Don Shooter, other controversial figures fail in Arizona primary election
Aug 29, 2018, 10:12 AM
PHOENIX – Primary election voters had a message for disgraced former Arizona legislator Don Shooter: Stay out.
Shooter, who was expelled from the state House of Representatives over sexual harassment charges in February, failed Tuesday to win the Republican nomination for state Senate.
GOP voters in District 13, which includes Yuma and stretches into western Maricopa County, opted to nominate Sine Kerr, who received 49.16 percent of the votes in the three-way race. Brent Backus was second at 29.78 percent, and Shooter was last at 21.06 percent.
He wasn’t the only controversial figure to get the thumbs down from voters in Arizona’s primary.
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Rep. Paul Mosley, who grabbed headlines this summer for his speeding exploits, finished third out of three in the GOP race for his District 5 House seat. The top two candidates in the northwestern Arizona district, Regina Cobb and Leo Biasiucci, advanced to November’s general election.
The loss gives Mosley less reason to drive fast between the Capitol and his Lake Havasu City home. In July, video was released in which he was seen boasting to a deputy that he’d driven as fast as 140 mph and been able to get away with it because of legislative immunity.
And then there was Bobby Wilson, the Republican candidate for state Senate who has admitted to shooting and killing his mother in self-defense in the 1960s. In a two-way race, District 2 voters in southern Arizona opted for Shelley Kais over Wilson, 52.22 percent to 47.78 percent.
Meanwhile, Republican state Rep. David Stringer, who resisted calls from his own party to step down in June after making comments perceived as racist, advanced through the primary in his re-election bid.
State GOP Chairman Jonathan Lines called for Stringer’s resignation after video circulated showing the Prescott legislator saying “there aren’t enough white kids to go around” while discussing racial integration.
Stringer finished second in a three-way Republican race to reach the general election, along with Noel Campbell, who won with 42.5 percent. Stringer was at 36.82 percent to best Jody Rooney’s 20.68 percent.
