The vulnerable GOP congressman convinced that economic interest voters will save him from the Trump and abortion backlash

Schweikert plans to vote for Trump, along with GOP Senate nominee Kari Lake. “I’ll vote for my party, but it doesn’t mean I’m not going to spend my time trying to help these people with how a calculator really works,” he says, before pausing for a moment. “Am I being too sarcastic?”

‘It was those sorts of arguments that I was losing’

Helping people use a calculator is sort of Schweikert’s whole shtick. He’s obsessed with America’s growing national debt. I’ve had numerous interactions with him at the Capitol where he somehow steers an unrelated conversation back toward the issue. He regularly gives half-hour-long speeches to an empty House chamber on the debt and other unglamorous topics, though he’s been heartened that some of them have garnered attention on YouTube. “‘We Did It—Congratulations’: David Schweikert Decries US Reaching $35 Trillion In National Debt,” reads the title of a recent speech posted by Forbes. It has 1.5 million views. “Maybe there actually is a hunger from people who would like to be talked to like adults,” he muses.

In Schweikert’s view, neither the left nor the right has shown sufficient interest in tackling the debt. All of the tax hikes that Democrats would like to see for corporations and the wealthy won’t raise nearly enough revenue, he says, while Republican proposals to cut non-defense discretionary spending will only scratch the surface when the vast majority of the government’s spending goes toward Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

This is where things get politically dicey. Just by talking about those programs in a manner that deviates from the standard bipartisan pledge not to touch them, Schweikert has opened himself up to Democratic attacks. He knows this. He likens it to playing with “kerosene and matches.” But while the Republican Study Committee, a group of which Schweikert is a member, released a budget this year that proposed cuts to those programs, the congressman says his main interest is driving down the baseline costs of healthcare, perhaps through developing new technologies. Hence our prior conversation about cancer vaccines.

The broad unwillingness to take the country’s fiscal health seriously, Schweikert warns, will inevitably lead to outcomes like the depletion of the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund, which is set to become insolvent in a little over a decade, leading to significant cuts to Social Security retirement benefits. “At one level, I think it’s almost evil what the Democrats do,” Schweikert says. “They care so much more about winning the next election than they do about not doubling senior poverty. It’s immoral. It’s absolutely immoral.”

While Schweikert often prefers to stay above the fray of contemporary politics, he’s still a Republican who’s interested in political survival in the Trump era, one who’s racked up his share of controversies along the way. He’s faced a total of $175,000 in fines from the Federal Election Commission and the House Ethics Committee for campaign finance violations committed in 2010 and 2018. He’s engaged in scorched-earth tactics against GOP rivals that have drawn lawsuits and charges of bigotry, including a 2022 mailer that accused his primary opponent of “not being straight with” voters. Like most of his Republican colleagues, he voted to object to the counting of Pennsylvania’s 2020 Electoral College votes, though he did not do the same for Arizona. And as he called into a local right-wing talk show in 2021, Schweikert entertained the idea that the FBI played a role in the January 6 insurrection. “He is a country club extremist. He knows the right polo shirts to wear,” Sutton, the Democratic consultant, told me. “I think he knows how to do that part well.”

Even as Schweikert bemoans the drift of his own party toward populism and conspiracy theorizing, he’s careful to ensconce that judgment within a broad critique of a political culture that’s unwilling to address major issues and is paralyzed by click-driven media and pandering politicians on both sides. For all of his concern about populism, Schweikert professed, during our conversation, to not have a “really formed opinion” on Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, the GOP’s avowedly populist vice presidential nominee who recently faced scrutiny for spreading misinformation about Haitian migrants in Springfield. “I’ve been a little more self-focused than paying attention to the top of the ticket, or what other people have been doing,” he says.

A former Mayo Clinic emergency room doctor and thrice-elected state representative, Shah eked out a plurality of the vote in a crowded Democratic primary in July, besting a field of better-funded primary rivals to become Schweikert’s 2024 opponent. It may have had something to do with knocking on doors. Shah has made canvassing, a routine campaign practice often delegated to volunteers and staff, a central aspect of his political identity. He told me he’s knocked on a cumulative 22,000 doors since entering politics in 2017.

“What I hear sometimes is ‘Amish, you’re running in a conservative district. What is your path to victory?'” Shah said during a speech at the union hall. “I have an overwhelming, resounding answer to that: Show up.”

Shah was best known in the legislature for frequently crossing the aisle and occasionally voting with Republicans, earning him comparisons to the state’s retiring senator, Krysten Sinema. While that’s rankled some Democrats in the state — even leading to him being reportedly excluded from some of his party’s caucus meetings at the state Capitol — it may be the kind of record that helps him in a district like this. In an interview, Shah told me that his politics are informed in part by his own family’s political divisions. His parents are “Trump-loving Republicans,” while his sister and her husband are “hardcore Democrats,” a situation that has, of course, led to some “rough Thanksgivings.”

If Democrats failed to take this race seriously last time, they’re not making that mistake again. Shah outraised Schweikert by a factor of nearly four to one from July to September, and the Democratic candidate reported having $1.4 million in cash left to spend — twice as much as the incumbent congressman.

We’ll know in about two weeks whether Schweikert is right, not just about the politics of abortion in Arizona, but about which way the winds are blowing in northern Maricopa County. “Bless their precious hearts,” he says of Democrats’ efforts to unseat him since 2018. But if his foes are right, the ground is shifting beneath the congressman, and he may not realize it.

The same afternoon we spoke, Vice President Kamala Harris was in Scottsdale. Her campaign has been wooing disaffected Republicans, including those who voted for Nikki Haley during the GOP primary, and one-fifth of Arizona’s Haley voters are in Schweikert’s district. The former ambassador to the United Nations got roughly 25% of the vote in this district during the March primary, which was held nearly two weeks after she dropped out. Meanwhile, Trump got just over 71% of the vote in the district — his worst showing in any of the state’s nine districts. Yet when I mention Harris’ presence to Schweikert, he seems taken aback. “That would be downtown,” he says. “She wouldn’t be up in this area.”

In fact, Harris was five miles north of us, holding a “Republicans for Harris” event in a clubhouse at one of the many golf courses that dot the wealthy neighborhoods of North Scottsdale.