The list of victorious election deniers, and defeated moderates, is a long one. In the hotly contested primary race for Congressional District 8, a highly conservative district in which the GOP is all but assured of winning come November, election denier Abe Hamadeh won out over a bevy of opponents, including defeated Senate candidate (and fellow election denier) Blake Masters. In CD 3, a safely Democrat seat being vacated by Ruben Gallego, the firebrand conservative Jeff Zink, who attended the infamous January 6, 2021, rally in DC, easily won the GOP nomination.

And in an ultra-red state legislative district, Mark Finchem, who unsuccessfully ran for secretary of sate on one of the country’s most extreme election-denying platforms in 2022, knocked off the relatively moderate GOP incumbent Ken Bennett, all but guaranteeing himself a place in the legislature come 2025.

With the GOP in Arizona marching entirely in lockstep with the election-denialist predilections of Trump, there is a danger that the machinery for running elections and counting ballots will at some point end up in the hands of extremists. But it’s also more than likely that the GOP, in lurching so far to the right during its primary season, will ultimately poison its relationship to the broader voting public in Arizona. After all, over the past decade the state has gone from being reliably red to being generally purple, and since 2018 most of the key national and state races have ended up narrowly going in the Democrats’ favor. Eighteen people have been charged in the false electors plot from 2020, and recently the first of these pleaded guilty—all of which has kept in the public eye GOP extremism around this issue.

As I wrote earlier this year, it is certainly possible that in Arizona the unreconstructed MAGA movement will take its last, ugly stand, and will end up being handed a series of stinging defeats by voters in the general election. Most recent polls have shown Gallego building a lead against Lake in the Senate race, and with an abortion rights initiative now qualified for the ballot in November after its sponsors submitted hundreds of thousands of signatures earlier this summer, it’s likely that Democratic voters will be particularly energized heading into the general election.

Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, who is responsible for upholding the integrity of the state’s voting processes, believes that last week’s primary results show more about the direction the GOP is taking in Arizona than about where the populace as a whole is on these issues. “I don’t think the state will go the way the Republican Party has gone,” he told me this week. “I don’t think it encompasses what the majority of Arizonans think.”

Fontes, who defeated Finchem in 2022, and who currently is an executive board member of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of States, believes that Arizona’s electoral processes are strong, and that they will survive the assault the current incarnation of the GOP is launching against them. “Doom and gloom I think is overrated,” he says pithily. This past week’s results, he argues, “say a lot about the Republican Party and Republican primary voters. But that’s a small vote compared to the whole.”