One of the closest House races in America is unfolding across the deserts and pine forests of northern Arizona. In the state's 2nd Congressional District, Democrat Jonathan Nez — the former president of the Navajo Nation — leads the Republican incumbent, Rep. Eli Crane, by 1,786 votes in the Associated Press count: 134,838 votes (50.3 percent) for Nez to 133,052 (49.7 percent) for Crane. The AP estimates about 78.8 percent of the expected vote has been counted, with 223 of the district's 284 precincts reporting, and rates the race too early to call.
Source: Associated Press election results, AZ-02
The lead is small enough that it has already changed hands as the count moved. In one batch of results during the night, the Arizona Republic's tally showed Crane ahead by 1,444 votes; in another release Nez led by just 195 votes; the AP's latest count has Nez in front by 1,786. With roughly a fifth of the expected vote still outstanding — late-counted early ballots and ballots from the district's far-flung rural counties — neither campaign can treat the current margin as safe.
Source: Arizona Republic
A rematch two years in the making
This is the second straight election in which these two men have met, and the district knows both of them well. Crane, a former Navy SEAL from Flagstaff and one of the House's most conservative members, was first elected in 2022, when he beat Democratic Rep. Tom O'Halleran by 53.9 percent to 46.1 percent. Nez challenged him in 2024 and lost by a wider margin, 54.5 percent to 45.5 percent. That Nez has cut a nine-point defeat down to a lead of under two thousand votes is itself the story of the night in this district — part of a midterm in which Democrats led, at least in early returns, in four Republican-held Arizona congressional districts, according to KJZZ's reporting of the state results.
Source: Arizona Republic / KJZZ via Arizona Globe
The district: Prescott to the Four Corners
The 2nd District sprawls across northeastern and central Arizona — from Yavapai County's population centres of Prescott and Prescott Valley, north toward Arizona's Four Corners country and the White Mountain region. It takes in Flagstaff's eastern reaches, vast stretches of high desert and forest, and some of the largest Native American lands in the United States, including much of the Navajo Nation, the Hopi Tribe and the White Mountain Apache Tribe. Nez, a Democrat from Tuba City, led the Navajo Nation — the largest tribe in the country by population and land — as its president, and tribal turnout in the district's Native communities is one of the forces both campaigns watched through the night.
Source: Arizona Republic
The contrast between the candidates is sharp. Crane built his Washington profile as a hard-line conservative and a critic of federal land and spending policy, closely aligned with the House's right wing. Nez campaigned on his record running a tribal government through the pandemic and on water, infrastructure and health care for rural communities that sit hours from the nearest city. A win for Nez would make him one of the very few Native Americans to represent a district in Congress that includes their own nation's capital region, and would flip a seat Republicans have held since Crane's 2022 victory.
Source: Arizona Globe
Democrats have already won the House majority nationally in these midterms. Late seats like Arizona's 2nd will not change who controls the chamber — they will decide how large, and how workable, that majority is for the next two years.
What happens next
Counting continues. Arizona counties are still processing early ballots dropped off on Election Day and other ballots that take longer to verify, and in a district this size — where some precincts sit hours apart by road — updates arrive in large, uneven batches that can swing a margin this small in either direction. Arizona law requires an automatic recount when a statewide or federal race is decided by half a percentage point or less; Nez's current lead equals about 0.67 percent of the votes counted so far, just outside that line, and the remaining ballots could still pull the final margin inside it. The AP has not called the race, neither candidate had claimed victory in the reporting reviewed, and a final picture may take days. Awaaz Punjab will update this story when the race is called.
Source: Associated Press
For Arizona's Indian-American community — which spent election night watching a different cliffhanger, Amish Shah's lead in the neighbouring 1st District around Scottsdale and northeast Phoenix — the 2nd District race is a reminder of how much of this state's politics is decided far from its cities: in county seats like Prescott and Holbrook, and in chapter houses across the Navajo Nation, where the former president's name on the ballot has made a rural House race one of the last undecided contests in the country.