Deborah Howard moved to Arizona nearly a decade ago. She meant to reinvent her life. At this point, she needs to consider her life re-invented. Howard will take the oath of office on January 11 to become part of the Democratic Party’s historic takeover of the Arizona Legislature, after winning election as the leading vote-getter in West Phoenix’s District 27.

By October, Howard and Kyle Clayton, who’s just won LD27’s Senate seat, had knocked on so many doors their district that, turning a corner while canvassing, they recognized the houses. They’d been there before. One of them thought they’d been there twice.

That was the point. Howard says she didn’t sweep into office on a national political tide. She won with old-fashioned shoe leather.

“We were not waved. We were the wave,” she told the Arizona Globe.

Howard lost in 2024 to Republicans Lisa Fink and Tony Rivero, who went on to serve together in the House. This time, Howard led both incumbents, collecting 39,878 votes in unofficial returns. The district elects two representatives, and Fink led Rivero by just 318 votes for the remaining seat as of Sunday. Clayton, Howard’s Democratic ally, also led incumbent Republican Sen. Kevin Payne.

LD27 includes parts of Phoenix, Glendale and Peoria, and has long leaned Republican. Howard’s reversal contains an apparent paradox: She received 45,601 votes when she lost in 2024, compared with fewer than 40,000 this year.

“We really did have a different electorate,” she said.

Howard’s campaign studied the precincts where she’d done well in 2024 and where Democrats had failed to turn out. She and Clayton, who often canvassed together, used signature-gathering efforts for education and voting-rights initiatives to build a volunteer operation and meet voters at Motor Vehicle Division locations.

“There was no daylight between us and our campaigning or in our politics,” Howard said.

The voters they talked to seemed less concerned about partisan ideology than the cost of daily life. “We were really asking voters what their issues were,” she says. “It was a cacophony.”

One woman complained that everything seemed twice as expensive, even though she shopped at Walmart. A 40-year-old man who saw no prospect of buying a home told Howard, “40 is the new 20.”

Howard has had an unusual route to Democratic politics. A UC Berkeley graduate, she began her public-affairs career in Washington, D.C., where President Ronald Reagan appointed her to a position at the U.S. Department of Labor. She was a Republican then. Her later career included work for AARP and California real estate associations.

She once might have called herself a “Chamber of Commerce Republican or League of Women Voters Democrat,” but says those labels have become almost meaningless in Arizona politics.

Her move to Arizona followed considerable personal upheaval. Her husband died in 2012. Five years later, after a bizarre bathroom fall at home involving a rogue moth left her reconsidering her future, she moved from Sacramento to live with her sister, with whom she still lives with today. She planned to join the Peace Corps in Madagascar, but was diagnosed with breast cancer and completed chemotherapy in February 2019.

While recovering, she immersed herself in online politics. “I soothed herself on bad chemo days,” she says, by trolling then-Rep. Debbie Lesko on social media. When she recovered, she began organizing protests outside Lesko’s office, which led to her running an Indivisible volunteer team that monitored Arizona’s redistricting process. The experience helped convince her to run for office.

Now, as she turns 70, Howard is preparing to join a Democratic majority in the state House, part of a historic shift in control of Arizona government.

She wants the new Legislature to focus on affordability, expanding state-subsidized child care and transportation opportunities, and changing what she considers abuses in the Empowerment Scholarship Account program. She hopes to see an ESA reform package reach Gov. Katie Hobbs early in the session.

Howard calls herself a capitalist, but questions why government repeatedly reviews eligibility for programs such as food assistance while corporate tax benefits receive less scrutiny.

She also sees limits. Arizona’s flat tax will make some ambitions difficult to fund, she acknowledged, and the new caucus has yet to settle its full agenda. “There are no rose-colored glasses here that any of this is going to be easy,” she said.

But she has little interest in a political career beyond the work at hand.

“I’m not doing this to advance a career,” Howard said. “I’m not doing this to make money, I’m not doing this to get a plaque on the door. I’m doing this to get things done.”

Editor’s note: As part of the historic changeover in the Arizona State Legislature, the Globe will be profiling as much of the incoming freshman class as possible. This is first in a series.