Dr. Amelia Gallitano Hopes to Win Arizona’s LD Two Senate Seat Running on the Affordability Agenda

The word for the political season at the Arizona State Capitol for Democrats in the Executive Tower and Legislative Chambers is affordability. 

Governor Hobbs is running for re-election, touting in part the programs she has overseen that have made life more affordable for Arizonans. 

Legislative Democrats, led by leaders Priya Sundareshan and Oscar De Los Santos, have unveiled “An Arizona We Can Afford Agenda,” a series of proposals to enact this session and ideas to run on this campaign season. 

Arizona Legislative District (LD) Two Senate Candidate Dr. Amelia Gallitano is also running on the affordability agenda. 

A neuroscientist, psychiatrist, and educator, Dr. Gallitano is running for the State Senate in the battleground LD Two because of her concern that “too many Arizona families are being left behind because costs are rising from housing and healthcare to utilities, while the state legislature too often ignores the real challenges people face.”

Vowing to bring solutions to the table on day one of the 2027 legislative session if she is elected, Dr. Gallitano is running on bringing health care, housing, and utility costs down. She is also running on water security, investing in public education while reforming the ESA private school voucher program, and public safety. 

If she prevails this November in the North Phoenix area battleground district, that would probably solidify full Democratic control of the Arizona Senate for the first time since 1966. 

Dr. Gallitano graciously interviewed with Blog for Arizona to discuss her campaign for the LD Two State Senate Seat. 

The questions and her responses are below. 

Please tell the readers two reasons you would like to run for the Arizona State Senate seat in LD2. 

“Well, the first is affordability. Costs are too high. These range from healthcare to housing to electricity and other utilities. I can tell you that, for example, my kids and their friends don’t see that they’re ever going to be able to afford to buy a home. This is really drastic. It negates the whole American dream. Also, healthcare is the number one concern of Americans right now, as they are worried about the cost and accessibility of healthcare. I think these are absolutely the most urgent items on Americans’ agendas and Arizonans’ agendas.”

“The second reason I’m running is that I know there are solutions to these problems. Yet many of the issues that the current legislators are spending their time on are things like making pickleball the Arizona State sport and tax cuts for people who have private planes. They’re completely out of touch with regular Arizonans. So it’s really important to not only come to the legislature with new ideas, but to already have solutions ready. And that’s what I will bring to the legislature.”

Please tell the readers what are two reasons voters should choose you over any primary or general election opponent.

“As a doctor, I feel like I have the unique experience necessary to really respond to the affordability and healthcare crises.  There was a recent Gallup poll indicating that 61% of Americans are very worried about having access to, and paying for, healthcare. So, I bring to the legislature not only the experience of working in healthcare, being a provider, a doctor, working within the system, and understanding how it works, and even more importantly, how it doesn’t work for most Americans.”

“But I’ve also had the experience on the other end as a patient. When I was diagnosed with breast cancer 20 years ago, l was very fortunate to have healthcare. If I hadn’t, even 20 years ago, the costs were astronomical.One bill for an overnight in the hospital after surgery was $25,000. A healthcare crisis is among the top reasons for bankruptcy. That is just wrong. 

“Secondly, I have spent my life as a problem-solver. Democrats need to not flip the majority in the legislature,  but we need to be ready to lead. We are not going to have the luxury of dilly-dallying, talking about ideas, brainstorming, thinking, interviewing. No, we’ve got to come in with the ideas already ready, with legislation prepared, with solutions. And I’ve spent my career in both medicine and science identifying problems – and practical solutions. I’m ready to go.”

What are at least two issues that you’ll be running on in the 2026 cycle? 

Our water supply is a huge concern for Arizonans – and rightly so.  Yet for years, one single Republican legislator has used her power as a committee chair to block every proposal – from both sides of the aisle – to enact any kind of meaningful reform. So, we’re not able to make the progress we need to continue to live in Arizona. We need to make sure that Arizonans get priority, that the residents get access to water before it goes to these other highly powerful and influential groups and corporations. So water is a huge concern. And again, I’ve been working with groups working on solutions. We already have plans that can be implemented.”

“I would say that also ties with increased energy costs. The Corporation Commission is in the midst of discussing APS’s latest request for a  14 percent rate increase. So, data centers are not only using enormous amounts of water but also creating astronomical increases in our energy costs.  How does that infrastructure get paid for? Infrastructure is one of the key determinants of the rates that APS and other utilities are allowed to charge us. So how do we protect Arizonans from these outside forces that are increasing our costs and making energy not only more costly, but also at greater risk? These astronomical energy demands are also going to put our grid at risk, making it less safe for Arizonans.”

What about public education and voucher reform?

“I am, in fact, a public educator. I  came to Arizona 19 years ago to start the U of A College of Medicine in Phoenix with the goal of training more doctors to meet our shortage here in Arizona. So I understand the importance of education, not only at the university level, training more doctors to meet our needs, but also at the K through 12 level. Why? Because the best way to get more doctors here in Arizona is to grow them up from within. And that’s particularly challenging in rural areas. We always hear how hard it is to get practitioners to serve rural areas. Well, if somebody grows up in a rural area, that’s the best way to get them to come back as a doctor. We need to make sure that our education system has the resources that it needs to train the next generation of students. Tax payer dollars can’t be being pulled out for people to spend on whatever they think they may need, whether that’s a trip to Disneyland or diamond necklaces or whatever. We need accountability.We need to prioritize those funds. And it’s not only just because it’s the right thing to do. Ninety percent of our families choose our public schools, yet the Republicans are driving many of them to close by depriving them of the investment they deserve. Having quality public schools is also an economic issue. We want businesses to come to Arizona. They need to know that they have access to an educated workforce. So, my team and I are carrying around Protect Education petitions to get common-sense guardrails on the ballot. 

What are at least two ways you could conduct voter and social media outreach to Democrats, independents, and like-minded Republicans? Your district is kind of a purple district, and you’re going to need Independents and maybe some like-minded Republicans to flip you over the top. How are you going to accomplish this?

“Knocking on doors and meeting people is number one. So even in the early stages of my campaign, when I was just getting signatures to get on the ballot, I would encounter people at the doors that weren’t on my list.I’d ask for Susan or Joe, and maybe somebody else was at the door, and they would say, ‘they’re not available right now, but tell me about your platform’. And I would tell them, and they’d say, ‘Well, I support all of that.’ I would then tell them ‘Well, you can sign my petition  if you’re an independent or a Democrat.’ And over and over again, I had people say, ‘Well, I’m a Republican, but I agree with what you’re saying.’ So, number one, I think you reach people by listening to their concerns, and then two, by talking about these priorities, because these are priorities for all Arizonans.”

“Let me add to that with a story of a voter that I met a couple of weeks ago. He was very, very angry. He came to the door and could barely stop himself from yelling at me, saying, ‘You politicians, both the Democrats and the Republicans, you all are terrible. You don’t listen to the voters. You get into the office, and you just do your own thing!’ He was screaming at me at the top of his lungs.  I listened, and then I said ‘I’m not a politician yet. I’d like to tell you why I’m running. And it’s, in fact, precisely because I feel the same way you do. That we’re not getting the response we need’. And we ended up agreeing on a lot of things. He’s a former Democrat, who is now an independent. And we had a great conversation. We really connected. 

Is there anything not covered in the first four questions that you’d like the readers to know about you and your candidacy for the Senate seat in LD Two?

“I would say this. I really think it’s important to emphasize that we need to have solutions ready on day one. We haven’t had a Democratic majority in the legislature since 1965, and we have to have solutions ready. I will bring to the legislature solutions for healthcare, for education, and also for energy, and how we’re going to deal with this crisis of energy needs going forward. So just as an example, I spent my career in science as a neuroscientist and a psychiatrist, trying to figure out how the brain works and what causes mental illnesses, so that we can come up with solutions.”

“But as I look back on what I’ve been able to do, I see the opportunities that I had, to study the brain and research new treatments, may not be available for the next generation. In fact, I was just talking with a colleague who said, ‘My son wants to get a PhD in clinical psychology and do research, but he’s afraid there won’t be any jobs.’ At the same time, I just talked to a colleague who says, ‘I can’t accept new graduate students in my lab because I don’t know if I’m going to be able to get a grant to support them, because the grant funding from the National Institutes of Mental Health was just cut in half.’”

“What can I do to ensure that young people have the same opportunities that I was so privileged to have, to spend my career studying these really intriguing questions and trying to come up with solutions for big problems? So that’s why I’m doing this: to ensure they have those opportunities. 

The world needs young people to continue to solve these problems. Right here in Arizona, we are the hottest county in the entire nation, and we have the most heat-related deaths. And those deaths keep going up, and we’ve been hitting new high temperatures all the time.

So, last year, when the U of A put out a call for its Big Idea challenges, I applied for one with a team. Out of 72 applicants, we were one of six that were awarded a quarter of a million dollars to develop new solutions to address the increasing heat we’re all experiencing here in Arizona, which is leading to more and more deaths. 

We’ve started the Heat and Health Resilience Innovation Consortium. And I’ve been working with the state and the City of Phoenix office of Heat Response and Resilience to develop solutions. If the power goes out in Arizona, in Maricopa County alone, an extended power outage like the one that happened in Portugal recently across the whole country, we would have 40,000 people die in a matter of days. There isn’t a sufficient plan in place to prevent that devastating outcome yet. And with data centers coming and less stability in the grid, there’s an increasing risk that something like that could happen. The great news is that the solutions are already available. We just need to implement them. We need to stop the blockage at the legislature right now, with a majority that says it won’t even hear bills that make sense for Arizonans. And I’m ready to start solving those problems, bringing those solutions forward as soon as next January.

Please click here to find out more information on Dr. Amelia Gallitano and her candidacy for the Arizona LD Two Senate Seat.