The Arizona primaries delivered a clear message on Tuesday night: when Donald Trump puts his name behind a candidate in this state, Republican voters tend to follow. His picks didn’t just squeak by. They ran away with their races, sometimes by margins that made the contests feel decided before the counting was halfway done.

On the other side of the ballot, Democrats quietly exhaled. A progressive challenge that could have thrown a competitive district into chaos fell short, handing the party establishment a result it badly wanted.

Here’s how the night unfolded and what it means heading into November.

Biggs Runs Away With the Governor’s Nomination

The headline result came in the race for governor, where Rep. Andy Biggs took the Republican nomination in convincing fashion. The former chair of the House Freedom Caucus, who carried Trump’s endorsement into the contest, finished more than 50 points ahead of Rep. David Schweikert and the rest of the field.

That isn’t a win. That’s a rout.

Biggs has spent his congressional career on the hard-right flank of the party, and the size of his margin suggests Arizona Republican primary voters are comfortable there too. Whether that same profile plays well with the independents who decide statewide races in Arizona is the open question, and it’s the question that will define the next several months.

Hobbs Waits, Unopposed and Unbruised

Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs faced no primary opponent at all, which means she enters the general election without a scratch on her, and without the campaign spending that a contested primary would have drained.

Hobbs, who previously served as Arizona Secretary of State, won the governorship four years ago by a razor-thin margin over Republican Kari Lake. That history matters. Arizona has a habit of deciding its biggest races by a few thousand votes, and nothing about the current environment suggests that’s about to change.

Now she faces a rematch of a different kind: an incumbent Democrat versus one of Trump’s most vocal allies in Congress. It’s a matchup that gives both parties something to organize around, and it will almost certainly attract enormous outside money.

Down the Ballot, Trump’s Picks Keep Winning

The governor’s race wasn’t the only place Trump’s endorsement carried weight.

• Former Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb won the Republican primary in Arizona’s 5th Congressional District, the safely red seat Biggs is leaving behind.
• Rep. Juan Ciscomani advanced in the 6th District without opposition, keeping a Trump-backed incumbent in place in one of Arizona’s more competitive seats.

Lamb built his campaign around a simple message of God, family and freedom, paired with the same hard-line border stance that defined Biggs’ time in the seat. He heads into the general election as a heavy favorite given how strongly the district leans Republican.

That’s true even though his campaign hit turbulence earlier in the year over allegations involving inappropriate messages he sent to women outside his marriage. In a district this red, the primary was effectively the real contest, and Lamb cleared it.

An Open Seat Opens Up in the Phoenix Suburbs

One of the more interesting races of the cycle now takes shape in Arizona’s 1st Congressional District, and it exists because Schweikert vacated it to run for governor.

The seat covers northeastern Maricopa County and stretches across large portions of Scottsdale, Paradise Valley and Fountain Hills. It’s affluent, suburban, and exactly the kind of territory where both parties think they can win.

Former NFL kicker Jay Feely captured the Republican nomination. He’s expected to face former state Rep. Amish Shah, who held a lead of nearly nine points in the Democratic primary as of early Wednesday morning, though the race remained uncalled at that point.

An open suburban seat with a first-time congressional candidate on one side and an experienced state legislator on the other is the sort of race that draws national attention fast. Expect it to.

Democrats Dodge a Left-Wing Upset

The night’s most consequential Democratic result came in Arizona’s 4th District, where Rep. Greg Stanton fended off progressive challenger Kai Newkirk.

Newkirk ran at Stanton from the left, and the race became a small test case for a much larger question: can the insurgent energy that has rattled Democratic primaries in other parts of the country take hold in a Sun Belt battleground?

For now, the answer is no.

Stanton’s survival spares Democrats from having to defend a nominee who would have been an easier target in a district neither party can afford to write off. It also gives the party establishment a data point it can use, after a cycle in which incumbents have faced mounting pressure from challengers over Israel, immigration enforcement, health care costs and corporate money in politics.

That pressure isn’t going away. But it didn’t break through here.

What to Watch From Here

Three things stand out coming out of the Arizona primaries.

First, Trump’s endorsement remains close to decisive in Republican primaries in this state. Voters didn’t just prefer his candidates, they preferred them overwhelmingly.

Second, the governor’s race is now a genuine ideological contrast rather than a contest of personalities. Biggs and Hobbs represent different visions of what Arizona should be, and both will campaign that way.

Third, Arizona remains one of the hardest states in the country to predict. It elected Hobbs by a hair four years ago while sending Republicans to office elsewhere on the same ballot. Split-ticket instincts run deep here, and the primary results tell you who’s competing, not who wins.

November is a long way off. Both parties leave the primaries with what they wanted, and the real fight starts now.