A Letter From Miranda

On Election Day 2024, I showed up early to the Student Union at the University of Arizona to set up a table and sign saying "Are you trying to turn in your ballot?" because what most students didn't know was that the on-campus voting center at the UA Student Union had been quietly moved to a Methodist church a short walk off campus. Students who had been seeing "VOTE HERE" signs at the Student Union for weeks arrived with their ballots and had nowhere to drop them off. Dozens of students walked over to us. We stayed there all day despite administrators telling me that the number of students potentially not voting was insignificant. That is the work I have been doing for eight years. Showing up where the institutions are supposed to and finding out, again and again, that they have not.

I am writing to you, my neighbor in Southern Arizona, because that day is one of the reasons I am running for the Arizona House of Representatives. Vote for me, Miranda Lopez, in the Democratic primary on or before July 21.

In 2018, I graduated from the University of Arizona. The day I graduated, I packed everything I owned into my car and drove to Flagstaff to take a job as a field organizer for the coordinated Democratic campaign. My parents thought I was crazy. I made 200 calls a day. I got rejected from a hundred and ninety of those calls. I learned how to keep dialing.

Since then I have done this work in every way I know how. I was a Regional Organizing Director. I was the Executive Director of the Pima County Democratic Party. For the last three years I have worked at the Arizona Students' Association as their Southern Regional Director. In 2025 I served as Treasurer for United Campus Workers Arizona.

I should also tell you what my life looks like right now, because I think it matters.

In December, the Arizona Students' Association told staff there was no funding left. I lost my job two weeks before Christmas. Now I am running for the State Legislature on my fiancé's income. We have cut everything from our budget that is not the mortgage or utilities or groceries. My clothes come from Goodwill. My fiancé and I want to start a family but we cannot save for it. I know what paycheck-to-paycheck looks like because I am living it while I run for this office.

I am telling you this because I think the people who write the laws about working families should know what it feels like to be one. I do. Vote for me, Miranda Lopez, on or before July 21.

I want to tell you who I am running against, and why it matters:

Consuelo Hernandez has filed two-thirds of her campaign finance reports late. She accumulated almost twenty-five thousand dollars in fines from the Arizona Secretary of State and refused to pay them until a primary opponent took her to court. She paid the entire twenty-four thousand eight hundred and forty dollars at once, only after she was caught. She has spent four years showing Southern Arizona that the laws she writes do not apply to her.

In this year's primary race, seventy-one cents of every dollar Consuelo Hernandez has raised has come from political action committees and corporations. From Pinnacle West, the parent of APS, while utility bills in Tucson keep climbing. From Tucson Electric Power's parent company, while the same company tries to pass data center costs on to the rest of us. From Blue Cross Blue Shield, while families in this district go without dental care and mental health coverage. From the realtors and developers who write the rules our renters cannot afford to live under. From the police PAC, after she voted to lock in police budgets at the expense of every other city service our communities need. While I was cutting every dollar I could out of my own household budget last quarter, she was raising thousands from the corporations that profit off our utilities, our rent, our water, and our health care. Our district cannot afford a representative whose largest donors are the people we need her to stand up to.

The Arizona Republican Assembly's 2026 scorecard ranks Consuelo Hernandez as the second-most-Republican-friendly Democrat in the entire Arizona House. She scored a 44.9 out of a hundred. Most Democrats in the chamber scored in the twenties. The Conservative Political Action Conference, the home of Donald Trump's movement, rates her at 24 percent for 2025, roughly three times the rate of the typical Arizona House Democrat. Two different conservative organizations agree. Consuelo Hernandez votes more like a Republican than the rest of her caucus. In a year when the federal government is rolling back voting rights, immigration protections, and abortion access in Arizona, our district does not need a Democrat in Phoenix who betrays working families to vote with Republicans more reliably than any other Democrat.

Consuelo Hernandez has been working in Phoenix to help advance Project 2025's federal agenda. She has voted four times to call a meeting to rewrite the United States Constitution. It is the same kind of meeting Trump and the MAGA movement need to roll back federal civil rights, labor protections, and abortion access. In 2026 she did not just vote for it. She put her name on the resolution as a sponsor. Voting rights groups opposed it. The teachers' union opposed it. The AFL-CIO opposed it. She sponsored it anyway. In a state where we just had to vote to put abortion rights back in our own constitution, Southern Arizona should not have a Democrat in Phoenix helping Trump rewrite the rules our parents and grandparents fought for.

Vote for me, Miranda Lopez, on or before July 21.

Here is what I believe.

I believe public education is the foundation of everything. When I was a kid in elementary school, there was a boy in my class who had dyslexia. My teacher quietly broke the rules to give him the extra help he needed because the school had nowhere else to send him. That is what public school teachers do. They show up for the kid in front of them with whatever resources they can scrape together. The Arizona legislature has spent the last three years gutting the budgets of the schools where teachers like mine work in order to hand public money to private and home-school families through a universal voucher program with no oversight. I have heard the stories of voucher money paying for trips to Disneyland. Consuelo Hernandez has spent her time in Phoenix taking corporate checks and betraying working families by voting with Republicans more than fifty times last year alone. She has not shown up for our public schools. I will fight to eliminate the universal voucher program and put that money back where it belongs.

I believe working families deserve to be able to afford to live in places like Tucson, Sahuarita, Rio Rico, Nogales and Bisbee. I have already told you what my own life looks like. Multiply that by every renter in this district. I will fight to let cities adopt rent control, cap short-term rentals, and stop the surprise fees and mid-lease hikes pushing working families out of their own neighborhoods. Consuelo Hernandez has taken thousands of dollars from the realtors, home builders and developers who write the rules our renters cannot afford to live under. I have not taken a dollar from any of them. I am not interested in fighting for the people who profit off our rent. I am interested in fighting for the people who pay that rent.

I believe we cannot give away our water to billionaires. When I drove to Mica Mountain High School for the first public meeting on Project Blue last year, I expected a small turnout. Instead, I had to park on the side of the road in the dirt. Five hundred people had come. The room could not hold them. That is when I knew I had to be part of this fight. While those five hundred neighbors were showing up to fight for our water, Consuelo Hernandez was in Phoenix voting to take Tucson's authority over our own water rates away. The City of Tucson opposed the bill. Sierra Club opposed it. Consuelo Hernandez voted yes.

My great-grandfather was a copper miner in Bisbee. I am proud of the work he did to feed his family, and I carry his story with me. I also know what extraction does to the air, the water, and the people who live downstream from it. I am not willing to ask another generation of Arizonans to choose between a paycheck and the health of the communities their kids will inherit.

I believe in unions and the people who do the work. I am a proud member of United Campus Workers Arizona. I have walked picket lines and organized rallies. Pima County needs roughly 68,000 new housing units over the next twenty years. That is sixty-eight thousand families with somewhere to live and decades of steady, dignified work for the people who build those homes. Consuelo Hernandez voted to ban Arizona cities from reducing police budgets even by a dollar, while she has done nothing to plan for the housing investment that would put trades workers back on steady ground. Southern Arizona should not have to wait for billionaires to decide it is profitable to take care of us. We can build for ourselves.

I believe we do not have to accept a politics of scraps. For too long our party has told us to vote for the lesser harm and be grateful it was not worse. That is the politics that produces a Democrat in this seat who betrays working families to vote with Republicans, takes corporate money, and pays her fines only when a court forces her to. Southern Arizona deserves a Democrat who fights for what we actually need. That is what I will be in Phoenix.

Vote for me, Miranda Lopez, on or before July 21.

I am not taking corporate PAC money. I am not taking money from utilities. I am not taking money from the realtors who have fought against tenant protections in this state for two decades. The money for this campaign has come from Southern Arizona residents writing checks for ten, twenty, fifty dollars at a time. That is the campaign I am running, and that is the representative I will be in Phoenix.

I know I am asking you to vote out a candidate you have voted for before. I have spent eight years showing up where the institutions are supposed to. I want to spend the next term doing the same in Phoenix.

If you have a question or feedback to share, write to me at info@lopezforarizona.com. I want to know what matters to you.

In solidarity,

Miranda Lopez Candidate, Arizona House of Representatives, LD21

P.S. When I walk into the State House next January, I will be thinking about those students who gave up on voting in 2024. About the kid in my class who got the help he needed because a teacher broke the rules to give it to him. About the five hundred Tucson neighbors who packed that high school to fight for our water. About every family being priced out of the city they grew up in. Vote for me, Miranda Lopez, on or before July 21.