Candidate Spotlight: Teri Ann Hourihan

Arizona Independent Party Nominee for Governor

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Teri Ann Hourihan doesn't call herself a politician. She calls herself a mother, a small business owner, and a mental health professional, and says that background, not a career in office, is what's driving her run for Arizona Governor.

"I didn't have this in my viewpoint a year ago," Hourihan said of the decision to run. "This is really me coming in to do a job that I feel like is not being done for the people."

Hourihan is a Licensed Professional Counselor with a Ph.D., and she owns a healthcare company that provides medical, psychiatric, and counseling services across Arizona. She won her party's primary and will appear on the November ballot as the nominee of the Arizona Independent Party — a party recently renamed from No Labels, and still referred to by both names.

Independence From Party and Donor Influence

A central piece of Hourihan's campaign is her rejection of corporate money, major endorsements, and party pressure. She says she's experienced that pull firsthand, including turning down an interview for her own party's formal endorsement process.

"I sometimes say where there's money, there's bad things happening," she said. "Money's not bad — people are bad with money sometimes." In her view, big-name endorsements and donor relationships create a conflict of interest that pulls candidates away from constituents and toward the interests attached to that money.

She also points to party loyalty itself as a distorting force. Hourihan has been registered with more than one party over the years and says that history doesn't define her politics. "Party is secondary to who I am as a leader," she said. Her approach to disagreements between Republicans and Democrats, she says, is to evaluate each issue on its own merits rather than align with a party position: "I look at the issue. I don't look at the party."

Healthcare and AHCCCS Reform

As a healthcare provider herself, Hourihan says reforming Arizona's Medicaid system (AHCCCS) is one of her top priorities. She says her own company was suspended from the program amid a broader fraud investigation, a process she says took roughly two years to resolve and shrank her staff from 250 employees to 19.

Hourihan argues that while fraud in the system is real, the current investigative process has swept up large numbers of providers who were ultimately cleared, a pattern she says has left Arizona Medicaid patients without access to care and providers unable to get paid for services already rendered. She cites recent state Senate hearings and testimony from the AHCCCS Office of Inspector General as evidence that a significant share of providers placed on exclusion lists are later reinstated without findings of wrongdoing.

Her plan, if elected, is to replace AHCCCS leadership, bring in independent reviewers to audit provider cases, and pursue faster resolution for both the providers she says were wrongly targeted and the cases of confirmed fraud.

Affordability

On the cost of living, Hourihan points to a few specific levers she'd want to pull as governor:

1. Housing. Streamlining permitting so construction moves faster, and encouraging denser, infill development on vacant land, including land currently held by school districts, rather than continued sprawl into new, resource-intensive areas.
2. Child care. She points to New Mexico's phased-in universal child care program as a model Arizona could adapt over a multi-year timeline, funded in part by redirecting what she describes as misused state funds identified in state auditor reports.
3. Gas and utilities. Hourihan supports limits on price-gouging at the pump and introducing competition into Arizona's utility market, arguing that a single-provider system (like APS in much of the state) removes any incentive to lower costs.

Asked when she last laughed the hardest, Hourihan pointed to the everyday moments she shares with her two sons, ages six and seven. She said her son Liam will sometimes randomly look at her and challenge her to a staring contest, where the first person to blink loses. It's those spontaneous moments with her boys that keep her laughing. "I laugh every day," she said.