The vulnerable GOP congressman convinced that economic interest voters will save him from the Trump and abortion backlash
Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images
- Rep. David Schweikert represents an Arizona district that's increasingly turning blue.
- But he's confident that he can maintain the support of upscale voters who've drifted from the GOP.
- He sat down with BI to talk about the race, the national debt, abortion, and the state of his party.
It's nearly 2 p.m. on a Friday afternoon. Rep. David Schweikert, the Republican who's represented Scottsdale and its surrounding areas in Congress for nearly 14 years, has invited me for lunch at what he calls his hang-out spot: A small Indian restaurant in a strip mall just around the corner from his district office. There's a small photo of him standing with the owners hanging on the wall near the register.
On paper, Schweikert is one of the most endangered House Republicans in America. Suburbs across the country are only getting bluer in the age of Donald Trump, and Phoenix has been no exception. Plus, abortion's on the ballot in Arizona this year. In an era where college-educated voters have been bleeding out of the GOP, Schweikert is increasingly an outlier, and he knows it.
Arizona's first district, redrawn ahead of the last election cycle, is the fourth most educated in the country that's still held by a Republican. President Joe Biden would have won it by 1.5 points in 2020. Almost every statewide Democratic candidate, including now-Gov. Katie Hobbs and Sen. Mark Kelly, handily carried the district in 2022. Meanwhile, Schweikert bested his Democratic opponent, Jevin Hodge, by roughly 3,200 votes that year. "With more money, we win that seat. The data is exceedingly clear," Jon Sutton, an Arizona-based Democratic strategist who worked on Hodge's campaign, told me.
"I'm sorry it's so hot," Schweikert tells me as we sit down, as if it's his fault. It's just over 100 degrees outside, which is significantly cooler than it's been over the last few weeks but still unseasonably warm for mid-October. It's fine, I tell him. I've mostly stayed inside here anyway. "A little bit of sunblock goes a long way," he offers, "being someone who's had things cut off his back." I assume he's talking about melanoma. "Actually," he says, pausing for several seconds as his face lights up, "not what you're here about, but look up 'melanoma vaccine.'"
As it turns out, there are vaccines for cancer, and the congressman's been trying to learn more about them. That gets him talking about the vaccine for Valley Fever, a disease caused by a fungus that's common in the Phoenix area. The congressman is, in his own words, "one of those people whose brain is going 1,000 miles a moment." Suddenly, he's distracted. A digital ad attacking his Democratic opponent, former state Rep. Amish Shah, has interrupted the YouTube video displaying Quranic recitations on the wall-mounted flat-screen TV across the room. "Welcome to the district," he says, raising his eyebrows as his face breaks into a wide grin.
Schweikert doesn't seem to be sweating his reelection. "We're gonna be fine," he tells me. Sure, Democrats keep making inroads with well-to-do voters, but the congressman points out that his district includes lots of very wealthy and "entrepreneurial" constituents, and they've generally remained Republican throughout the Trump era. Even if some of them are repelled by their party's descent into populism or election denial, Schweikert thinks they'll stick with him in order to safeguard their economic interests. After winning here seven times in a row, he feels he still has his finger on the pulse. "I have a district that's functionally me," says Schweikert. "I grew up here, I look like it, my education is exactly like the district. If you were going to go out and say, 'here's the candidate,' I'm sort of the central casting."
In order to keep looking like his district, Schweikert — a one-time conservative rabble-rouser who rode his way into Congress during the 2010 Tea Party wave — has had to make some changes. He left the right-wing House Freedom Caucus, a group he helped found, shortly after his near-loss in 2022, telling me that the caucus had "migrated away from being sort of that free market group" that they once were. "I'm a conservative, not a populist," he says.
There's also his delicate handling of Trump. Schweikert's obviously no super-fan. As the 2024 GOP presidential primary field began to take shape last year, the congressman told me at the time that he was closely watching the moves of one of his good friends, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina. But now that Schweikert's sharing the ballot with Trump, he's not sweating that either. In fact, he says his own polling shows Trump ahead in the district: "We weren't actually prepared to see that." He's also the only House Republican from the state who has not been endorsed by the former president this year, which he shrugs off. Maybe it helps him anyway.
Bryan Metzger
Schweikert plans to vote for Trump, along with GOP Senate nominee Kari Lake. "I'll vote for my party, but it doesn't mean I'm not going to spend my time trying to help these people with how a calculator really works," he says, before pausing for a moment. "Am I being too sarcastic?"
'It was those sorts of arguments that I was losing'
Helping people use a calculator is sort of Schweikert's whole shtick. He's obsessed with America's growing national debt. I've had numerous interactions with him at the Capitol where he somehow steers an unrelated conversation back toward the issue. He regularly gives half-hour-long speeches to an empty House chamber on the debt and other unglamorous topics, though he's been heartened that some of them have garnered attention on YouTube. "'We Did It—Congratulations': David Schweikert Decries US Reaching $35 Trillion In National Debt," reads the title of a recent speech posted by Forbes. It has 1.5 million views. "Maybe there actually is a hunger from people who would like to be talked to like adults," he muses.
In Schweikert's view, neither the left nor the right has shown sufficient interest in tackling the debt. All of the tax hikes that Democrats would like to see for corporations and the wealthy won't raise nearly enough revenue, he says, while Republican proposals to cut non-defense discretionary spending will only scratch the surface when the vast majority of the government's spending goes toward Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
This is where things get politically dicey. Just by talking about those programs in a manner that deviates from the standard bipartisan pledge not to touch them, Schweikert has opened himself up to Democratic attacks. He knows this. He likens it to playing with "kerosene and matches." But while the Republican Study Committee, a group of which Schweikert is a member, released a budget this year that proposed cuts to those programs, the congressman says his main interest is driving down the baseline costs of healthcare, perhaps through developing new technologies. Hence our prior conversation about cancer vaccines.
The broad unwillingness to take the country's fiscal health seriously, Schweikert warns, will inevitably lead to outcomes like the depletion of the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund, which is set to become insolvent in a little over a decade, leading to significant cuts to Social Security retirement benefits. "At one level, I think it's almost evil what the Democrats do," Schweikert says. "They care so much more about winning the next election than they do about not doubling senior poverty. It's immoral. It's absolutely immoral."
While Schweikert often prefers to stay above the fray of contemporary politics, he's still a Republican who's interested in political survival in the Trump era, one who's racked up his share of controversies along the way. He's faced a total of $175,000 in fines from the Federal Election Commission and the House Ethics Committee for campaign finance violations committed in 2010 and 2018. He's engaged in scorched-earth tactics against GOP rivals that have drawn lawsuits and charges of bigotry, including a 2022 mailer that accused his primary opponent of "not being straight with" voters. Like most of his Republican colleagues, he voted to object to the counting of Pennsylvania's 2020 Electoral College votes, though he did not do the same for Arizona. And as he called into a local right-wing talk show in 2021, Schweikert entertained the idea that the FBI played a role in the January 6 insurrection. "He is a country club extremist. He knows the right polo shirts to wear," Sutton, the Democratic consultant, told me. "I think he knows how to do that part well."
Even as Schweikert bemoans the drift of his own party toward populism and conspiracy theorizing, he's careful to ensconce that judgment within a broad critique of a political culture that's unwilling to address major issues and is paralyzed by click-driven media and pandering politicians on both sides. For all of his concern about populism, Schweikert professed, during our conversation, to not have a "really formed opinion" on Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, the GOP's avowedly populist vice presidential nominee who recently faced scrutiny for spreading misinformation about Haitian migrants in Springfield. "I've been a little more self-focused than paying attention to the top of the ticket, or what other people have been doing," he says.
Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images
But the congressman does worry that his party has become too willing to start "using government as redress of grievances." It's a big reason he left the House Freedom Caucus.
To illustrate his point, he mentions a vote from July 2023 on an amendment to the Federal Aviation Administration Reauthorization Act that would have required airlines to reinstate pilots who were fired for refusing to get vaccinated against COVID-19. "Do you empower government to tell who you hire, who to fire? A conservative would say, 'No, that's not in the Constitution, the market makes that decision, not my feelings,'" he says. "Go back and look at how many Republicans voted for that." It was 140. Schweikert was among the 83 who voted against it. "It was those sorts of arguments that I was losing and was never going to win anymore."
Despite these frustrations, Schweikert maintains a strangely optimistic view of what a second Trump presidency, along with a continued GOP majority in the House, could look like, even if he's increasingly outnumbered by the populists in his party.
"If it's a really close majority, the handful of those of us who I think are good at math, good at economics, good at these things, may actually have much more influence," he says. "You can't move it without the seven or eight of us who want markets to work."
He's not a fan of Trump's tariff plans — "I think tariffs create great distortions in markets" — and he's skeptical of the former president's proposal to exempt tips from taxation. "I can make it work," he says. "My fear is the traps you have to run to avoid scamming."
Schweikert is also bullish on the idea that a second Trump administration, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, would have "enough adults" around to avoid the mistakes of last time, and that people who are "ideological, but not professional" would not be appointed to important positions.
"I'm 62 with a two-year-old," he says. "Of course I'm optimistic."
'Bless their precious hearts'
The morning after I met with Schweikert, I drove out to a cavernous union hall west of downtown Phoenix, where Amish Shah and other Democrats were rallying workers for a get-out-the-vote effort.
Courtesy/Amish for Arizona
A former Mayo Clinic emergency room doctor and thrice-elected state representative, Shah eked out a plurality of the vote in a crowded Democratic primary in July, besting a field of better-funded primary rivals to become Schweikert's 2024 opponent. It may have had something to do with knocking on doors. Shah has made canvassing, a routine campaign practice often delegated to volunteers and staff, a central aspect of his political identity. He told me he's knocked on a cumulative 22,000 doors since entering politics in 2017.
"What I hear sometimes is 'Amish, you're running in a conservative district. What is your path to victory?'" Shah said during a speech at the union hall. "I have an overwhelming, resounding answer to that: Show up."
Shah was best known in the legislature for frequently crossing the aisle and occasionally voting with Republicans, earning him comparisons to the state's retiring senator, Krysten Sinema. While that's rankled some Democrats in the state — even leading to him being reportedly excluded from some of his party's caucus meetings at the state Capitol — it may be the kind of record that helps him in a district like this. In an interview, Shah told me that his politics are informed in part by his own family's political divisions. His parents are "Trump-loving Republicans," while his sister and her husband are "hardcore Democrats," a situation that has, of course, led to some "rough Thanksgivings."
If Democrats failed to take this race seriously last time, they're not making that mistake again. Shah outraised Schweikert by a factor of nearly four to one from July to September, and the Democratic candidate reported having $1.4 million in cash left to spend — twice as much as the incumbent congressman.
Bryan Metzger
There's also abortion. As is the case in every other race in America, Democrats are hoping that running on the issue will redound to their benefit. Schweikert is pro-life, which he says is influenced by his own experience of being adopted. In fact, he comes from a whole family of adoptees, including his father, his siblings, and both of his children. Until the current Congress, he was a consistent co-sponsor of the Life at Conception Act, a bill that would effectively outlaw abortion nationwide. But since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Schweikert has taken the view that a federal abortion ban would be unconstitutional. "You can do things around the edge, I guess," he told me. "It's pretty clear that it belongs to the states."
Schweikert plans to vote against Proposition 139, a ballot measure in Arizona that would enshrine abortion rights into the state constitution and override the state's current 15-week ban. But he's not blind to the political realities of abortion in 2024, even if he admits to being a bit dismayed by it all. "It's going to pass overwhelmingly," he says of the ballot measure. "It is what it is."
But while Democrats are hoping the state-level vote will boost turnout on their side and remind voters of Republicans' opposition to abortion, Schweikert sees it differently. He believes he's actually set to benefit. Voters in his district, he says, will "get to vote for their personal economic interests" by voting for him, even if they decide to vote for the abortion ballot measure.
"This is where the Democrats screwed up. The candidate's not the proxy on the issue," Schweikert says. "They may have actually stuck it to themselves by putting it on the ballot."
Frederic J. Brown / AFP via Getty Images
We'll know in about two weeks whether Schweikert is right, not just about the politics of abortion in Arizona, but about which way the winds are blowing in northern Maricopa County. "Bless their precious hearts," he says of Democrats' efforts to unseat him since 2018. But if his foes are right, the ground is shifting beneath the congressman, and he may not realize it.
The same afternoon we spoke, Vice President Kamala Harris was in Scottsdale. Her campaign has been wooing disaffected Republicans, including those who voted for Nikki Haley during the GOP primary, and one-fifth of Arizona's Haley voters are in Schweikert's district. The former ambassador to the United Nations got roughly 25% of the vote in this district during the March primary, which was held nearly two weeks after she dropped out. Meanwhile, Trump got just over 71% of the vote in the district — his worst showing in any of the state's nine districts. Yet when I mention Harris' presence to Schweikert, he seems taken aback. "That would be downtown," he says. "She wouldn't be up in this area."
In fact, Harris was five miles north of us, holding a "Republicans for Harris" event in a clubhouse at one of the many golf courses that dot the wealthy neighborhoods of North Scottsdale.
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