Flake Wins Congressional District Six Election

Incumbent Congressman Jeff Flake won Arizona’s Congressional District 6 on Tuesday.

With 99.2% of the precincts reported, Flake won 169,725 of the 295,920 total votes as of Tuesday.

Flake, a Republican, has been in office since 2001 and defeated Democrat Rebecca Schneider and Libertarian Rick Biondi by 73,454 and 161,418 votes respectively according to azcentral.com.

Flake could not be reached for comment, but Deputy Chief of Staff Matthew Specht said in an e-mail,

“He just doesn’t have time right now.  Sorry.”

District 6, which includes parts of Mesa, Chandler and all of Queen Creek, Gilbert and Apache Junction, saw its first Democratic challenger in 6 years.

Schneider said that was a reason she ran for the position,

“I didn’t like that Jeff Flake had no Democratic challenger since 2002,” she said.

Schneider, who currently works at Arizona State University’s Hayden Library and received 35% of the votes, wanted to run against Flake in 2006, but was unable to.

“I wanted to run because I didn’t like the deterioration of our Constitutional rights and how the government showed such total disdain for the will of the people and our election integrity,” she said.

Biondi, a first-time candidate, received 3%.

Guest article contributed by Becky Barber, Caity Quick and Devin Smith
Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication

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