Ballot Math / Arizona Legislature / LD5
Candidate races: Arizona Legislature, District 5

LD5: a term limit, a familiar name, and no Republican on the ballot

November 3, 2026 general election. District 5 lies entirely in central Phoenix, in Maricopa County. Registration: 42 percent Democratic, 22 percent Republican, 36 percent other. The Independent Redistricting Commission rated the district "not competitive," with a composite Democratic advantage of about 38 points, and the 2024 presidential vote in the district was Democratic by about 36 points. The outgoing senator, Lela Alston (D), won in 2024 by 68.3 to 31.7 percent and is term limited. No forecaster publishes a rating for these specific races.

State Senate: Marsh vs. LaForest, and the missing Republican

The structural fact: Sen. Lela Alston (D), first elected to the Legislature decades ago and a fixture of Arizona Democratic politics, is term limited, and no Republican filed for this seat. The printed ballot offers a former Democratic senator who lost a neighboring district in 2024 and a No Labels nominee whose entire candidacy exists because, without him, the Democratic nominee would have run effectively unopposed from primary to general. Both facts are printed plainly here because they are the race.

Christine Marsh (Democrat)

Public school teacher for roughly three decades and Arizona Teacher of the Year in 2016. State senator from January 2021 to January 2025, first for the old 28th district and then, after redistricting, for LD4, where she lost reelection in 2024 to Carine Werner, 51.9 to 48.1 percent. She is now running for the open LD5 seat. UCLA graduate (English literature, on a track scholarship), master's in education administration from Grand Canyon University, honorary doctorate from Northern Arizona University. In the Senate she sat on the Education Committee and the Transportation and Technology Committee, and she continued teaching while serving.
  • How she got here, with the margins: she lost to incumbent Kate Brophy McGee by 267 votes in 2018, beat her by 497 votes in 2020 in a race with more than 120,000 votes cast, held the redrawn seat in 2022, and lost it in 2024. Few Arizona legislators have run four consecutive races that close; this district, on paper, is not close at all.
  • Stated priorities (azcentral): stop tax breaks from going to large corporations, and reform education by prioritizing public schools and adding transparency measures to the Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program. On ESAs, she has said she sees validity in the program's original purpose for special needs students and objects to how far it has grown in scope and scale.
  • Record note: no individual key votes from her 2021 to 2025 Senate term were verified at name level for this page, so none are printed. Her committee work, her Teacher of the Year platform, and her stated ESA position are the record this page can source, and the gap is admitted in the verification notes.
  • Money: as of her March 2026 campaign finance reports, raised $53,325, spent $24,651, $28,633 on hand. She won the Democratic primary unopposed with 21,771 votes.
  • Debate note, attributed: Ballot Access News reported that in the Clean Elections debate series, LaForest "debated himself, as his Democratic opponent did not show up." No explanation from the Marsh campaign was found in the sources checked.
  • Controversies: none of significance found.

Jason LaForest (No Labels)

Financial strategist at the Arizona Department of Health Services, per Wikipedia's candidate listing; azcentral describes him as having worked in finance at multiple state agencies. He won the No Labels primary with 303 votes. His ballot designation is No Labels; the party now also calls itself the Arizona Independent Party.
  • His pitch is the vacancy, plus oversight: he says he has seen oversight failures firsthand in state government and wants to support taxpayers by limiting "waste, fraud and abuse." His party's endorsement release argues that without him, LD5 voters who are not Democrats would have no meaningful general election choice, and that he is "not running as a spoiler" but to create competition and accountability.
  • Money: as of his March 2026 campaign finance reports, raised $800, spent $870, $898 on hand. Those are the smallest figures on this page by a wide margin, and they are printed because the gap between a career legislator's campaign and an $800 campaign is itself information about this race.
  • Record and controversies: he has never held elected office, so there is no legislative record to check, and no controversies were found. Where something cannot be verified beyond his state finance work and his stated oversight pitch, this page says so rather than padding his entry.

State House: two Democrats, two seats, no one else on the ballot

This race is uncontested, and this page says so plainly: vote for up to two, and exactly two candidates are on the ballot, both Democratic incumbents. No Republican, Green, Libertarian, No Labels, or other candidate filed, and no official write-in candidate was found in the sources checked. Barring something extraordinary, Sarah Liguori and Aaron Márquez have already won reelection; the only contest in this race was the July Democratic primary, where Liguori took 19,718 votes and Márquez 17,403, and Sen. Alston withdrew from a short lived House bid before the primary.

Sarah Liguori (Democrat, incumbent)

LD5 state representative since February 8, 2024, appointed to replace Jennifer Longdon, and elected to a full term that November. She previously served in the House for the old 28th district from October 26, 2021 to January 9, 2023, appointed after Rep. Aaron Lieberman resigned to run for governor (he is the Democratic Senate nominee this year in LD4), and she lost a 2022 election bid before returning by appointment. Born in Tucson; University of Arizona, with international business study in Florence, Italy. Former financial advisor. At the Capitol she has served on the Government and Elections and Commerce committees.
  • 2024 result, for scale: in her first LD5 general election she finished first of three candidates with 40.6 percent (61,889 votes), ahead of Márquez, with the Republican candidate taking 20.7 percent. This year there is no third candidate.
  • Endorsements, attributed (azcentral): the Sierra Club, Maricopa County Young Democrats, and the Voting Rights Fund.
  • Money: TransparencyUSA's listing for this race, retrieved October 2026, shows contributions of $62,524 and expenditures of $20,224. The listing does not carry a single as-of report date in the form this page could verify, so treat the figures as the site's current cycle totals at retrieval, not as a dated report.
  • Key votes and controversies: no individual key votes were verified at name level for this page, and no controversies of significance were found. She is a minority party legislator in a Republican run House; most Democratic bills in that position do not receive hearings, which is reported here as context, not as an excuse.

Aaron Márquez (Democrat, incumbent)

LD5 state representative since January 2025, in his first term. U.S. Army veteran; he previously worked for U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego, per the Arizona Republic's 2024 primary guide. He also serves on the Phoenix Union High School District governing board.
  • Stated priorities (azcentral): continue to support abortion access and public schools, counter Republican attempts to restrict transgender students in schools, and expand voting accessibility.
  • Money: TransparencyUSA's listing for this race, retrieved October 2026, shows contributions of $3,361 and expenditures of $27. The contrast with his seatmate's $62,524 is real and is what an uncontested race looks like in finance form: neither incumbent needed to raise or spend much, and one of them barely did either.
  • Key votes and controversies: no individual key votes were verified at name level for this page, and no controversies of significance were found.

Verification notes

  • Key vote depth is this page's known shortfall, and it is larger here than on most pages on this site. No name level roll call votes were verified for Marsh's Senate term or for either House incumbent, so this page prints offices held, committees, stated priorities, and election margins instead of assuming party line votes. Treat any other guide that lists their votes without a roll call source with suspicion.
  • Money comes from two different systems and should not be mixed. The Senate figures are March 2026 Arizona campaign finance reports via See the Money as compiled by Wikipedia. The House figures are TransparencyUSA cycle listings retrieved in October 2026 without a verifiable single report date; both are labeled with their source and date basis in the entries.
  • LaForest's party label is printed as No Labels because that is the designation in the general election guide and in the primary results; Wikipedia's Senate page headers him as Independent, and his party now also uses the Arizona Independent Party name. Same candidate, same race.
  • Whether Marsh changed residence from LD4 to LD5, and when, was not documented in the sources checked, so this page does not speculate about it. It states only the verified sequence: she represented LD4 until January 2025 and is the 2026 Democratic nominee in LD5.

How to vote without getting your ballot rejected

  • Mail it by Tuesday, October 27, 2026. After that day, do not mail it: use a drop box or a vote center instead.
  • It must be received by 7 p.m. on Election Day, Tuesday, November 3. Postmarks do not count.
  • Sign and date the affidavit envelope, and write a current phone number on it.
  • For write-ins: only votes for officially filed write-in candidates are counted. No official write-in candidates were found for the LD5 Senate or House races in the sources checked for this page.
  • Leaving any item blank is allowed. It does not affect the rest of your ballot. In the House race, voting for one candidate, or neither, is allowed and changes nothing about the rest of your ballot.

Sources

Ballot Math: analysis only, no endorsements. Same template as every race on this site: offices and record, key votes, money with dates, stated priorities, controversies with responses, and gaps admitted in the open.