Roasting turkeys: The 6 Arizonans who failed the hardest in 2025

They say it’s bad form to bring up politics at Thanksgiving dinner. Better to stick to pleasantries about the kids and sports rather than getting Kinda Racist Uncle Larry ranting about vaccines.

But you know what we say here at Phoenix New Times? Screw that. Go nuclear. Collegial Thanksgiving holidays are forgettable ones. We say drop Donald Trump’s name into the mashed potatoes, take a step back and enjoy the rapid dissolution of polite society. Thanksgiving might as well be like every other day.

That’s what we’re doing at New Times this week. As we did last year, we’ve picked out the biggest turkeys of 2025. These are people who lied, who obfuscated, who kept problematic company and who generally had trouble keeping their heads out of their asses. Each deserves a good roasting.

Here are this year’s biggest losers.

It’s been a rough year for Justin Heap, the election skeptic who ousted centrist Republican Stephen Richer from the county recorder’s job last year. In his first year as Maricopa County Recorder, Heap has bumbled his way into controversy after controversy.

He’s beefed the Republican-controlled Maricopa County Board of Supervisors almost since the moment he took office. He has accused the board of usurping election administration duties that are rightfully his, going so far as to sue the board over a planned audit of their shared IT systems. (He’s already lost once in that case.)

But that’s just one of Heap’s many flubs. He’s also been caught lying about firing staffers who resigned before he took office. He mistakenly sent mailers to 83,000 voters that said they’d be marked as inactive voters, and then falsely blamed a printing contractor for the mix-up. He proposed mailing ballots to people who didn’t request them, which Arizona Republican Party chair Gina Swoboda warned was illegal. He also got caught whining to some supervisors by text message — which the outlet Votebeat had to sue to obtain — and falsely claiming that he had the board’s lone Democrat, Steve Gallardo, in his corner.

Few have earned turkey status so completely. – Morgan Fischer

After Arizona Democrats’ disappointing showing in the 2024 election, which saw Donald Trump win the state and Republicans gain seats in the Arizona Legislature, party members decided to shake things up. They shook a little too vigorously.

The party booted its old chairperson and elected Branscomb, an underdog candidate, to lead it forward. Instead, things quickly unraveled for the Laveen businessman. He lasted only six months, most of them defined by infighting, budget issues and Branscomb’s willful defiance in the face of calls for him to get his shit together.

The saga started when Branscomb publicized a conflict with the state’s top elected officials, whom he claimed had withheld funding from the party because they didn’t like Branscomb’s staffing choices. The state’s top Dems — Sens. Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego, along with Gov. Katie Hobbs, Attorney General Kris Mayes and Secretary of State Adrian Fontes — then jointly announced they would not fundraise through the state party, a stunning vote of no confidence in Branscomb.

Branscomb also caught flak for issues with the union representing his staff, the party’s lackluster fundraising and financial mismanagement that put the party at risk of insolvency. He blamed racism for his unpopularity and the intraparty uprising against him. “It could be profiling me, thinking that because I’m a Black man, I’m unsavory,” he told New Times. “I was barely in office before they said they couldn’t trust me.” While some wings of the party agreed with him, many more wanted him gone. In July, Branscomb was dethroned in a 476-56 vote by party members. – TJ L’Heureux

Maricopa County Sheriff Jerry Sheridan is Joe Arpaio, minus the outsized personality and the political skill. Consider his tireless campaigning for perennial loser Rodney Glassman, who keeps fumbling (and making up things, like endorsements and donation milestones) as he runs for Arizona Attorney General. Jeez, Jerry, why hitch your wagon to a horse who actually has a shot against incumbent Democrat Kris Mayes when you can ride an assclown instead?

Put aside the incongruity of Sheridan’s Queens accent and his fondness for cowboy hats, or even the fact that he has hired and/or promoted all his old cronies from back in the day when he was Sheriff Joe’s plodding chief deputy, playing human donut pillow to Arpaio’s ancient keister. Consider instead Sheridan’s genius plan to get his allies on the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors to raise a stink about the court-ordered federal monitoring of the sheriff’s office. OK, maybe it was just coinkydink a couple of supervisors showed up alongside a passel of gun-slingin’, geriatric white folks to support Sheridan at a community meeting earlier this year. That stunt backfired badly — forcing federal judge G. Murray Snow to skip the event and order all future monitor meetings be held in the safe, unarmed confines of federal court.

Republicans’ gripe was about the projected $350 million it has taken to get the sheriff’s office to stop racial profiling — and, oddly, not the racial profiling itself. About that, though: Earlier this year, Snow released an audit that showed that from 2014-24, the sheriff’s office misattributed $163 million to Melendres compliance costs, which was 72% of the $226 million it supposedly spent during that time. Padding the bill were golf carts, cable TV, trips to Washington, D.C., car washes, you name it. Sheridan wasn’t sheriff during those years, but he wears the big boy hat now. Like your Thanksgiving fowl, he’s done. – Stephen Lemons

Leila Parnian painted herself into a corner with her biggest project of her relatively short art career. In July, the Scottsdale artist unveiled “Through Her Eyes,” a 230-foot-tall mural adorning downtown Phoenix’s Saiya apartment building. The vibrant depiction of a woman’s face was crowned Arizona’s tallest mural and showered in praise by local media. Parnian called it a “beacon of hope.”

The glow of positive press couldn’t mask the controversial histories of Parnian’s assistants on the project: Maryland artists Danny Lorden (a.k.a. D-Lord) and Shawn Forton, both of whose portfolios contain MAGA-flavored artwork. Lorden’s social media reads like a Trumpian greatest hits — pieces lionizing Kyle Rittenhouse and espousing COVID denial, “Let’s Go Brandon” graffiti and a Las Vegas wall he spray-painted with a billboard-sized “Kill the Homeless.” Forton, a former corrections deputy with Maryland’s Harford County Sheriff’s Office, has his own baggage: a 2024 felony theft and forgery case involving a forged $15,000 check, resolved with an Alford plea and a five-year suspended sentence.

Their involvement marred what should be a career milestone for Parnian, who quit her parents’ upscale Scottsdale furniture store in 2018 to pursue art full-time. Not that she’s willing to talk about it. Over the summer, repeated requests for comment from New Times about Lorden and Forten’s backgrounds went unanswered. No explanation, no distancing, no disavowal. Her silence speaks volumes. – Benjamin Leatherman

It’s been a bad year for Republicans in what they think are secure group chats. Luke Mosiman and Rachel Hope may not have pulled a Pete Hegseth and included a reporter in a Signal chat about a bomb strike. But Mosiman and Hope — both in their mid-20s and serving as the chair and events chair of the Arizona Young Republicans, respectively — did learn the hard way that nothing is ever really private.

In early October, Politico reported more than seven months of messages in a Telegram group chat among Young Republican leaders in New York, Kansas, Vermont and Arizona — basically, all the people you’d avoid in a crowded bar. Over the course of 2,900 pages of chats, the leaders referred to Black people as monkeys and “watermelon people,” used racial slurs, called rape “epic” and talked about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. In one of the chats, Mosiman suggested the groups could win support in the race to head the national Young Republican organization by linking their opponent to a white supremacist group.

“Can we get them to start releasing Nazi edits with her… Like pro Nazi and faciam (sic) propaganda,” Mosiman asked.

“Omg I love this plan,” Hope responded.

“The only problem is we will lose the Kansas delegation,” Mosiman said.

The Arizona Republican Party was among a chorus that called for Mosiman and Hope to resign. Yet both remain featured on the group’s website. Mosiman did lose a gig at the Center for Arizona Policy, an anti-abortion advocacy group. – Morgan Fischer

Since Corey Woods was reelected as Tempe mayor in early 2024, he and the Tempe City Council have come under increasing scrutiny from community members who claim they have run amok. 

Last year, the Arizona Attorney General’s Office ruled that Woods and the council illegally held three secret meetings. Though executive sessions usually aren’t taped, a recording of one of the meetings revealed the councilmembers bashing their own constituents, referring to one as a “crazy uncle” and delighting in calling the opponents of a plan to build an NHL arena “cave people.”

This year, Woods and the council were forced to beat a hasty retreat after trying to ram through a divisive special events ordinance that some felt targeted groups that helped Tempe’s unhoused community. On the heels of a months-long campaign to criminally cite and prosecute Tempe residents who feed the homeless, Woods and the council hastily and unanimously passed a new ordinance with little public input and in the face of loud opposition. A whopping 77 people spoke against the change during public comment the day of the vote, which wasn’t conducted until after midnight.

The rushed process came back to bite them. Tempe citizens organized a petition to repeal the new law — facing interference from paid counter-pamphleteers with mysterious backing — and successfully collected enough signatures to put it on the ballot. Recognizing a loss in the making, Woods and the cornered councilmembers chose to back down and repeal the ordinance themselves. – TJ L’Heureux