Emily Lopez is a teen-age activist in Phoenix. She grew up in the city, raised by her mother, who is undocumented; her father was deported before she was born. In 2010, when Lopez was ten, she marched in street demonstrations to protest an Arizona law known as Senate Bill 1070, which, among other things, gave local police the power to act as immigration agents. Later, Lopez participated in the campaign to unseat Joe Arpaio, then the sheriff of Maricopa County, who has long been a hero of the anti-immigrant movement. When I met her, this past Saturday, on the eve of Tuesday’s primaries in Arizona, she had just finished an afternoon of registering voters door to door. “These elections are definitely bigger than the ones we’ve had before,” she said. Democrats in the state believe that, come November, they have a strong shot at winning a U.S. Senate seat for the first time since the mid-nineteen-seventies. The candidate who handily won the Party’s primary on Tuesday, as expected, is Kyrsten Sinema, a polished centrist who has served three terms in the U.S. House, representing a district in the Phoenix suburbs. But Lopez didn’t want to talk about her. She preferred to discuss the governor’s race, and, in particular, her enthusiasm for a candidate named David Garcia, an educator running as an unabashed progressive. The last time that a Latino won statewide office in Arizona was 1974. “Garcia is one of us,” Lopez told me. “He understands our community.”

Sinema and Garcia—who, on Tuesday, won a three-way Democratic primary with forty-nine per cent of the vote—are running on different theories of how a member of their party might win statewide office in Arizona. Sinema is campaigning with an eye toward the fact that Republicans outnumber Democrats in the state, and that there are about as many Independents as Republicans. She’s trying to attract those in the center, perhaps on the assumption that the Democratic Party base will be loyal to her in spite of her centrist positioning. Garcia, meanwhile, is making direct and impassioned appeals to the progressive base, hoping to get enough of them to polls in November to put him over the top.

Garcia, a professor at Arizona State University and a former infantryman in the Army, speaks in public with the frankness of someone new to politics, and he projects an air of having nothing to lose. At the center of his platform is public education. He wants to increase funding for public schools, increase teachers’ salaries, and fund universal community college. A ballot measure he supports would help fund public education by increasing income taxes on the state’s wealthiest residents. Earlier this year, Arizona was one of several Republican-controlled states that saw huge teacher strikes—in Phoenix, more than fifty thousand public-school teachers, many of them white and Republican, turned out to protest. The protests, known as “Red for Ed,” gave Garcia’s campaign a major boost. The state’s current governor, Doug Ducey, the former C.E.O. of the Cold Stone Creamery ice-cream chain, was widely seen as having bungled his response to the protests. Ducey is running for reëlection, and the Republican Governor’s Association has already spent nine million dollars backing his bid. This money has, in part, paid for TV ads attacking Garcia, who is considered an underdog, accusing him of wanting to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

David Garcia is making direct and impassioned appeals to the progressive base in his race for governor. Photograph by Jonathan Bachman / Reuters

On Sunday morning, Garcia and I met at a Starbucks in Scottsdale. He’d just spoken with a group of white high-school students who were planning to spend the day canvassing on his behalf in the suburbs. He wore a T-shirt, sneakers, and a baseball cap. When I asked him about the attack ads, he seemed to relish the question. “Immigration isn’t even the main issue of our campaign,” he said. “When your last name is Garcia, and you’re running in Arizona, immigration is going to fall at your feet.” Still, he wanted to make his positions clear. “I think what ICE is doing is a travesty,” he said. “They’re separating families and terrorizing communities. They’ve lost trust for a lot of communities. When you lose trust in law enforcement, you have a public-safety issue.” ICE, he went on, was symptomatic of the broader dysfunction involving the U.S. immigration system. He advocated for border security (“I am a former infantryman; the first thing you do is secure your perimeter”), but also said he supports paths for legal entry (“for those ready to contribute”) as well as asylum (“I just think that’s what we’ve always been about, whether you’re talking about the Irish and Italians or Central Americans”). But did he support abolishing ICE? He hedged a bit, but without ceding the broader point. “We need to replace ICE with an immigration system that works. It's more than about an agency. It's about a system that's problematic.”

Garcia’s forthrightness about his values is precisely what Emily Lopez likes about him. Garcia would rather talk about environmental policy or criminal-justice reform, but he’s taken unequivocal positions on immigration enforcement, Dreamers, and refugee policy. When I spoke to progressive activists in Phoenix and Tucson, many of them mentioned that, with a candidate like Garcia, the movement could finally “play offense.” The activist network that was created in response to measures like S.B. 1070, called One Arizona, is large and, by this point, well-practiced: it has launched campaigns to raise the minimum wage and to increase funding for public schools, and has registered more than a hundred thousand voters in the past few years. Garcia’s campaign manager, Ian Danley, is the former executive director of One Arizona. “The immigrants-rights movement is the backbone of progressivism in Arizona,” Danley told me. “This is the real muscle here.” Garcia wants to be the first major candidate for statewide office to tap into this progressive infrastructure. In 2014, he ran, and narrowly lost, a bid to become the state’s superintendent of public instruction. “Turnout turnout turnout. It was the big lesson,” Garcia told me. “You can try to persuade people who you think are going to vote, the persuadable Republicans and Independents. Or you can try to get your base out to vote in bigger numbers. We believed from the beginning that if you have a candidate who was grounded in their community and was taking tough stances, that that would resonate with the people you’d want to get out to vote.”

Kyrsten Sinema epitomizes the more conventional view for how Democrats can win in Arizona. “Historically, Democrats have won here by going to the middle,” Roy Herrera, a Party strategist, told me. The Republican nominee in the race is a congresswoman from Tucson named Martha McSally, who during the primary embraced President Trump and abandoned her earlier support for Dreamers, to fend off her conservative challengers. A number of Republican moderates expect Sinema to benefit from McSally’s rightward turn. A former state senator named Jerry Lewis told me that McSally had “pretty much aligned herself with the border wall during the primary. It’ll be hard for her to make it back to the center in time for the general.” Sinema has been raising lots of money, and Democrats are feeling increasingly confident about her chances.

A social worker and lawyer by training, Sinema served in the state legislature in the early two-thousands, first in the House and later in the Senate. Back then, she was known for her strong progressive positions, typified by her concerted opposition to S.B. 1070. Alejandra Gomez, one of the leaders of a local advocacy group called Lucha, told me that Sinema had brought activists pizzas and reserved spaces at the capitol so that they could hold daily protests. “To have someone from the capitol come out to support us then meant a lot,” Gomez told me. Later, though, Gomez and other activists watched with dismay as Sinema started making deals with Republicans. She sponsored a state anti-trafficking bill that, according to advocates, made it easier for law enforcement to crack down on undocumented immigrants. “She was trying to cover herself politically by being tough on crime,” Carlos Garcia, the founder of the group Puente, said. “But she ended up giving weapons to the other side.” One of her former colleagues in the state legislature, a Democrat named David Lujan, told me that the two of them had learned that occasionally working with Republicans was necessary to have influence in a conservative state. Shortly before running for the U.S. House, Sinema published a book, called “Unite and Conquer,” about the value of building “broad coalitions.” (The foreword was written by Janet Napolitano, the former Democratic governor, who is seen as the paragon of Arizona centrism.)