This Mayor Could Help Harris Win Arizona. And It Might Cost Him.

The gathering had all the standard fare of a Harris fundraiser: snarky ribbings of Donald Trump, anxious talk about his potential return to the White House and inspired praise for his Democratic opponent. Except for one thing: the room was filled with Republicans. 

The draw of the evening was the Republican mayor of Mesa, Arizona, John Giles, who is athletically slim and was dressed in a dark blazer with clear-frame glasses that night. Mesa is a deeply conservative city in Arizona, but Giles has emerged as one of Harris’ chief evangelists to right-leaning voters in this crucial state.

“Kamala Harris is a much better Republican than Donald Trump,” he declared to the small room of fellow Republicans in downtown Phoenix. “She governs from the center. She's pragmatic. She'll help us to solve problems.” Though everyone in the room agreed with most everything Giles had to say, the “better Republican” line elicited laughs.

The event was organized by a pro-Harris PAC called, “Arizona Republicans Who Believe in Treating Others with Respect.” A school principal, a retired nurse, a former state legislator, Giles’ wife Dawn and a dozen others had gathered in a law firm’s skyrise office for the pro-Harris fundraiser in mid-September. The PAC’s co-chair, a kindergarten teacher named Suzanne Lunt, distributed cookies in plastic wrap which read, “Country Over Party.”

“This election is going to be so narrow in Arizona,” Giles continued, as an orange glow settled over the Superstition Mountains out the window. “Every opportunity we have to exert any kind of influence is important to take advantage of because it's going to come down to the narrowest of margins.”

Giles, 64, speaks with a mellow midwestern lilt. His tone, as ever, was conspicuously devoid of schmoozing. He considers himself “a bit of an anxious person,” and at times, this shows. One-on-one, he has a tendency to gaze off to the side when speaking. Tonight, and for most of the month leading up to the election, he sought to motivate those in the room to do what he was doing: to tap their networks of like-minded conservatives and make the Republican case for the Democratic candidate — or, at least, the Republican case against the Republican one.

“I'm trying to convince Republicans to not leave the ballot blank,” he told me. “I’m trying to give them aid and comfort on coming to terms with voting for Vice President Harris.”

Some months ago, Giles was enlisted by the Harris campaign, as part of their nationwide Republicans for Harris initiative, to keep the state blue. His job is to mobilize moderate Arizona Republicans into jumping ship come November. Speaking to like-minded, grassroots PACs like this one was what that often looked like. “I'm accepting all the invitations I'm getting,” he told me.

Robin Shaw, a former Republican state legislator who has partnered with Giles and the Harris campaign, put it more succinctly. “My one job is to hand Harris [Arizona’s] 11 electoral votes,” she said. “If we were able to just get 1 out of every 4 [Nikki] Haley voters, that would be 26,000 more votes and we win this thing.”

In 2020, Joe Biden won Arizona by only 10,457 votes. Though infinitesimally narrow, it was the first Democratic presidential triumph there since 1996.

So far, the small PAC Giles was speaking to that night in Phoenix had raised $100,000, said its co-chair Dan Barker, a former appellate judge (formed in 2020, the PAC is not affiliated with the Harris campaign.) He was ecstatic about Giles joining the movement. “It’s huge. It’s been terrific that he’s been involved,” Barker said. “It’s hard to look at him and say he’s any kind of an extremist, that he’s some liberal going off the deep end.”

Yet if Giles has not gone off the deep end, he has certainly jumped ship into murky waters. During Trump’s first term, at least 132 Senate and House Republicans left office or announced their retirement. Many, like former Rep. Will Hurd of Texas and Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona, cited Trump and their distaste for him as the deciding factor. And several Republicans not seen as sufficiently MAGA, such as Mark Sanford of South Carolina, lost reelection battles to more Trumpian candidates. In their wake, few Republicans left in the House or the Senate are inclined to speak out against Trump. Even among mayors, few Republicans have dared to publicly criticize Trump.

This makes Giles exceedingly rare among politicians: A Republican who still had years of his career ahead of him and not only swore against Trump but has worked to make his opponent president. He has invited the ire not only of the potentially 47th president but the many Trump voters in his own, stubbornly divided state.

Giles, and those around him, understand the risk. “He's toast in terms of running for political office as a Republican in Arizona,” said Barker. “The Arizona Republican Party is Kari Lake and Andy Biggs. This is hardcore MAGA.”

And that might make him one of the last remnants of the old GOP — or, possibly, the future of a new one. “There's a lot of people like me that, frankly, we're not Democrats, we're not progressive socialists,” Giles said. “But we are turned off by what we see in the MAGA party, this very negative, contentious, mean spirited, thinly veiled bigotry.”

“We are essentially politically homeless,” he continued. “I don't know how long that situation can persist. We've got to find a place to land at some point.”

Like 6 percent of Arizonans, Giles is a Mormon. His faith, he says, has colored much of his distaste for Trumpian bluster. “I was taught in my faith that we should look at the character and the integrity of individual candidates,” he said. “I don’t think the ends justify the means.”

That distaste predates Trump. In 2011, while he was running a law firm in Mesa, Giles became co-chair of a successful campaign to recall the far-right legislator Russell Pearce. The late state senator, who was also Mormon, had become Arizona’s poster child for anti-immigration sentiment. He was the major force behind S.B. 1070, or the so-called “show me your papers” law, which critics say incentivised racial profiling. What greatly offended Giles was that Pearce seemed to justify his restrictionist stances with his Mormon faith. While he had done a brief stint on the Mesa city council and as vice mayor in the ’90s, the Pearce recall brought Giles back into politics. It also brought him into direct conflict with the Arizona GOP, which portrayed the recall as an outrageous Democratic affront.

Two years later, when Mesa Mayor Scott Smith resigned to seek the governorship, Giles was recruited by friends on the city council to replace him. He won easily in 2014, with 72 percent of the vote, ran unopposed in 2016 and prevailed with 66 percent of the vote in 2020. During his mayorship, Mesa has grown immensely. Between 2010 and 2020, its population swelled by 17 percent to 517,000 residents — larger than Miami or Atlanta. Multinationals like Apple, Google, Gulfstream and Meta have opened offices there. The zip code where those firms have located boasts more commercial development than any other in the U.S. In Giles’ office, a large stack of branded shovels attests to the frequent groundbreaking ceremonies he attends.

As Mesa has changed, so has its politics. Settled by Mormon colonists in the 19th century, the city was always more conservative than not. But it was of a more moderate kind, structured around fiscal responsibility, social conservatism and limiting government regulation. Still, as Trumpism and its populist character took root in red America, it found ample support in Mesa and elsewhere in the state. Trumpist Republicans coexist, in a tense way, with moderates like Giles, the so-called McCain Republicans. “The whole Republican spectrum is represented in Mesa,” said Tyler Montague, a conservative activist there.

As Trump took office, Giles was optimistic that he might bring some positive change to Mesa through federal infrastructure investment. Campaigning, Trump had promised he would make this a priority, but the investments never materialized. “This whole infrastructure week thing was kind of a joke during the Trump administration,” Giles said. “We kept being promised, much like his health care plan, that it was just a couple of weeks away. It just never happened.”

Giles’ anti-Trump advocacy began shortly after Trump became president. Giles did not endorse Clinton in 2016, but he was caught on a hot mic speaking to then Sen. Jeff Flake in 2017, calling Trump “an idiot.” He cites that moment as his public outing as a Never Trumper. Though Giles did not formally endorse Biden in 2020, he did endorse the Democratic governor Katie Hobbs in her race over Kari Lake in 2022 as well as the Democratic senator Mark Kelly that year.

Under Biden, Arizona has been the recipient of billions in investment through the CHIPS Act, the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act; much of that money has trickled into Mesa, said Giles, through private investment spurred by those acts. “It was apples and oranges,” he said. “It’s a very stark contrast.”

His campaigning for Harris began in July with an op-ed in the Arizona Republic formally endorsing her. Soon after, he introduced Harris at a campaign rally in Glendale, Arizona, and in late August, Giles spoke during a prime time slot at the Democratic National Convention.

Beyond governance, what bothers Giles most about the former president are the ways in which his example deranged Republican politics, encouraging the aspirant demagogues in his wake. “I have seen it change,” he said of the party. “You literally have someone like Kari Lake who's telling non-MAGA people to get the hell out of the room. It hasn't been a subtle shift. It's been a personal invitation to leave the party.”

Giles was speaking in a hallway at the Mesa Convention Center. He was about to introduce Harris’ running mate, Tim Walz, who had flown in for a rally centered around the presidential debate. His visit was a clear indication of how much the campaign values the state and, by extension, Giles. A crowd of elated supporters queued in 110-degree heat to fill the center. Many wore blue. A digital screen decreed: “Arizona is Kamala Country.” One rally goer, passing Giles in the air-conditioned hallway, smiled and patted his arm. “You’re the best,” she said. The mayor looked embarrassed.

Arizona is an unusually receptive audience for anti-Trump advocacy aimed at Republicans. Nearly 13 percent of Arizona Republicans, or 185,900 voters, have said they will not be voting for Trump, according to recent polling by Arizona Family/HighGround, a conservative political consultancy (though a new HighGround poll forecasts Trump narrowly winning the state.) A recent Wall Street Journal poll found that Harris has the support of 96 percent of Democrats in the state, but that Trump has the support of only 88 percent of Republicans. “The game for Democrats is to win enough old McCain Republicans,” Michael Bocian, a Democratic pollster who worked on the survey, told the Journal. “There’s more crossover vote in this state than anywhere else.”

In that delicate ask, conservative leaders like Giles are seen as pivotal agents of persuasion.

In explaining his own role, Giles prefers to use the word “permission.” As in, “Let's figure out a way to give our Republican brothers and sisters permission to cross that divide” and vote for Harris.

Giles’ advocacy provides on-the-fence voters “conscientious air cover in their decision making,” said Chuck Coughlin, a veteran political consultant and founder of HighGround. “I think it just gives people approval. That's all. I’m not sure it's moving a great number of people. But holy moly, it’s not going to require to move a whole lot of people to move the needle out here. It’s going to be close. Every little bit helps.”

Alongside pitching Harris as a “better Republican,” Giles frames his advocacy for her in moralistic terms. He put it this way soon after the Walz rally, at a private Republicans for Harris fundraiser in the wealthy Phoenix neighborhood of Arcadia. Earlier that day, Trump held a rally in Tucson where, referring to a migrant “invasion,” he said, “We’re being conquered and we’re being occupied by a foreign element.”

“Silence is not an option when you're confronted with these types of moral dilemmas in life,” Giles intoned. Some 80 like-minded conservatives had crowded inside Robin Shaw’s handsome home. Through the living room and the kitchen, “STOP TRUMP” signs were interspersed between folksy suburban knick-knacks: a plastic cow head, a horse painting, floral sketches. Olivia Troye, Mike Pence’s national security adviser, was there. When Rep. Ruben Gallego, the Democratic senatorial candidate, showed up, the houseful of Republicans erupted into cheer.

During a brief Q&A, a woman in the audience asked Giles about gay marriage. “As I try to speak to my Republican colleagues, another topic that comes up is the LGBT community,” she began. “As we know, Trump removed the part from the Republican platform that used to say, ‘We believe in the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman.’ He removed the man and a woman part, so he's open. That is another one that’s tossed out the window.”

Giles responded to this sensitive, hot-button culture war question by … pivoting to the CHIPS Act. “Our entire economy is being recreated because of this bipartisan legislation that has invested in infrastructure,” he replied. “Do Republicans think it's the proper role of government to invest in infrastructure? Yes, we do. So who’s the better Republican?”

The mayor’s deft dodge reflected the tricky political acrobatics of what Giles and the campaign were trying to pull off. Theirs was a mission laden with unfavorable tripwires: abortion, LGBT rights, “woke” orthodoxy. These were areas that, as much as Giles might try, were not Harris’ strong points from a conservative’s perspective. Nonetheless, the latent conservative disdain for Trump might prove overpowering.

To many of Giles’ conservative constituents in Mesa, his anti-Trump apostasy makes him worse than any liberal extremist. He is a RINO (Republican in Name Only.) “I blame you for the destruction of this country,” reads one typical comment on his mayoral Facebook page. “Does Soros pay you to be anti-American?” asks another.

Giles has been censured by state G.O.P branches three times. During one, the Mesa branch sent him a registration form to change from Republican to Democrat, recalled Ian Murphy, the former chair. (Giles did not recall this.)

Next year, he terms out of his mayorship, and he doesn’t know what he’s going to do then. “I couldn’t win a Republican primary for dog catcher,” he said. “I could see maybe staying in government at the state level or somewhere else,” he continued. Some have speculated that he might be invited into a potential Harris administration — much like Flake became Biden’s ambassador to Turkey.

In the meantime, Giles is committed to the cause.

“I hope that [another Trump loss] causes an uproar in the party,” he said. “I hope that, contrary to what Donald Trump promised, where we get sick of winning, we get sick of losing and people can see that this party is in a downward spiral to irrelevancy if they continue to back a MAGA faction.”

“I’m hoping that’s what happens,” he continued. “I don't know how optimistic I am that’s what's going to happen.”