On Tuesday, Arizona voters fired the Republican Party. Then, on the very same ballot, a few inches further down, they voted like conservatives. Both results are real. Both are blowouts in their own lanes. Anyone who reads only one half of this ballot understands nothing about this state.

Start with the candidates, because it was a rout. Katie Hobbs beat Andy Biggs 56.5% to 43.5%, a margin of roughly 309,000 votes. Four years ago she won the same office by 17,117 votes. Adrian Fontes beat Alexander Kolodin by about 11 points. Kris Mayes, who won the attorney general’s race in 2022 by 511 votes, beat Warren Petersen by double digits this time. Democrats took both chambers of the Legislature for the first time in generations, on track for roughly 37 of 60 House seats and 20 of 30 in the Senate, and a Democratic trifecta for the first time since the mid-1960s. The congressional delegation flips from 6-3 Republican to 5-4 Democratic. Republicans went into this election with a voter registration advantage and legislative majorities, and they lost everything.

Now scroll down the ballot. All eight statewide propositions were referred to voters by that same Republican Legislature, and the voters could not have been clearer about which ones they wanted.

Proposition 316, capping local grocery taxes and requiring voter approval to raise them: passed with 62%. Proposition 319, banning new photo radar and forcing existing camera programs to win voter approval: passed with 62%, the biggest yes vote of the night. Proposition 318, barring transgender athletes from girls’ sports and sex-segregated facilities: passed with 59%. Proposition 317, designating drug cartels as terrorist organizations: passed with 57%. Proposition 141, a constitutional ban on taxing drivers by the mile: leading at 51%, still uncalled, but ahead.

Those are conservative answers, delivered by the same electorate that had just handed Democrats their biggest Arizona win in decades. Several of those measures ran ahead of Hobbs’s own margin.

But before anyone crowns a secret conservative majority, read the rejections. Proposition 142, which would have expanded the constitutional ban on preferential treatment and DEI practices across government and public education: rejected, 60% to 40%. Proposition 144, which would have required government ID to vote by mail and rewritten election rules in the constitution: rejected, 53% to 47%. Proposition 320, a mandate forcing large school districts to spend 60% of their budgets on direct instruction: failing. The voters fired the legislature’s party, kept about half its homework, and threw the rest back.

This is not a confused electorate. It is an electorate answering two different questions. The candidate races asked who governs, and Arizona answered that one the way the whole country did on Tuesday: against the party holding power in Washington, against the chaos, against prices that never came down. The propositions asked what government is allowed to do, and on questions that touch a voter’s own life (a tax on groceries, a camera ticket in the mail, a tax on every mile she drives, who plays in her daughter’s league) Arizonans answered as the individualists they have always been.

The through-line is not left or right. It is suspicion of whoever is reaching. Voters would not let cities reach into the grocery bill. They would not let the state reach into the odometer. And they would not let the Legislature reach into the constitution to fight its culture wars or rewrite the election rules, either. Proposition 142 lost by 20 points in a state that passed the girls’ sports measure by 18. That gap is the whole story. One was a concrete question about fairness in a specific place. The other was a partisan signal dressed up as a constitutional amendment, and voters could tell the difference.

Arizona is not turning blue, and it is not staying red. It is doing what it has done for thirty years, through McCain and Sinema and a 511-vote attorney general’s race: voting person by person and question by question, and ruining every narrative anyone builds on top of it. The counting continues until the November 23 canvass, and the margins will move a little. The split personality will not.