AZ-06: Arizona Democrat's Tough Past Fuels Pitch for a Key House Seat
JoAnna Mendoza, the Democrat running to represent a southern Arizona congressional district that could determine control of the House next year, remembers with painful clarity the moment she hit bottom.
It was March of 2012, and after a night of heavy drinking, Ms. Mendoza, who had been abusing alcohol to numb the trauma of a sexual assault she had experienced months earlier, drove into another car in a parking lot. She was charged with driving while intoxicated.
“That moment made me realize I needed healing,” Ms. Mendoza said in an emotional interview this week in which she recounted the previously undisclosed incident while sitting at a public library in Casa Grande, miles down the road from the desert town of Eloy where she grew up. “I couldn’t keep pushing this stuff down and hiding it.”
Today Ms. Mendoza, 49, is sober and leaning heavily into her personal history in her campaign to unseat Republican Representative Juan Ciscomani in Arizona’s tossup Sixth Congressional District, in a race that could be crucial to Democrats’ chances of winning the majority in November.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/20/us/politics/arizona-democrats-tough-past-fuels-pitch-for-a-key-house-seat.html