Andy Biggs put out two new campaign ads. We fact-checked them

In less than seven months, Arizonans will cast their ballots for governor in the 2026 election. The Republican challenger to Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs hasn’t even been set yet, but one candidate is already getting on their airwaves.

Rep. Andy Biggs, a hardcore MAGA Republican, is acting like the presumptive GOP nominee as he goes after Hobbs rather than Rep. David Schweikert, his Republican primary opponent. Biggs’ first two campaign ads hit the airwaves over the last week, with the Trump-endorsed Biggs positioning himself as a leader who will bring “a freer, safer, more prosperous Arizona” while attacking Hobbs as someone who isn’t “leading the way” and is driving up prices. 

In the first minute-long ad, Biggs shakes hands with constituents while wearing a black MAGA hat, with airy, upbeat music playing in the background. Standing in front of a body of water and red mountains, he tells the camera that the state has “tremendous resources, both naturally and amongst the people.” He says he can “unleash” the power Arizona has through “the processes we have in the legislature and the authority that the governor has.”

While he takes a few slight digs at Hobbs in the first ad, the second is a full-scale attack titled “We Can’t Trust Katie Hobbs.” It shows stock video images of distressed women with their hands on their heads while headlines about Arizona’s affordability issues — including one from Phoenix New Times — flash over a grainy video of Hobbs.

Both ads were paid for by Biggs for Arizona and produced by DC London, a political consulting firm that isn’t listed in Biggs’ Q1 campaign finance report. (The next report will come out in July.) At the end of the first quarter of 2026, Biggs’ campaign had more than $1.1 million in cash on hand, likely to be spent on more ads and promotional materials.

New Times fact-checked some of the claims Biggs made in the TV spots. Here’s how they hold up.

Whatever “liberal” California policies exist in Arizona sure aren’t the fault of Democrats, considering they haven’t had control of the Arizona Legislature for decades. In the three-plus years Hobbs has been in office, she’s had to contend with a Republican-led legislature that has fought her priorities at every turn. Before Hobbs, Republicans enjoyed control of both legislative chambers and the governor’s office.

When New Times asked for specific examples of how Arizona is following in California’s footsteps, Biggs campaign manager Drew Sexton cited “drastic jumps in government spending” and reliance on wind and solar. 

On the spending front, it’s worth noting that budgets are negotiated between Hobbs and the Republican-led legislature. On the wind and solar front, solar energy has long been popular in Arizona — because, you know, all of that sun we get — and it’s only after Trump took office that using any kind of solar energy became “woke.”

In other ways, Arizona and California remain decidedly distinct from each other. Arizona is a right-to-work state with few union protections. It also has a low state income tax and spends relatively little on education and social safety net programs. Not to mention that it took a ballot measure — itself an expression of the popular will — to pass abortion protections and legalize recreational weed. If Biggs wants to call those things signs of California drift, he can blame his constituents.

Tariffs have made everyday goods, including groceries, more expensive. Safety net programs, like Medicare and SNAP, have also been gutted under the federal budget — which Biggs voted to approve — leaving Arizonans to fend for themselves if times get tough. 

Additionally, gas prices have skyrocketed over the past three months due to the U.S.’s war on Iran and the resulting closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Biggs has backed the war, and also seems to understand that gas prices aren’t determined locally. In the past, Biggs has consistently portrayed gas prices as a federal issue, often blaming rising gas prices on “Bidenomics” and celebrating their brief fall at the beginning of the second Trump administration.

When asked about the spike in gas prices and Biggs’ support for Trump’s war in Iran, Sexton wrote that Biggs has been talking about Arizona’s high gas prices since before the war, when they were around $3.29 to $3.59 per gallon. They’re “always been much higher than the national average,” Sexton wrote, though that’s because Arizona has a special gas blend to comply with Environmental Protection Agency rules. Sexton said Biggs called on Hobbs to seek a waiver from the EPA for those standards — she did — and noted that Biggs supports the expansion of a natural gas pipeline from the East Coast to Arizona. Hobbs has also come out in support of the pipeline.

“No matter how much Andy Biggs tries to hide from his harmful record, the reality is he voted in lockstep with DC’s cost-hiking agenda,” wrote Michael Beyer, Hobbs’ campaign director, in a statement to New Times.

One affordability issue that is more local than federal is housing costs, which skyrocketed nationwide during the COVID-19 pandemic. Biggs’ ad cites a New Times article about a think tank study that named Arizona as among the “least affordable states in the U.S.” But if Biggs had bothered to read the story or the study, he would know that the root cause of that unaffordability — a lack of housing — predates Hobbs’ time as governor.

What’s more, Hobbs can point to several housing bills she’s signed in the last several years, all of which passed with Republican support. Arizona needs to do more on housing — though the market has been coming back to earth, the state still has an acute housing shortage — but Hobbs needs Republican votes to do it.

The two-day trip was far from secret. Instead, the business delegation trip was led and paid for by the Arizona Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, according to reporting by the Arizona Republic. The cost of the tickets was originally covered by the state’s protocol fund, which is filled with private dollars, but Hobbs said she would reimburse the fund for the tickets. No taxpayer dollars were used, though it’s fair to ask questions about who paid for it instead.

Hobbs has since apologized for her boneheaded comment, noting that it is indeed anyone’s business to know who paid for her travel to see a baseball game in a foreign country. Biggs’ ad left out that part. It’s no surprise why: The clip of Hobbs makes for perfect campaign ad fodder.