Warren Petersen wins GOP primary for attorney general over Rodney Glassman

State Sen. Warren Petersen defeated rival Rodney Glassman to become the Republican nominee for Arizona Attorney General.

Early Friday morning, with Petersen leading by more than 62,000 votes, The Associated Press called the race in his favor. While neither Petersen nor Glassman earned an endorsement from Trump, Petersen’s long political career in Arizona won him the backing of several local heavyweights, including law enforcement associations and gubernatorial candidate Andy Biggs, who easily won his own primary contest. 

Petersen will face off against Democratic incumbent Kris Mayes in November, as she seeks to stay in office for another four years. The 2022 election that Mayes won was tight enough to warrant a recount, and she ultimately came out on top by just 280 votes. 

During an election night watch party in Scottsdale, Petersen said the country was “saved” by God when Trump won the White House in 2024, and he characterized the November midterms as an opportunity for divine intervention in Arizona. 

An avid Trump supporter, Petersen was among those who claimed, without evidence, that the results of the 2020 election were fraudulent. He helped launch the so-called “audit” of the election led by the Trump-supporting Cyber Ninjas the next year, which ultimately concluded that Biden won, and co-chaired the committee that oversaw the Florida company’s work.

And even without a concession from Glassman, and ballots still being counted, Petersen celebrated his lead in the race as a victory, saying that, despite being outspent he ultimately won the primary. 

“We beat the money — we won,” he said.

Petersen, who has spent 14 years in the state legislature, including a two-year stint as the head of the upper chamber, ran a hotly contested race against Glassman, a military attorney and former Democratic Tucson city councilman who has run unsuccessfully for a series of offices since moving to Phoenix and becoming a Republican a decade ago.

Prior to that, Glassman was the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in 2010, a campaign he lost to the late John McCain by nearly 400,000 votes. While a Democrat, he also ran twice to be the chairman of the Arizona Democratic Party, losing both times.

This was Glassman’s second unsuccessful attempt to be the GOP nominee for attorney general. Four years ago, he lost the primary to Abe Hamadeh, who went on to narrowly lose to Mayes. 

Whoever is elected attorney general will determine which way Arizona falls on a myriad of legal issues, particularly as the Trump administration and Republican lawmakers wage culture wars in the courts. Mayes has marked her time in office by opposing Trump administration policies and joining dozens of lawsuits aimed at blocking them — especially the White House’s mass deportation campaign, and defending access to abortion care in the wake of the state’s abortion rights amendment. 

Meanwhile, Petersen has vowed to uphold Trump’s political agenda and mobilized his position as the head of the Arizona Senate for the last three years to intervene in lawsuits on behalf of laws that Mayes refused to defend, including a near-total abortion ban from 1864 and the state’s trans athletic ban. 

And amid the federal push to deport people who came to the country as children, Petersen said he would do all he could to help the Trump administration expel recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.