Our founder and CEO, Dr. Matthew C. Whitaker, recognized by the Arizona Republic. “Who can keep Arizona on track in 2025? Here are 8 leaders to watch | Opinion”
Will Arizona politics chug along in 2025 or take a wild turn and go careening off the tracks? A lot of that depends on these leaders.
Editorial board, Arizona Republic
Who is most worth watching in 2025?
Considering how volatile politics is now, perhaps the better question is who isn’t worth watching.
Even still, here are eight political and community leaders that you might want to keep an eye on.
Who is most worth watching in 2025?
Considering how volatile politics is now, perhaps the better question is who isn’t worth watching.
Even still, here are eight political and community leaders that you might want to keep an eye on.
Steve Montenegro
Steve Montenegro is set to make headlines in 2025 as the new Republican speaker of the House.
But what kind of leader will he be?
The immigration hardliner is almost certain to capitalize on Trump’s deportation plans. He made it big, in part, by helping to orchestrate anti-immigrant sentiment.
The big unknown is whether he’ll be better than outgoing Speaker Ben Toma at working with Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs.
Toma, who lost his congressional bid, characterized his tenure by negotiating with Hobbs on the budget but sticking it to her on practically everything else, including sending to voters many of the bills she vetoed.
Montenegro now takes the helm emboldened by a Republican election sweep that helped Trump win big in Arizona and grew the party’s margins in the Legislature.
He’ll have the majority to pass legislation, but Hobbs, though weakened by her failure to flip the Legislature, still commands power with her veto pen.
And Montenegro will still have to work with her to pass the budget, one of the body’s most important mandates.
T.J. Shope
There are two gatekeepers for water legislation in the Arizona House and Senate, and one of those key positions opened this year.
T.J. Shope eagerly stepped in.
Water is a key issue for Shope, a Republican who grew up in Pinal County. He understands the struggles of groundwater-dependent rural areas, but he also knows the need for stable water supplies in fast-growing, rapidly urbanizing counties like his own.
And, even better, the new head of the Senate natural resources committee is saying all the right things to make meaningful progress on reforms that, despite much effort last legislative session, never made it into law.
Shope wants to include a lot more people in the conversation, for one. And he wants bills to garner the support necessary to not only pass both chambers, but also to survive the governor’s veto pen.
Can he do it?
It may be a tall order, considering that Republicans are in no mood to compromise, and many expect Rep. Gail Griffin, his counterpart in the House, to be on the warpath with the governor over her actions on groundwater.
That makes Shope one to watch.
Charlie Kirk
He is only 31, but Charlie Kirk is arguably one of the most powerful people in American politics.
The young Midwesterner who founded Turning Point USA has sunk his roots in Arizona, marrying Erika Frantzve, Miss Arizona 2012, and raising a family here.
He is basking in the afterglow of Donald Trump’s second presidential election triumph and is taking victory laps for Turning Point’s voter turnout strategies.
There have been rumors that Kirk is considering a run for Arizona governor in 2026. But if so, Trump just complicated those by promising to support Republican Karrin Taylor Robson for the job.
Kirk has courted controversy over the years, calling Martin Luther King Jr. “awful” and “not a good person” and arguing that Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory was illegitimate.
Turning Point has been blamed for setting back the Arizona Republican Party by years and unwittingly helping Democrats win many of the state’s major offices. But for the moment, Kirk and his conservative youth movement are flying high.
He has mastered new media and the internet to magnify conservative themes. And with his millions of followers on social media, he will have a large voice in the political year ahead.
Yassamin Ansari
Yassamin Ansari is moving up the political ladder at light speed.
At 32, her resume includes stints as a U.N. climate adviser, a Phoenix councilwoman and soon to be a congresswoman from Arizona.
She won a bruising Democratic primary by fewer than 40 votes to represent District 3, a predominantly Hispanic enclave. And she’s already grabbing the attention of the Washington press.
Ansari is the only woman in Arizona’s congressional delegation and the first Iranian American Democrat to serve in Congress, the Washington Examiner reports.
She ran as a moderate but quickly joined the Congressional Progressive Caucus, where she presumably will push back against the Trump administration and MAGA control of both chambers of Congress.
At home, she set up a “transition team” that ran the gamut of elected and union leaders, activists and others. It’s unclear exactly what role these individuals will play, but she is surrounding herself with local power.
Ansari clearly has her eyes on higher prizes in D.C., which could be good for our state. But how well will she also represent the interests of her constituents?
The balancing act is worth watching.
Ruben Gallego
Arizona is finally sending a Latino to the U.S. Senate.
That’s not the most important thing about U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego’s victory. But Latinos have been an integral part of this territory long before it became a state in 1912.
At one point, Arizona was part of Mexico and home to Native Americans. Perhaps Arizonans will have the wisdom to send a tribal member to the U.S. Senate in the not-too-distant future.
After all, everyone deserves to have representation in the highest offices of power.
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Gallego, a Democrat, will be judged over the next six years for how well he represents the interest of all Arizonans. He is filling the seat vacated by Kyrsten Sinema, who became an independent after angering her Democratic base.
Will Gallego press for moderation and consensus, as he promised during the election, or will he revert to the bomb-thrower he was in the solidly blue District 3 of the U.S. House?
We hope he moderates his more liberal impulses because he’s joining a Republican-controlled Senate, where finding common ground will be key to moving the country forward.
Anna Hernandez
Don’t take your eyes off Anna Hernandez, who won a Phoenix City Council seat by unapologetically touting her progressive views.
Hernandez, a former state senator, easily dusted off centrists in a year when many other voters gravitated toward MAGA candidates. She defied the powerbrokers who wanted another seat on the council to fall under Mayor Kate Gallego’s grip.
Hernandez will replace the temporary seat-holder, Carlos Galindo-Elvira, in District 7, which represents parts of downtown and southwest Phoenix, in April.
In many ways, she is reminiscent of former Phoenix Councilman Carlos Garcia, whose flamboyant and vocal style unnerved well-heeled city dwellers.
Garcia didn’t survive politically, and his overarching police reforms hit a wall, even in this liberal stronghold.
But Hernandez is poised to pick up where Garcia left off on a council that has already drawn a hard line on the side of police.
Granted, policing isn’t the only challenge facing Phoenix, and like Garcia, Hernandez may often find herself fighting alone.
But Phoenix needs people like Hernandez who can champion the most vulnerable, those who are often unseen and shoved into irrelevance.
They need a voice.
Jordan Peterson
News reports suggest that Jordan Peterson is one of our newest Arizonans.
Although details remain sketchy and are not formally confirmed, the former Toronto college professor who battled wokeness and cancel culture in Canada made headlines by announcing he was moving to the United States because of the oppressive culture in his home country.
On a podcast that his daughter Mikhaila posted online on Dec. 6, she tells her father, “This is why I’m glad you’re now living in Scottsdale and not in Toronto.”
Peterson is one of the most famous public intellectuals in the English-speaking world. His 2018 book, “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos” became an international bestseller.
He has a huge following on social media, with nearly 6 million readers on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Before his own bout with health and related substance issues, Peterson would carve up hostile interviewers with verve and dash. His swashbuckling days appear over.
The question now is will he ever — can he ever — recover them?
Matthew Whitaker
Matthew C. Whitaker is moving forward to keep us from moving back.
The executive director of the George Washington Carver Museum and Cultural Center in the Phoenix Warehouse District has been pushing to raise the profile of an institution that calls itself “the steward of the (local) African American experience.”
“Last year was all about recalibration and education,” Whitaker said. “Educating the community about Carver. Getting the word out about Carver for people who hadn’t heard about it.”
The building opened in 1926 as Arizona’s only school for Black students during the segregation era. More recently, it hosted events connected to college basketball’s March Madness and the nation’s newest federal holiday, Juneteenth.
So far, 2025 promises more of the same, with a celebration of Negro Leagues baseball planned for April and an award show called “The Carver Center Honors” expected in May.
“There’s nothing but excitement moving forward,” Whitaker said. “Foot traffic has increased. Knowledge about us has increased. And we have more people who want to advance the mission.”
A big piece of that is connected to education, especially with the ongoing battle over how U.S. history should be taught. “I’ve reached out to some public and private school leaders, encouraging them to look at us as potential safe and productive spaces for extensions of what they’re doing,” Whitaker said.
Whitaker, a historian, also has been working to expand the museum’s archives, saying Carver’s curator has recently found lost pictures of a 1967 race riot in Phoenix.
Time will tell how the museum uses those images or whether 2025 will create proper momentum for Carver’s centennial, but Whitaker is excited.
“I love Carver,” he said. “I love the mission. The potential is unlimited.”
Who else should be on our radar? Email suggestions at opinions@arizonarepublic.com.
This is an opinion of The Arizona Republic’s editorial board.