11-08-2025
Sandra Day O'Connor voted most influential figure in Arizona History Showdown
And the winner is … Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.
State of play: The Arizona History Showdown is over, and the history-making O'Connor was voted by Axios Phoenix readers as our state's most influential historical figure.
O'Connor easily dispatched Sen. John McCain, taking nearly 65% of the vote in the championship round.
Between the lines: O'Connor is, of course, most famous as the first woman on the U.S. Supreme Court, and her lasting influence was primarily at the national level for her many years on the bench and her role in deciding major cases.
But before she became a groundbreaking national figure, she was a highly influential state legislator, rising to Senate majority leader, and she went on to become a Maricopa County Superior Court and Arizona Court of Appeals judge, setting the stage for her Supreme Court tenure.
Her legacy lives at the federal courthouse in downtown Phoenix, which is named for her, and the nonprofit Sandra Day O'Connor Institute, which was founded in her honor in 2009 to champion civics education and civil discourse.
What they're saying: Scott O'Connor, the justice's son, told Axios that his mother's greatest accomplishments in the Senate included a statute-by-statute elimination of laws that were discriminatory against women, and major mental health legislation inspired by her time working for the Attorney General's Office at the Arizona State Hospital.
Throughout her career, he said, his mother would find areas of need and do what she could to improve them.
He called his mother the godmother of Arizona's judicial merit selection system, which voters approved in 1974.
After she retired from the Supreme Court, Sandra Day O'Connor created the iCivics online education provider, which her son said is a major, but often overlooked, accomplishment.
Jeremy's thought bubble: I left the voting to our readers, but if I'd filled out a bracket, my winner would've been longtime U.S. Sen. Carl Hayden.
Hayden has been gone for so many years and Arizona has grown so much in the decades since his Senate career ended that it's easy to overlook how important he was to the state.
He used his seniority to direct a lot of federal resources to what was, at the time, a very small state, and capped his career with the passage of the monumentally important Central Arizona Project.
The bottom line: Thanks to all of our readers who made the Arizona History Showdown a success!
As a native Arizonan and lifelong history nerd, this has been a labor of love and a longtime dream, and I'm glad that so many of you enjoyed it.
🗣️ You tell us: The bracket format was a lot of fun, and we'd love to use it again.
