Arizona Legislative District (LD) 17 resident Edgar Soto has devoted his life to service, first as a Marine, then as an educator, coach, and mentor.
Now he would like to take that commitment to service to the Arizona State Senate as LD 17’s new Senator in January 2027.
A battleground district that includes parts of Tucson, Oro Valley, and the Catalina Foothills, Soto, if elected to represent the people there, will work on advancing an affordability agenda, promoting opportunity for residents, increasing funding for public education, supporting public safety, honoring veterans, and improving water security.
Mr. Soto graciously interviewed with Blog for Arizona to discuss his candidacy for the LD 17 State Senate Seat.
The questions and his responses are below.
Please tell readers two reasons you want to run for the Arizona Senate in LD 17.
“My whole life has been of service. My whole family is kind of what I grew up around. My whole family is a family of teachers, police officers, and firefighters. That’s kind of something that was embedded in me. My dad is a Marine Corps veteran. He really instilled service in me. He used to tell stories about the Marine Corps, and he would always say, ‘I don’t recommend the Marine Corps for everybody, but if I had to do it again, I would.’
I was born on November 10th, and November 10th is the Marine Corps birthday. So my dad told my mom, if I have a son on the Marine Corps birthday, I’m getting you diamond earrings.”
“I was born on November 10th, the Marine Corps birthday, and so, of course, I had to join the Marine Corps, but out of high school. I told the recruiter, ‘Hey, if I don’t get a baseball scholarship, I’m going to join the Marine Corps, but I ended up playing four years of college baseball.’”
“But the thing that I want to run is that I’ve seen, from a level of being an administrator, being a leader at a community college, how these state legislative policy statutes can impact the whole communities and I know from experience that when you invest in communities, people, and when you invest in people. Communities become stronger, so I know from experience that we’re all born with the same amount of talent. The difference is access to opportunities, and I think that’s what community colleges do for a lot of people. And that’s what we need to do in the United States of America, and in Arizona is we need to create access to opportunity. Knowing that when you invest in people, communities become stronger, I think we need to create pathways that make sense and are in certain areas that are going to exist in the future with AI and all these other things going on. We need to be able to pivot and sometimes get reskilled. That’s why I love being at a community college because we have more leverage in any other institution to make a difference because we accept students where they’re at, and we actually can take a student that wants to go into the world of academia and be a teacher. They can do it in your first year, as your first year of college, same wherever you go, or they might be somebody who thinks they want to learn a trade. They want to be a plumber, a welder, an automated industry technology. That’s what I love about Pima. And I don’t know if you know this, but in 2015, we lost our funding from the state. The Pima Community College and Maricopa Community College system, which has about 14 campuses, are the only two systems that do not get ongoing state funding. We get some one-offs for Adult Ed and Aviation, but we would have had about $ 221 million more had we continued to get our ongoing funding, as the other rural community colleges do so. So service is probably the reason that I got into the scene, helping people reach there, giving them opportunities to reach their potential.”
What are two reasons voters should choose you over your general election opponent?
“The thing about me is I’m born and raised here in Arizona, five generations here in Southern Arizona. I don’t think my opponent can say that. Whatever I do, it’s going to be to serve my community. I didn’t just show up. I’ve been here. My family’s here. So, I’m going to make sure that anything that I do is something that or any way I treat anybody, is the way I’d want my own family to be treated. I think just my experience here, my longevity here in Southern Arizona, as well as my experience. I don’t think anybody’s had 30 or more years of experience at the community college, and when you work at a community college, you meet people from all kinds of different times in their life: some working adults, or you have people that are right out of high school, your traditional student. You have students that want to come back after maybe losing a job, and they want to get re-skilled. You also might get a student that wants to just come to a community college for self-improvement or personal interest kind of stuff. That experience, being able to talk to people across the board and understand the needs of our community and how best to serve them. I think it makes a difference.”
“I still teach a class at Pima. I teach a college readiness class, ST100, and when I talk to students, some might have some idea of civic engagement. Some might not know much about politics, but what all of them know is that they want a good job. They want a living wage, and they want to live a life of meaning and purpose. So I think government, if we do it the right way, it can work for those people that really want to. Put in the effort and put in the energy into bettering themselves and bettering our communities.”
What are at least two issues that you’ll be running on in this general election campaign?
“When I first started talking, thinking about this question, I was like, well, education is always big for me, so, for me at community college, I’ve really invested in a lot of early childhood education. We have two childcare centers there. One and two year olds, three to five year olds, which are the only two childcare centers on all the campuses, and we know from experience and data that. You know, when you invest in early childhood education, there’s a big return on the investment because you’re not having to have as many remedial courses. They can see, you know, how many prisons and jails you’re going to need by third-grade reading level, so we know that when you invest in young people. And it’s a lot better than when you try to fix an adult. So, investing in young people, so education is always a big one because we need a skilled workforce. We need to be able to attract business and industry that are going to offer good jobs, and we can’t do that unless we have a skilled workforce.”
“I think. K12 education is underfunded right now. We’re 49th in per-pupil funding, which is unacceptable. We need to do a better job supporting our teachers, supporting our firefighters, supporting our police officers.”
“Education is a big one for me, but the more I’ve talked to people, and I’ve knocked on 1935 doors in the month of August, the more I talk to people, you see multigenerational families living in one home because they can’t afford it. I have a son who moved back home with me. So housing, it’s a big issue, and the cost of living. I have a 93-year-old mother who’s in our valley hospital right now. She broke her hip. Luckily, because she was in such good health; no disease, no diabetes- they did the surgery. They gave her a hip replacement, a partial hip replacement, because she was active, butgoing through the process of trying to find the best physical therapy for her, and we want to stay there, but this insurance doesn’t take that there. We should be able to communicate with our health care providers. The doctors, and they should help us determine what’s the best path.”
“Also, when you think of cost of living, a big one is utilities. I’m looking at my electric bill, my water bill, and I’ve heard this quote. I haven’t looked it up, but I know this came from Kevin Volk. ‘Since 2019, our utilities have gone up. I want to say 60%. I might have to fact-check that, but I’ve heard him say that. From an anecdotal personal, it feels like that because what I’m paying for- electricity and water has really gone up. These are things that we can do things about at the state legislative level with the Corporations Commission and some of the things going on, like passing on costs to people that we shouldn’t have to like on data centers. All these types of things we’re paying, like taxes on the incentives that they’re giving them, so, we need to just do a better job monitoring that, making sure that every all the costs are being passed on to us citizens.”
Water security.
“You know, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: if we don’t have food, shelter, water, safety, nothing else matters. So we need to make sure that there’s plans out there, and Tucson’s really good at conserving water, what we do with our aquifer and how we do it, but. If we don’t start implementing some plans that already exist and working together with both sides of the aisle, we’re going to leave ourselves or our kids and their kids in a place where it’s not going to be sustainable. Water security is really important in that anybody that’s going to come in, they’ve got to have, like, a 100-year plan with water sustainability, and I think a good example of someone doing right is Mosaic Quarters. They’re using reclaimed water, you know, going about things in a way that is really environmentally conscious about how we can live in harmony while also developing, but we can re-vegetate. We can renovate. We can make sure that we have a sustainable water supply beyond a short amount of time.”
What are at least two ways you can conduct voter and social media outreach to Democrats, independents, like-minded Republicans, and people who do not normally follow politics and current events?
“This one really hits close to me because when I knock on doors, I think engagement is really important. Just meeting people face to face. But the reality is, like, when I talk to people, they are so just disengaged with politics. They feel that their vote doesn’t matter. Politicians are corrupt; they’re in it for themselves. What I try to do is remind them what our Arizona Constitution says. All political power is inherent in the people; government’s powers are just powers from the consent of the governed. That’s us. Like, we are the owners of our Democracy. We are not spectators. And we should make sure that anything we do, we should understand that our vote does count, and we can’t sit on the sidelines anymore. The future and our freedom. It’s at stake here.”
“I’m not just saying that to say it, but the reality is things are happening where they’re trying to make it harder to vote. We should be making it easier to vote and harder to cheat. In places like some states, they automatically register you to vote, like you got to opt out. That is something that we have to do at a young age. We’ve got to really promote civic leadership and civic participation. And understand that we cannot continue to sit on the sidelines and think that everything’s going to be okay and everybody’s going to do the right thing. Because they’re not, you know, and right now with the algorithms that we have in these phones and the. And the conversations I’m having with people is they see one side, and they see it embellished. They see it exaggerated. When the reality is, we all want safe neighborhoods. We want secure borders. We want quality public education. We want affordable health care and housing. So the part that really concerns me is that we need to continue to have conversations. And, you know, this is the thing that I try to tell people: this isn’t going to happen right away. No one is going to come save us. It’s going to take repetition. It’s going to take time. And it’s going to take genuinely and authentically showing up for people and having real conversations. Earlier, I was doing call time, and there’s this really well-known coach who has very well-known kids, and he’s a big-time Republican. His big thing was, ‘you know, every Democrat voted across the board for transgender.’ I was like, ‘wait a minute. You know, that’s not the case. Like, you know, you know, I said, can you name one trans, one trans girl playing high school sports? No, I can’t because it’s such a small number that they want us to.’ Fight and argue about things that are like on our list of 100 things to do. Let’s wait till number 88. We can talk to that. There are so many more important things to talk about that are impacting your life. There are things that we can talk about that are actually impacting your lives right now with gas prices, with electricity, utilities with public education, with all the different things that are day-to-day, kitchen-table kind of talking points. The cost of groceries, all that stuff. I think that we need to really make sure that we start talking to each other. We get off our phones, and we actually have real conversations, and we understand that whether we agree with the other side or not. This country was built on American ideals of freedom, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And, you know, the next part of the Arizona Constitution says governments were created to protect and maintain individual rights. That means that I might not agree everything with you, but if you’re not infringing on my individual rights, that’s what our country is about.
Have you encountered anyone accusing you of being a Democratic Socialist who’s for open borders and closing the jails? And if so, how have you responded to them?
Yeah, a few days ago. There’s a guy, Thomas. He says he’s a Republican. I said, ‘What’s one thing you don’t agree with about Democrats?’ And he said, ‘Open borders.’ I said, ‘Well, I’ve talked to a lot of Democrats. Nobody I’ve talked to wants open borders.’ Well, everybody I’ve talked to said, ‘Hey, there needs to be a pathway so people can get through, and it needs to be in a humane way that we treat people like human beings with dignity and respect.’”
“Being a baseball coach, being an athletic director at Pima and in the world of athletics, a lot of my ballplayers and former ballplayers are Border Patrol, Customs, law enforcement and so I call them directly, ‘Hey, tell me about, like, what’s going on at the border? What’s happening? And they’ve said Biden failed us at the border.’ And that’s not me saying that. That’s people who are there working. And so, yeah, maybe they didn’t do as good a job, but that doesn’t mean we can’t correct it and fix it and do it in a humane way where maybe you have some ports of entry. You have people that can vet health care, judicial, all these different things. And you create a pathway so that people can be treated humanely. And, we’ve got to secure our borders because we don’t want bad people coming in, but we should do it in a humane way where people are treated with dignity and respect. And the process is a lot more efficient than it is now.”
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 LD17?
“I’m not a politician. I didn’t ever aspire to be a politician. This is something where people encouraged me to run because of my experience, because of my ties to Southern Arizona, and because they know that I know that we are all very similar and that everywhere I’ve gone, every country I’ve traveled, every state I’ve been to, we want the same things. We want to love and be loved, and we want our life to matter. So, I think the one thing that I want people to know is that I’m a patriot.I love this country. My Dad was a very proud American Marine, and I feel the same way. I think people need to get off their phones.
They need to start talking to people and showing up in a genuine, authentic way and connecting. And the one thing I want people to know is this: when I go talk to people in my district, I give them my card, and I say, hey, here’s my cell number. I’ve had the same cell number for 30 years, and I’ve given all my students my card. I’ve given my employees my card. I want to be accessible, and when I make some of these decisions, I don’t know everything. I’m going to go to those people that are actually in those places, responding to the situation. I’m not just going to listen to some lobbyists. Well, I know they’re informed.
I know they’re really well educated. But I also want to talk to the people that are, for example, law enforcement or actually working on the border or teachers.”
“I taught middle school social studies at Wakefield Middle School, Tucson-Baton District. But I want to talk to the people that I’m there to represent. And I’m not there with my own agenda. I’m there to represent my district. You know, so there might be things that maybe I don’t 100% agree with, but I’m there to support and serve my district. And if that’s something that they feel is important, I need to be a good representative.”
“That’s why I’m doing it. I don’t need a job. I don’t need a title. I’m like three years past my retirement date at Pima. I literally want to go there to do a good job, and if I have the ability to jump the arena and make things better, I want to do that. I have family. I have kids. I want my kids’ kids to be able to live in an Arizona that I grew up in, where everybody had an opportunity to reach their potential.”
Please click here to find out more information about Edgar Soto and his candidacy for the LD 17 State Senate seat.
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