Despite $200K in Racially Charged Attacks, Yee Leads Horne

It seems money couldn’t buy Tom Horne another term. State Treasurer Kimberly Yee has built a commanding lead over incumbent Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne in Arizona’s Republican primary, and as additional ballots are counted, the margin appears increasingly difficult to overcome. As of late Tuesday, Yee held approximately 55% of the vote and led Horne by more than 32,000 votes. The race had not yet been formally called, but the size and consistency of Yee’s advantage placed her firmly on track to unseat the longtime Arizona politician.

The result is even more striking when measured against the extraordinary sums spent to stop her. The superintendent contest became the most expensive race for the office in at least two decades, with more than $1 million spent on electioneering. Horne reported approximately $795,000 in campaign receipts and spent roughly $550,000 through June 30. Much of his campaign funding came from his own pocket. Yee reported approximately $400,000 in receipts and about $150,000 in expenses during the same period. In other words, Horne’s campaign spent more than three times as much as Yee’s campaign, yet Yee emerged with a substantial statewide lead. Then came the outside spending.

Arizonans for Election Integrity, a California-based political action committee, spent nearly $200,000 opposing Yee. The committee received a $200,000 contribution on June 25 from Conservatives for Effective Government, a Virginia-based PAC described as a pass-through organization, and purchased the attack advertising the following day. The structure made it difficult for voters to identify the original source of the money. The advertisement featured Yee, a Chinese American, against an Asian-themed backdrop, with the sound of a gong, stylized lettering, and the title “Empress of DEI.” It was not subtle. It was a political attack constructed around Yee’s ethnicity.

The ad could have challenged her record, her policies, or her qualifications. Instead, its creators deliberately reached for racial imagery and stereotypes to make a conservative Asian American woman appear foreign, suspicious, and culturally alien. Yee called the commercial “revolting” and racist.

Horne denied any connection to the independent expenditure committee and publicly condemned the advertisement, calling it an appeal to ethnic prejudice. But Horne’s own campaign had already promoted a substantively similar attack, accusing Yee of supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. The outside committee took that political message and wrapped it in racial caricature. That distinction matters legally. It may have mattered far less to voters.

The attack did not merely fail to stop Yee. It may have helped crystallize the race. The final numbers tell the story. Horne and the outside committee collectively poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into the race. The outside group alone spent nearly $200,000 attacking Yee, while Horne’s campaign spent approximately $400,000 more than Yee’s. Arizona Republican voters did not reward the racial imagery. They did not appear persuaded by the gong, the bamboo-style presentation, or the effort to brand Yee as some foreign “empress.” Instead, tens of thousands more voters selected her to lead the state’s education system.

Superintendent Tom Horne sent congratulations to Kimberly Yee earlier today.

In general, he now states, “Over the last three years it’s been an honor serving as Arizona’s State Superintendent of Schools. We focused on school safety by increasing the number of officers on campuses from 117 to almost 500, fought to keep boys out of girls’ sports and bathrooms,
created a free tutoring program where a number of students made six months of progress in one six-week tutoring session. We sent school improvement teams to hundreds of schools to help increase academic achievement, and in working with the bottom 5% of schools, 80% of the
schools ended up not in the bottom 80%. I lobbied the legislature to increase salaries for educators, and for a cell phone ban so now teachers can focus on academics rather than dealing with students scrolling on their cell phones.”

Superintendent Horne added, “my focus for the next five months is to continue and extend our work to help the schools improve academic outcomes for students.”