didn’t budget for was reaching for the AC before spring had even arrived.
“I think what actually did it was the fact that it got so hot in March,” said Vania Guevara, advocacy and political director at Chispa Arizona, the state affiliate of the League of Conservation Voters. “It was a complete anomaly. Like, March, and I already have to turn on my AC — what does that mean?”
What it meant was extra months on the power meter in a state where cooling off is less about comfort than it is survival. And it landed just as two of the state’s largest utilities came asking for more. Arizona Public Service and Tucson Electric Power are each seeking residential rate increases of roughly 14% — about $240 more a year — citing surging demand from data centers, extreme heat and infrastructure costs.
Guevara said she watched the reaction ripple through the membership in a way she had not seen in three election cycles. A woman posted a video to Spanish-language TikTok about an $820 Arizona Public Service bill. It drew more than a thousand comments, most of them echoing the story of being hit with a mammoth utility bill.
The Squeeze
Come November, Arizona voters will be facing an unusually loaded ballot: a governor’s race pitting Democratic incumbent Katie Hobbs against Republican U.S. Rep. Andy Biggs, an attorney general’s race, two congressional toss-ups and numerous races at the state Capitol, where Republicans hold narrow majorities in both legislative chambers — 17-13 in the Senate, 33-27 in the House.
The regulatory backdrop over utility rates is now a boldface issue. The Republican-controlled Arizona Corporation Commission, which regulates utilities, voted in March to repeal the state’s renewable energy standards and its electric energy efficiency standards. Utilities are also pushing a “formula rate plan” that would replace multiyear reviews with automatic annual increases, bypassing the public hearings where ratepayers get to speak. The commission has until the end of December to rule on the pending rate cases — which means the vote lands safely after Election Day.
Attorney General Kris Mayes, a former corporation commissioner herself, has intervened in both cases and made them the center of her reelection campaign against Republican Warren Petersen. She has called Tucson Electric Power’s request “blatant corporate greed,” said she is watching a monopoly utility try to abuse the system and dismissed Arizona Public Service’s warning about its credit rating as a “sky is falling” tactic from a company already seeing net income of $600 million a year. Her expert witnesses filed testimony arguing Tucson Electric needs only a 4% increase, not 14%. Petersen has not commented on her claims, focusing instead on policy disagreements with Mayes.
“The vast majority of Arizonans do not believe that they should be subsidizing the cost of building data centers for a whole bunch of out-of-state billionaires,” Mayes told a packed Tucson town hall in May 2026 and told reporters she had never seen anything like the current series of utility rate increases.
Arizona Public Service, for its part, has proposed raising data center rates by nearly 30% and creating a separate customer class for them — a tacit acknowledgment of where the extra load is coming from.
Arizona Public Service and Tucson Electric Power did not respond to requests for comment.
The Ceiling
But those who see this as a climate mandate may be disappointed.
In an AARP Arizona survey of 913 likely voters conducted July 26-28 by the bipartisan team of Fabrizio Ward and Impact Research, affordability was the runaway top issue, chosen by 37% of voters as one of their top two concerns from a list of 12 issues. Environment and climate change came in at 10%.
“Affordability is definitely the driving issue for voters in Arizona,” said Bob Ward, a partner at Fabrizio Ward. But when the firms pressed further, asking which costs voters worried about most, utilities finished behind groceries, health care and gasoline.
“Utility rates — it’s a second- or third-tier affordability issue,” Ward said, noting that it draws a consistent one-quarter of voters across every demographic slice. “It’s sort of like a baseline issue, but it’s not the driving issue.”
Among older voters, it resonates louder. Seventy-nine percent of Arizona voters over 50 said rising utility prices were a very or extremely important factor in their vote — including more than 70% of older Republicans and better than 90% of older Democrats. Those voters are expected to make up at least 62% of the November electorate.
Ward also flagged the partisan inversion that has quietly reshaped the race. In AARP’s 2024 Arizona polling, voters who prioritized affordability broke heavily for Donald Trump. This year, they favor Hobbs by 29 points. Hobbs leads among independents by 26.
“If they’re prioritizing affordability,” Ward said, “guess what candidates need to be talking about?”
Both campaigns already are.
Biggs has used the proposed 14% increases to attack Hobbs directly, framing them as the consequence of California-style green energy policy that lets utilities profit while transition costs flow downhill, and campaigning on rolling back environmental regulation. Hobbs has pointed to state and federal money routed into emergency bill assistance and positioned herself as a check on legislative attempts to gut renewable investment.
Fuel costs are another source of anger. A Noble Predictive Insights survey conducted May 5-7 found 90% of Arizona voters were concerned about rising fuel prices, and 68% said gas prices were likely to influence their midterm vote.
“Gas prices are one of the most visible ways voters feel the economy,” said Mike Noble, the firm’s founder.
The Drop-Off
The congressional map is where the fight draws money. In Arizona’s 1st Congressional District, an open Scottsdale-area seat being vacated by Republican David Schweikert, who ran unsuccessfully for governor, former NFL placekicker Jay Feely faces Democrat Amish Shah. The race is a pure toss-up in a district with more than 170,000 independent voters. The state’s 6th Congressional District sits at an even partisan split, where Republican U.S. Rep. Juan Ciscomani faces Democrat JoAnna Mendoza, a Marine Corps veteran who argues that rolling back federal clean energy tax credits strips families of the tools to offset the costs they are now absorbing.
Down-ballot, the shift is already measurable. Guevara, the Chispa Arizona director, said environmental groups won a three-year moratorium on data center tax breaks in this year’s budget negotiations while beating back an effort to eliminate renewable energy tax credits — an outcome she had been told was impossible, and one that came after data center lobbyists worked aggressively to stop it.
“Republicans are scared,” she said. In battleground legislative districts, vulnerable Republicans have moved to pass energy affordability packages capping miscellaneous fees, while Democratic challengers hammer the commission’s repeal of consumer protections. In the July primaries, Guevara said, Democratic incumbents seen as aligned with Arizona Public Service lost — including in Maryvale, a heavily Latino West Phoenix neighborhood.
The last mile remains the problem. Corporation Commission races sit far enough down the ballot that voters routinely skip them, and many still do not know what the commission does. Guevara described watching retirees turn out to a 10 a.m. hearing on a Tuesday to explain that pensions they had spent 30 or 40 years earning no longer covered the bill, while commissioners stayed away.
“People are realizing what their actual material conditions are versus what they’re being told, and they’re smart,” Guevara said. “They’re picking up — you can’t keep lying to them anymore, because it’s affecting their pocket.”
