Tuesday sure delivered. The blue wave—a bluenami—is a great relief to people with brains and functioning moral senses, but much of the strongest juice produced Tuesday night was drawn from a few individual races. Some of those were incredibly stirring. It feels amazing to wake up in a world where Susan Collins is out in Maine, Greg Abbott is out in Texas, data centers took a beating everywhere, Virginia finally and resoundingly overturned a Jim Crow-era voting restriction, and Vivek Ramaswamy ate a fat one. A strong contender for the funniest result, though, came in the race for the U.S. House seat from Arizona's first congressional district. Voters there did what ESPN so far has failed to do, and waved away a braying MAGA jackass of a former NFL special teams player.
Jay Feely kicked for six NFL teams over a 14-season career, with notable stops in Atlanta, Arizona, and East Rutherford, where he had stints with both the Giants and Jets. His playing career petered out in 2014. By then, he'd already made himself known as a right-wing blowhard. Feely is buds with Fox News host Sean Hannity, and it was on Hannity's show, back in 2009, when he was kicking for the New York Jets, that Feely foreshadowed the rise of MAGA nationalism. What he said was stupid, of course, but in listening to Feely summarize a bunch of hazy, barely coded, haphazardly gussied-up criticisms as legitimate concerns over Barack Obama's unwillingness to "defend America's greatness," you could hear an irritating future Republican elected official finding his form.
Feely's notional appeal, as an ascending conservative striver, is that he once had a manly job, can formulate a complete sentence, and projects masculine authority, often ostentatiously. That, plus a square jaw and a razor-sharp hair part, made him a natural for football broadcasts, and eventually a contender for some cushy political office in an ironclad conservative sanctuary. If he were half an inch taller or played a skill position, today he might be Secretary of Blowing Up Brown People.
Instead, Feely kept himself in the public eye through roughly a decade of work as a CBS football color commentator, always looking out for the right moment to make a leap into politics. The moment evidently came when fellow Republican Andy Biggs, U.S. representative from Arizona's fifth district, decided last year that he would make a run for governor. Feely, who said he'd also been courted by the GOP for a congressional run in 2022, announced in April 2025 that he would seek to succeed Biggs in the Republican stronghold. That July, Feely's ambitions were all but wrecked when President Donald Trump endorsed another contender for that district: accused sex pest and balloon-bending-cowboy-looking former sheriff Mark Lamb. This must have been especially painful for Feely, who adores our huge disgusting loser of a president. On the homepage of his campaign website, the closest Feely comes to a succinct mission statement is notice that he is "a proud conservative and staunch supporter of President Donald Trump." The two are regular golf partners.
Instead of dropping his congressional bid and scurrying back to football work, Feely shifted his campaign to the state's first district, in the northeast of Maricopa County, a wealthy area that includes Scottsdale and part of north Phoenix. That seat had been held by Republican David Schweikert, who won by almost four points in 2024, but, like Biggs, had recently abandoned the House in order to make a run for governor. Trump, always a sensible operator, issued endorsements to both Feely and another conservative challenger, Gina Swoboda. This confusion was settled when Swoboda withdrew from the race this past February in order to run for Arizona's secretary of state; Feely rode Trump's endorsement to an easy primary victory over conservative create-a-candidate Joseph Chaplik.
Feely had it all lined up. In addition to Trump's endorsement and the strength of his own national prominence, he had a well-funded campaign that took contributions, per FEC records, from Roger Goodell, Charles Barkley, Jim Nantz, John Harbaugh, Robert Kraft, and a few other NFL owners. In an election cycle that was otherwise shaping up as a blowout defeat for his party, Feely was an uncommonly solid Republican candidate in a vital purple district, although he showed worrying political instincts when, in the campaign's final debate, Feely outed himself as data-center-curious, despite the parched nature of the desert biome that makes up his district.
Unfortunately for this bozo, Feely was unable to outrun the curse of having worked for the New York Jets. In the general election, Feely found himself in a contest with emergency room physician Amish Shah, a moderate Democrat who'd served six years in the Arizona House of Representatives. Before moving to Arizona and entering politics, Shah was a full-time faculty member and researcher at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City. While there, Shah presented research to the NFL Physician's Society, and worked as an emergency sideline physician for, yes, the New York Jets. It was while working for the Jets that Shah was determined to seek a sports medicine fellowship, which brought him to the University of Arizona. That led to him moving to the state for good, and it was through doing philanthropic work in Arizona that he was encouraged to enter local politics. It's a bizarre but hilarious coincidence that Shah's leap into national politics coincided with that of his one-time Jets colleague.
How'd it all work out for these red types? Biggs clobbered Schweikert in July's primary, then was wiped out in the general by incumbent Gov. Katie Hobbs. Lamb is up by around 6,000 votes in an as-yet-uncalled race against Elizabeth Lee, a fertility nurse who has not previously run for elected office. Swoboda was dumped in the primary for secretary of state by Alex Kolodin, a Freedom Caucus freak who was sanctioned by the State Bar in 2023 for election denialism horseshit; Kolodin was annihilated in the general by incumbent Democrat Adrian Fontes.
As for Feely, he lost pretty handily to his former Jets coworker: Decision Desk called the race Wednesday evening, with Shah leading Feely by seven percentage points, and the Associated Press called it early Thursday afternoon, with Shah's lead holding steady at around 22,000 votes. Shah claimed victory on Wednesday, commending Feely for "a hard-fought race" and asking Arizona voters to help "end the political toxicity" of the Trump era. Feely has not yet formally conceded.
Thus it finally came to pass that the New York Jets produced a winner. In keeping with tradition, the loser was the favorite.
