Marlene Galán-Woods, candidate for CD1

Monday, June 22, 2026 | 18:51

Will the second time be the charm for Marlene Galán-Woods? Will her second attempt to win the Democratic nomination in Arizona’s 1st Congressional District (CD-1) lead to her being Arizona’s second Latina in Congress? (Adelita Grijalva became the first when she won last year’s special election in CD-7.)    Galán-Woods won’t get the chance if she comes in second to Amish Shah, the Democrat who won 2024’s CD-1 Primary. (Shah went on to lose the General Election to Republican David Schweikert.)   Shah and two other men, Rick McCartney and Johnathan Treble, will be sharing a debate stage with Galán-Woods Tuesday night.     Galán-Woods tells me on this week’s AZ Political Podcast that with Schweikert out of the CD-1 picture (he’s running for governor), Democrats’ chances of flipping the seat have greatly increased. And she argues that she represents her party’s best chance to beat whomever the Republicans nominate in the CD-1 race.    On the podcast, Galán-Woods also discusses her personal journey: starting out as the daughter of poor Cuban immigrants to realizing her dream of being a broadcast journalist.    And she shares her political journey: what caused her to go from being a solid Cuban-American Republican to a Democrat worthy of receiving the endorsement of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.    Even though this was my first time interacting in the media with Marlene Galán-Woods, in the interests of full disclosure, I should mention I was friends with her late husband, former Republican Attorney General Grant Woods — who took a similar political journey before his death in 2021.