With MAGA and “Freedom” Caucus Zealot Andy Biggs running for his party’s nomination for Governor, Democrats sense an opportunity to make history in Arizona’s House Congressional District Five.
Nurse Elizabeth Lee is one of those Democrats. Pledging to give her constituents honest answers to honest questions, Lee, if elected, vows to listen and not just use her position to sound off partisan sound bites.
Her campaign website states:
“She knows what it means to fight through obstacles that should have been met with support. She knows what it means to feel overlooked by the very systems meant to serve us. That lived experience is what grounds her work as a nurse, as an advocate, and now as a candidate. She is not stepping into this race to seek power. She is stepping forward to give power back to the people of Arizona’s 5th Congressional District.”
Lee will also focus on an affordability agenda to help people gain affordable access to health care and housing. She will also work to fully fund public schools. Mrs. Lee graciously took the time to interview with Blog for Arizona to discuss her candidacy for the House seat in CD Five.
The questions and her responses are below.
Please tell the readers two reasons you would like to run for the Arizona Congressional District Five Seat.
“I’ll start by saying that I grew up in rural Ohio and both of my parents were union laborers. A lot of families in my community worked really hard and still were one paycheck or one health crisis away from a disaster. That experience really taught me that first of all, working people deserve dignity and leaders who ignore those struggles are completely failing across the board. Leaders that said they were there to represent folks are not. Putting their constituents’ struggles aside shows me that we need folks and in Congress who put them first. After building my own career and my family here in Arizona, I saw those same struggles playing out in our neighborhoods that I had seen growing up, the same struggles I heard my mom’s friends complain about. One of the reasons I’m running is to bring a voice to Congress that is shaped by lived hardship and not political ambition.”
“Another reason is that the people of this district and the people of Arizona deserve a representative who shows up to listen. Not who shows up to chase a headline or celebrity. It feels so often that politicians do show up for the sound bite or the snapshot. But when I ask you your story, the answer matters to me, and if a representative is really going to do the job they promise they’ll do, that starts by just sitting and listening to their community.”
“I’m a nurse by training and a lot of my professional advocacy work has been built on finding solutions for people and standing with them in their hardest days. That’s the work ethic I’ll be bringing to Congress.”
In your opinion, what are at least three issues that you will run on to win the nomination and in the general election in 2026?
“The three primary issues that my campaign will be running on to earn the primary nomination, and then the general election are healthcare access and affordability, strong public schools, and economic stability and affordability. Those three things are pivotal to what comes next for us as a nation. Going to healthcare, whether it’s IVF coverage, medication, prescription medications, or the cost of managing chronic illnesses. I’ve seen first hand health families are bankrupted by a system that profits off of suffering and we’ve seen the backlash of that in the public. Folks know that it doesn’t make sense that the healthcare CEOs are buying their fourth yacht and their own grandmas are skipping their insulin because they can’t afford it. I’ll champion reforms that ensure healthcare is treated as a human right and not a privilege. I passionately believe that housing, food, and health care are just basic human rights. That’s not a radical position. That’s a human position.
With our ever-aging community, we need a healthcare system that’s going to function and be accessible for everyone and as a health care professional, I am very concerned about our rural communities because they’re facing these massive cutbacks in Medicare funding.
The Big Beautiful Bill put forth $880 billion of cuts to Medicaid and we’re looking at five hospitals in rural Arizona that are at-risk list of closing in Page, Winslow, Bisbee, Nogales, and Globe. Those are five hospitals.
Do you know that 50 percent of all births in Arizona are paid for by Medicaid? Now, combine that statistic with five hospitals at risk of closing. This will spell collapse for our health care system. What we’ll see is that the consequences of the political failures of the hard right in rural areas will trickle down and become the financial responsibility of those areas that have more widespread support for health care.”
“The second issue is public schools. Growing up, my small town school was the anchor of the community. When I moved to Arizona in 2011, it was so important to me that because I saw how low Arizona schools were ranked, I said, okay, they give you a choice. Let’s find the closest district to our new home in Tempe that would give her the academics that she needed. So we drove her. We had the privilege of being able to do so. We drove her to and from a public school every day. But Arizona families deserve fully funded schools. They deserve safe classrooms. That’s another huge thing for me. Discussing bulletproof backpacks is one of the lowest points as a parent, I will say. We need teachers who are supported instead of driven out. Teachers are spending, on average, a thousand dollars a year of their own money just to keep their classrooms up and running. If I, as a nurse, had to show up at the hospital, and they said, yes, you’re going to have to bring your own supplies, everybody would lose their minds. So, that’s why the school voucher business will bankrupt public schools at the end of the day. Public schools should receive public funding, and if you receive public funding, you should be responsible to public standards. It’s really that simple and the same thing that we’ve been warning about that would happen with this system and the exact thing that this recent investigation is now showing to be happening is that money is going out of our public schools.
We only pay about $9,600 a year per student in K -12 grades, and the national average is somewhere over $13,000. That’s a big disparity and part of the problem is that voucher money is flowing out of public schools.”
“The last issue is we have to regain economic stability and affordability. I had a conversation with a realtor the other day. She has not sold a single house in 2025, and she said that is the norm in the realty community right now. Agents on average sold less last year. It’s rough that housing is not more affordable. From housing to groceries to prescription drugs, people are being squeezed. I myself have had to skip out on a prescription the last two months because it just became too expensive. So, I’ll support policies that are going to expand affordable housing. These are basic human rights, policies that expand affordable health care, and housing, and rein in the corporate gouging and protect working families who are just trying to stay afloat.”
Please describe your views on water security.
“Water security is huge. Environmental sustainability is one of our three core pillars. We’ve been sounding the alarm for a long time, both about the heat prices, the water prices, the power grid prices, and we are going to have to focus on sustainable agriculture in all of Arizona. When you look at things like the lettuce farms down in Yuma and the huge toll that that type of farming takes on our water supply. We’re going to need to work with the Department of Agriculture to understand what makes sense to farm where and then do that thing and help give subsidies to farmers so that they can transition their operations from farming one crop to farming another. That is something that those down in Yuma have talked about, but water security is at the top of our list, because without water, we have no place to live and if we don’t just start listening to the scientists, we’ll get to a point of no return.”
Please explain your views on Comprehensive Immigration Reform.
“Gosh, so important. I fully believe that a path to citizenship for immigrants exists. This country was founded on immigrants. We are a country of immigrants. It’s part of what makes our country so special, and so there must be a pathway to citizenship. And we have to employ humane policies that govern immigration. We can’t snatch people off the streets. The government should not simply show up masked with no badge, no ID, no warrant, and just throw people into vehicles and disappear them off the streets. We have families in our district here that are needing assistance from community members to help give groceries and other items because the breadwinners of the family have been abducted and deported, and all that’s left in the home are the children. That is not humane. That is not anything that America stands for. So we absolutely must work together with the folks who know this best and get rid of the rhetoric and stop demonizing already-marginalized communities. Get rid of the spin and understand what a solid border enforcement plan looks like. Human rights will not be violated – That’s the biggest thing. I’ll just tell you personally. I cried for days and days when they took Kilmar Abrego Garcia. I lived in Maryland for a period of time, and I knew the area from where he was taken, and all I could picture was my own five-year-old child watching in the car behind. And that’s not what this country is supposed to be about.
Please tell the reader’s least two reasons voters should pick you over any opponent in the CD Five Congressional race.
“Well, it’s obviously a very wide field, but the two reasons that I am the candidate to not only beat the Republican, but to actually go and do the job I’m promising to do is 1. Healthcare Leadership. As a nurse and a patient advocate, I know how to navigate very complex systems and fight for families who’ve been ignored. That’s not a theory, it’s lived practice. Not only that, because I was born and raised with a lot of medical issues, it took me becoming a nurse to crack the code and understand what was wrong. Spoiler alert, I have a genetic disease called Ehlers Syndrome, and people are learning a lot more about it now, but it wasn’t until I was 37 years old I got that diagnosis. So that lived experience is going to be critical to actually go and fight for families.”
“We are a campaign that puts people before politics. It’s what I’ve done every day of my career as a nurse. I don’t stop patients at the door and check their voter registration before I come into the room and care for them. We take an oath as healthcare professionals to give unconditional positive regard to all patients, regardless of any specific factors.”
“The second reason voters should select me is that my life and my career have been rooted in service. I wasn’t born into politics. I’ve not worked under anybody’s Administration. I have built my career helping patients and supporting grieving families. I helped to run a program when I was a labor delivery nurse. I helped care for the families who had a stillborn and who had early losses when a baby dies within 24 hours of birth and those families are left to leave empty-handed, and so somehow, I found myself as one of the nurses that just tended to gravitate towards those families. I would help those families grieve. Holding somebody’s hand in those situations are the types of experiences that explain the type of person I am. I built my career helping families and fighting for reproductive justice. That makes me accountable to people, not special interests, not corporate PACs, not greedy groups, not even to the party. We have to get away from blindly backing party politics. We have to do the right thing for the sake of the right thing and start actually fighting for ‘We the People’.”
Please explain at least two ways your campaign will win over Independent and Moderate Republican voters in CD Five.
“I love this question. This is everything. Independents and Republicans want the same things as Democrats do. They want good schools. They want safe neighborhoods. They want affordable living. So, I think if we can start by coming together and asking, what can we agree on? What ground do we share? Because politics over the last decade has been very much about disagreement, and there’s so much vitriol that by the time all the things that are disagreeable have been aired, both sides walk away. Everybody ultimately wants pretty similar things, and so I’ll focus on solutions that everybody benefits from and help folks understand that these wedge issues have become things that politics has convinced us to vote against our own self interests in favor of ‘this thing or that’. One thing that is about to happen and is critically important to know is that we are going to be paying 40 percent more in our health premiums after January 1st. Also, a piece of the ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ repeals a piece of the Affordable Care Act that kept premiums down. Those are the things that will have to affect people before they care, and it affects all of us. So, the first thing would be just that – shared ground, common ground, finding the things that we do have in common and starting there.”
“Then, there is also accessible leadership. It shocks me how little of our Representatives’ time is actually spent in their district. It’s really quite surprising, and I should not claim to be a representative of the people if I don’t regularly listen to and connect with our people. So, libraries, town halls, coffee shops, wherever people are, every voter needs to know that their voice matters. I think that the one big reason that this is such a huge passion point for me is because growing up with an invisible illness, it was a lot of medical gaslighting. There was a lot of not being heard or being convinced this was in my head. It is such an honor to be able to amplify someone else’s voice and someone else’s struggles.”
Please explain at least two ways your campaign will reach out and appeal to voters who normally do not pay attention to politics or current events.
“This is such a huge one because so many people say, ‘I don’t do politics.’ And my response is ‘Okay, do you drive on roads? Do you go to the library? Do you get city water? Do you have trash picked up?’ And the list goes on. You do care about politics, and it does affect you. We have just been conditioned to tune it out because that’s part of the reason that we are where we are. So, first, we have to have real stories from real people and part of the reason I know this is because I’ve found my own strength in my own story. It is inspiring me to seek out other people’s stories. We need to be using our stories as the planting seed to bring us all together. We’ve got to have community voices, teachers, nurses, and parents. People who can come together and share how investments in education and investments in mental health and jobs actually reduce crime. Because If we’ve learned anything from the last decade, it’s that real stories beat slogans every day of the week and the American voter, or many of the American voters are paying a little bit more attention at this point in time. I think the other point to make is that what is happening is designed to get folks to tune out. We can’t expect to show up in our spaces and meet people. We’re going to have to meet people where they are at, beyond the political spaces. We’ve been walking the farmers markets on the weekends and just chatting with people and asking them what matters to them, setting up booths at grocery stores, at Little League games, at moms’ groups and swap meets. Being in places where folks can ask honest questions and get honest answers. So that would be my answer there.
Is there anything that is not covered in the first five questions that you like the readers to know about you and your candidacy for the House seat in CD Five?
“I will just reiterate an earlier point, and that is my campaign exists to bring humanity back to politics. To help people understand that politics is a part of everyone’s everyday life. Growing up and watching families, including my own, get left behind and seeing that same thing in Arizona. I want people to know that they matter, even when the system tells them that they don’t, and then in Congress, we will make sure that no family feels invisible.”
Please click here to find out more information about Elizabeth Lee and her candidacy for the House seat in Arizona CD Five and here to access a recent article on her from KJZZ.
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