Arizona Agenda's "What We're Laughing At" Laughs at Candidate Richard Grayson in Arizona's Legislative District 7

Today, Wednesday, September 23, 2026, Arizona Agenda's "What We're Laughing At" section focuses on Legsislative District 7 candidate Richard Grayson:

We got an email from candidate Richard Grayson recently bragging that he had broken the algorithm for a tool on iVoterGuide that measures where a candidate falls on the political spectrum.

“I seem to be the only person in the voter guide who got that rating! I feel like everyone else is G, PG, PG-13 or R and I am NC-17,” he told us.

And “unclassifiable” is the perfect term for Grayson, a serial candidate and political performance artist who has run for something — often multiple things at once — every year for about as long as we can remember.

This year, Grayson is running as a Green Party candidate seeking a seat in the state House representing Legislative District 7, though on his campaign website he warns people not to vote for any Green Party candidates because they’re “jerks.”

We first came across Grayson in 2008 as part of Project White House, an “experiment in reality journalism,” run by longtime political reporter Jim Nintzel, back when he was in charge of the then-venerable Tucson Weekly.

Short version: Nintzel realized that all you had to do to qualify for the Presidential Preference Election in Arizona was get a form notarized.

So he enlisted the weirdest Tucsonans he could find to run for president.

Grayson was one of those weirdos.

Nintzel actually ran the gag for two presidential election cycles — in 2008 and 2012 — adding dozens of names to the ballot all for the sake of a good laugh.

Grayson ran both times, though he dropped out pretty early in 2008, citing “days of turmoil and division in the campaign of the handsome (candidate).”

Unfortunately, lawmakers eventually wised up to Nintzel, and they changed the law so he couldn’t run the same scam in the 2016 election cycle, as we wrote back then.

Anyway, this trip down memory lane gave us a good excuse to text Nintzel about the great joy we still get from those 2008-2012 Project White House archives.

“Had no idea at the time that it would serve as a model for so many modern-day candidates but here we are,” he wrote back.