Prominent Black leader endorses Lopez for governor

Katie Hobbs’ run for governor seemed to take another hit as former Democratic lawmaker Art Hamilton said he’ll endorse Marco Lopez for the state’s top job.

Hamilton emerged as a leading critic of Secretary of State Hobbs last week after her insistence that Republicans ultimately had been responsible for the 2015 firing of Talonya Adams, a Black woman, as a Senate senior policy adviser. He signed a letter along with five other prominent Arizona Black leaders asking voters to “reconsider” support for Hobbs.

“I’m proud to endorse Marco for governor... because Marco is running the kind of inclusive campaign that we need in order to win in November and make real, sustainable change for working families here in Arizona,” Hamilton said in a statement released Monday by Lopez’s campaign.

Hobbs was considered an early frontrunner in the 2022 governor’s race before getting blowback from a $2.75 million federal jury award to Adams earlier this month for her firing.

The jury found Adams, who represented herself at trial, was discriminated against on the job and retaliated against when she was fired in 2015. At the time, Hobbs was the Democratic leader in the Senate, and she has testified that she participated in the discussion to fire Adams.

Adams sued after being fired, alleging it happened because she’d complained she was making $30,000 less than white men in the same job. Two years earlier, a state jury had awarded her $1 million and ordered the reinstatement of her job.

Hobbs apologized to Adams in 2019 for not being a “stronger ally.” But her recent statements attempting to shift blame were perceived by some as lacking accountability.

Hamilton, though, said he had never seriously considered endorsing Hobbs for governor, noting that she was implicated in Adams’ firing back in 2019, and that she’d also been accused of discrimination by former Senate Minority Leader Leah Landrum Taylor, the state’s first Black woman to lead the Senate Democratic caucus, whom Hobbs helped remove from her job.

Hamilton is a former Democratic lawmaker who served from 1973 to 1999 in leadership roles. He said he’s known Lopez for years, working with the former Nogales mayor in Arizona and also in Washington, D.C., where Lopez served as chief of staff for U.S. Customs and Border Protection under President Obama.

Hobbs, meanwhile, disappointed Hamilton by “blaming someone else” for Adams’ termination and has “perhaps a blind spot with respect to sensitivity on certain issues,” he said.

“I don’t want to judge her motives with respect to race, but I’m absolutely obliged to judge her treatment of folks,” he added.

Lopez, in a statement, said he was honored to have the support of Hamilton, whom he called “a pillar in our community.”