Cook Political Report moved the Feely-Shah race from “toss-up” to “leans Democrat”
Donald Trump has repeatedly asked voters to pretend he is on the ballot in November’s crucial midterm elections. In Arizona’s 1st congressional district — the state’s most affluent and fiercely contested — Trump is on voters’ minds, and whether that helps or hurts the warring candidates depends on who you ask. The race pits Democrat Amish Shah, an emergency room doctor who narrowly lost the seat in 2024, against Republican Jay Feely, a former National Football League kicker, with voting on 3 November. Early voting for the midterms opened on 7 October. The district includes north Scottsdale and Paradise Valley, and its outcome could help determine which party controls the House. The seat is open because Republican Representative David Schweikert opted not to seek a ninth term.
The contest tests how far a Republican-leaning, affluent district will move at a moment of dissatisfaction with the Trump agenda. Democratic strategist Matt Grodsky said the current environment, combined with no incumbent carrying built-in name recognition, creates the conditions for a change in a one-time Republican stronghold. Both campaigns have softened their posture: Feely has stepped back from his public embrace of the president, and Shah has moved away from his earlier support for a universal health care system.
The district’s median income is $102,000, 33% of residents hold a bachelor’s degree and 22% an advanced degree. Those figures describe a conservative-leaning electorate that does not fit comfortably within Trump’s Make America Great Again movement, said Mike Noble, founder of the non-partisan pollster Noble Predictive Insights. Republicans still hold a voter registration advantage in the district, and independents form the second-largest voting bloc, ahead of Democrats.
Republican strength has slipped since Trump’s election a decade ago. Voters in the district helped deliver Democrats to both of the state’s Senate seats, a slight tilt to Joe Biden in 2020, and a slate of top statewide officials in 2022, when they rejected MAGA-aligned candidates. Schweikert held on anyway, though narrowly. Cracks widened in 2024, when Nikki Haley, the ambassador to the UN, won nearly 25% of the district’s vote in the state presidential primary even after Trump had clinched the Republican nomination. Months later, Trump won a second term from Arizona voters with a 3% margin in the district compared with 5.5% statewide. Stan Barnes, a political consultant and former Republican state senator, said, “We’re watching a bit of a political revolution play out in slow motion.”
Grodsky described the electorate in terms of the late Arizona senator and 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain: “These are your McCain-type voters.” Business owners with college degrees who remain relatively tuned in to politics, he said, are the voters most likely to move in an unusual year. “If there’s going to be a swing, it should be this cycle,” he said.
Voters interviewed described the strain between party and president in personal terms. Tom Wolfe, 82 and a lifelong Republican, said no Republican politician will get his vote and called Trump’s endorsement of Feely a “death knell”; he plans to vote for Democrats. David McGahan, a retired accountant in Rio Verde, a desert enclave outside Scottsdale, said, “I like the course the country is on” — adding “Mostly” when a reporter noted the $101 charge for his fill-up.
Greg Edmunds backed candidates including McCain and George W Bush for most of his life, but said Trump’s ascension in the party changed that; he is now a registered independent. Edmunds said Feely’s well-publicized embrace of the president, amplified by the pro-Shah campaign, makes his choice easy, and that he will vote for Shah to help block Trump’s agenda. “We just can’t have a rubber-stamp Congress,” the Scottsdale resident said. “I can’t vote for someone like that.”
Independents are the swing bloc: after Republicans, they are the second-largest voting bloc in the district and across the state, with Democrats in third. No Labels, a small startup party trying to claim the independent lane, endorsed Shah for his willingness to work across the political aisle, said Paul Johnson, the party’s chairman. To qualify, Shah signed a pledge to uphold the US constitution, effectively vowing to abide by the rule of law; No Labels invited Feely to sign the same pledge and received no response.
Feely has backed away from his earlier enthusiasm for the president’s support. Since the July primary, his campaign signs and website no longer tout the endorsement, and he did not attend Trump’s mid-October visit to Arizona. He was, however, the only Arizona official or candidate to speak at the Republican party’s midterm convention in Texas last month, an event many Republicans in competitive races skipped. Feely has also pointed to the backing of former senator Kyrsten Sinema, an Arizona Democrat turned independent, as a sign that he can appeal to voters of all stripes, though she has not publicly endorsed his campaign.
Barnes called the de-emphasis a savvy move that follows a time-honored tradition of shifting to the middle after winning the party base in the primary, and said, “He can’t win solely by being the Trump candidate,” noting that Shah, too, has struck a more centrist tone. Feely’s supporters dispute that reading. Adam Kwasman, a Republican and member of the Scottsdale city council, said the district remains conservative at heart and that voters are motivated by a desire to keep taxes low and make prices more affordable. Kwasman, an early backer of Feely who likened his demeanor to that of former Arizona governor Doug Ducey — pro-business, genial and decidedly not a flamethrower — said, “The Shah campaign is grasping at straws if they think the Republican nominee for Congress is a problem.”
Shah has moved as well. After previously supporting a universal, single-payer health care system, he now says he wants to add a public option to the mix of other insurance plans to ensure all Americans are covered. His campaign has touted an endorsement from former state house speaker Rusty Bowers, a Republican who resisted pressure from Trump to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Arizona, and Shah won the party’s nomination again this year after a nasty primary battle against a rival backed by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Feely’s campaign, with hefty support from Turning Point Action, has sought to portray Shah as a socialist, posting signs that link the Democrat to Senator Bernie Sanders; Shah firmly rejects that label. The two candidates disagree sharply on healthcare, datacenters, tariffs and congressional accountability. Both have leaned into football: Feely — whom Trump not only endorsed but also encouraged to drop his campaign in a neighboring district and run in the 1st District — has hosted regular “huddles” with his team and put up campaign signs with a football motif, while Shah was on the sidelines as a team doctor for the New York Jets during Feely’s stint as a kicker. The two never met.
Although not an issue the candidates have spent time openly debating, abortion — a major topic in the 2024 race — could be decisive in this tight race. Two years ago, district voters strongly supported a statewide ballot measure that ensured abortion rights in Arizona, with 64.8% in favor, and Shah helped collect voter signatures to put the measure on the ballot. Feely voted against the initiative and says abortion policy should be a matter of local, not federal, control. Reproductive Freedom for All has targeted the district with a six-figure investment in messaging that highlights Feely’s anti-abortion stance and promotes Shah’s “very solid” support for reproductive rights. Athena Salman, director of Arizona campaigns for Reproductive Rights, said, “The bottom line is what the federal government does on abortion can wipe out the gains we made by amending our state constitution to lock in a fundamental right to abortion.”
The issue reaches individual voters. Donna Hale, who is voting for Shah, said, “Women’s rights are absolutely top of my list,” and described her worry about the future facing her 28-year-old daughter with two years left in Trump’s term. Henry Male dropped his lifelong Republican registration after Trump’s first term, but said he was frustrated with the party’s opposition to abortion long before then. Male said he did not know much about Shah but considered the Democrat his only option this year: “There’s not a chance in hell I’ll support Jay Feely.”
Affordability is the other concern both campaigns invoke. Cindy Cummens, who backs Shah, said she likes that, during his time as a state lawmaker, Shah worked with Republicans, often to the dismay of his Democratic colleagues. “I’m tired of one side voting only one way, whether it’s Democrats or Republicans,” she said, adding that bipartisan cooperation could resolve issues such as high prices, from gas to groceries. National data published through the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis show the Atlanta Fed wage growth tracker, a three-month moving average of composition-adjusted pay growth for the median continuously employed worker, at 3.9%, and the University of Michigan’s median measure of household one-year-ahead inflation expectations at 4.6%, both as of 28 October.
The race enters its final week with the arithmetic unsettled on both sides. The Cook Political Report changed its rating of the Feely-Shah race from “toss-up” to “leans Democrat” in September as Trump’s approval ratings slipped nationwide, and Democrats are counting independents and suburban voters like Edmunds and Wolfe. Republicans are counting a district that still leans conservative, a registration advantage, and a candidate who has spent the summer presenting himself as a conventional pro-business Republican.