Democrat Adelita Grijalva won Tuesday’s special election for the Arizona congressional seat held by her late father, NBC News projects.
Grijalva, a former Pima County supervisor and Tucson school board member, captured Arizona’s 7th Congressional District, which includes Tucson, over Republican Daniel Butierez. She will serve out the remaining 15 months of Rep. Raúl Grijalva’s term after he died in March of complications during cancer treatment.
Grijalva will fill one of three vacancies in the House, narrowing Republicans’ majority to 219-214 as Congress faces some key upcoming moments, including a partisan staring contest over government spending and an effort by House Democrats to force a vote on the disclosure of more files related to the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Grijalva will join the Congressional Progressive Caucus, she and caucus co-chair Maxwell Frost, D-Fla., said Friday an endorsement video. Grijalva’s father, who served 11 terms in Congress, was a co-chair of the caucus from 2009 to 2019 and chaired the House Natural Resources Committee for four years.
“My dad left huge shoes to fill, but I stand on my own two feet,” the younger Grijalva said in an interview with NBC News in July.
In a July primary, Grijalva beat 25-year-old activist Deja Foxx and former state Rep. Daniel Hernandez. She accumulated endorsements from both of Arizona’s Democratic senators, Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego, as well as national progressives, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.
Frost called her a “progressive champion” who is “fighting for working people, fighting to end gun violence, fighting for our environment and just fighting for all the people of [her] district.”
The endorsement from Frost, the youngest and first Gen Z member of Congress, came after age became an issue in the special Democratic primary.
Foxx said in an interview with NBC News in July that she hoped to leverage her hundreds of thousands of social media followers and that the Democratic Party had “lost ground with young people.”
“We need to give young people real leadership,” she said.
“Respectfully, I’m not old,” Grijalva said in an interview, adding later: “It’s frustrating to me how experience is being seen as a negative.”
At 54, Grijalva will be younger than more than half of her congressional colleagues.
Grijalva added that Foxx’s remarks were “making it appear as if I’m part of some establishment, when the national Democratic Party has not helped me in this race.”
Grijalva’s victory gives Democrats another vote in the tightly divided House.
And her win comes amid an effort spearheaded by Reps. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and Ro Khanna, D-Calif., to force a vote that would compel the Justice Department to release more of its files on the investigation into Epstein.
The discharge petition, as the move is formally known, is just one signature shy of the 218 needed to force a floor vote on the issue. All 213 House Democrats and four Republicans have signed on, and Grijalva’s victory could push the petition over the threshold.
The special election also leaves just two more vacancies in the 435-member House. Texas’ 18th Congressional District, a blue stronghold including Houston, will be on the ballot Nov. 4 after Rep. Sylvester Turner, a Democrat, died this year. Tennessee’s 7th District, where Mark Green, a Republican, won by more than 20 points before he resigned in June to take a job in the private sector, also has a special primary scheduled for later this year.
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