They beat election deniers in the midterm elections. Now they're gearing up for 2024

Arizona's Democratic Gov.-elect Katie Hobbs faced a flurry of criticism in the days leading up to last month's election.

As Hobbs campaigned on the threat election deniers posed to democracy, Democrats privately worried that she wasn't present enough, that her campaign was too low-key and that she'd made a terrible decision against debating her Republican opponent Kari Lake, an ardent supporter of former President Donald Trump who said she would not have certified President Joe Biden's 2020 win in the state.

But Hobbs found that her plan to characterize the race as "a choice between sanity and chaos" resonated with voters, and she went on to beat Lake by 17,000 votes.

"We had a campaign strategy and we kept [focus] on it, and it was the right strategy," Hobbs said in an interview. "So, I don't know why they were worried."

In battleground states, candidates for offices that play key roles in election