JoAnna Mendoza, the Democrat running to represent a southern Arizona congressional district that could determine control of the House next year, remembers with painful clarity the moment she hit bottom.
It was March of 2012, and after a night of heavy drinking, Ms. Mendoza, who had been abusing alcohol to numb the trauma of a sexual assault she had experienced months earlier, drove into another car in a parking lot. She was charged with driving while intoxicated.
“That moment made me realize I needed healing,” Ms. Mendoza said in an emotional interview this week in which she recounted the previously undisclosed incident while sitting at a public library in Casa Grande, miles down the road from the desert town of Eloy where she grew up. “I couldn’t keep pushing this stuff down and hiding it.”
Today Ms. Mendoza, 49, is sober and leaning heavily into her personal history in her campaign to unseat Republican Representative Juan Ciscomani in Arizona’s tossup Sixth Congressional District, in a race that could be crucial to Democrats’ chances of winning the majority in November.
In such a competitive race for such a critical seat — Ms. Mendoza said Republican trackers often follow her, even filming private moments with her 10-year-old son — she said she expected the Ciscomani campaign to highlight the incident to attack her character.
She is betting instead that it will humanize her with voters who can relate to her lowest moments.
“I’m hoping that other people will see themselves in me,” she said. “And that despite all the things that have happened, it’s so important for me to do this now at this moment because of what’s at stake.”
It is one of the most important seats that Democrats are targeting, and Ms. Mendoza is a unique candidate. Working class people remain a rarity in Congress. And her biography — she is a queer single mother who grew up in rural poverty and served in the Navy and as a Marine Corps drill instructor — checks so many boxes it almost feels out of a movie.
Growing up, Ms. Mendoza would wake at 4 o’clock on summer mornings and wait at a gas station with her parents for a bus to drive them to cotton fields where they would pick weeds with bare hands under the desert sun.
Her family never had a car. She remembers riding her pink bike to the grocery store with food stamps in her pocket and then home with plastic bags balanced on her handlebars.
“There was so much shame about it,” Ms. Mendoza said. “Everyone knew if you were using funny money, you didn’t have any.”
These days, things are pointing in the right direction for Ms. Mendoza’s campaign. She handily out-raised Mr. Ciscomani, the two-term Republican incumbent, in the first quarter of the year, taking in $2.4 million to Mr. Ciscomani’s $1.1 million.
A recent Republican-commissioned poll showed Ms. Mendoza beating Mr. Ciscomani 47 percent to 44 percent. Even some Republican operatives are questioning whether Mr. Ciscomani can still win in the current political environment, which is trending against the G.O.P.
Chuck Coughlin, a Republican political analyst, said on a recent podcast that the race was an uphill battle for Mr. Ciscomani, especially against a retired Marine with “a very compelling story.” It is also a populist moment when voters are angry at a government many believe has failed them at every turn.
Ms. Mendoza joined the Navy and then the Marine Corps after high school, the only path she saw available to her as she tried to escape rural poverty. But that version of the American dream was disrupted after a night of heavy drinking at a bar in 2000, when Ms. Mendoza, then a 23-year-old lance corporal, was sexually assaulted by a marine sergeant whose advances she had resisted in the past.
After a night out with friends, “I was drunk and blacked out,” she recalled of the incident as she held back tears. “As I was coming to, I realized what was happening to me.” The friends she shared a house with called the military police and she was taken to the hospital for a full rape kit.
“I’ve done some work to be able to talk about this without breaking down, but it’s still an experience that, every time I talk about it, I relive it,” she said.
The man who assaulted Ms. Mendoza eventually received a court-martial and was sent to a military prison. Ms. Mendoza became a drill instructor, a decision driven by her determination to become tough enough to protect herself from something like the assault ever happening again.
“I didn’t want to be a victim,” she said.
Ms. Mendoza, who served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, became one of two women in the Marine Corps to serve as a drill instructor’s instructor. “That’s the elite of the elite,” she said.
More than 10 years passed, and she thought she had moved past the hardest times in her life. And then she was assaulted again.
“The second was more of a date rape situation,” Ms. Mendoza said. “I went from preparing myself so that something like this could never happen again to it happening again. It was a peer, another gunnery sergeant.”
She added: “I felt angry, ashamed — somehow it was my fault. You’re supposed to trust the people you serve with.”
The DWI arrest occurred not long afterward. It was the moment that she realized she needed to set herself on a new path, which she pursued by leaning heavily on her Catholic faith.
When Mr. Ciscomani was first elected in 2021, he too ran as a different kind of candidate. He shared his personal story of immigrating from Mexico as a young child and washing cars to help his family make ends meet. Mr. Ciscomani, who became a citizen at 13, also pitched himself as an example of the American dream with a movie-worthy biography: a pro-business Mexican immigrant Republican and father of six.
But that image has been complicated by his record in Congress, where he has established a long paper trail of voting for President Trump’s hard-line immigration policies even as fears about the president’s deportation crackdown have angered this border district, where an ICE detention facility is set to open.
Like many House Republicans who do not relish the idea of defending Mr. Trump’s agenda in front of their constituents, Mr. Ciscomani has not been holding town halls, although his schedule shows that he often participates in more controlled community round tables with small business owners.
“We need a representative who is going to be accessible,” Ms. Mendoza told a group of 80 senior citizens who came out to a meet-and-greet event on Monday night in Tucson. “Right now, we don’t have the ability to do that. He hides, he runs, he doesn’t answer the phone.”
A spokesman for Mr. Ciscomani’s campaign, Daniel Scarpinato, said Mr. Ciscomani was the state’s most bipartisan member of Congress. And he characterized Ms. Mendoza, who favors strengthening Social Security and expanding health care coverage, as a far-left extremist.
“As a lobbyist at the State Capitol, she advocated for higher taxes on working class people,” he said, accusing her of trying to scrub old positions from the internet. “Arizonans aren’t going to like what they see.”
In the last two cycles, Mr. Ciscomani faced the same challenger, Kirsten Engel, a white, Ivy League-educated former Democratic state legislator and law professor who was not originally from the district.
But Democrats believe that Ms. Mendoza, who got her B.A. nine years after graduating from high school at the American Military University, is a far more relatable candidate for a district that is 20 percent Hispanic and has the ninth largest veteran population in the country.
Her life experiences informed almost every interaction she had on a two-day swing this week through the southern part of the district she is seeking to represent.
“It reminds you that sometimes you’re doing everything you can and you can’t find a way out,” she told a food bank administrator who said hospital workers have been coming to pick up boxes of food in their scrubs.
“Growing up in poverty is traumatizing,” Ms. Mendoza said.
On Tuesday morning, Ms. Mendoza attended a round table in her native Eloy at the Pinal Hispanic Council, where she pointed out her grandmother’s old home, the one with green trim, from the window.
“My heart is always in our rural communities,” she said. “Growing up poor, you feel a sense of despair and helplessness.”
She said it was only years later that she had come to realize that “it wasn’t my parents fault.”
“It was a failure of government,” she said, “a failure of our elected leaders.”
