Kris Mayes never proposed closing a single golf course. In a state where water is the whole argument, a sentence about too much grass was always going to land like one.
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Attorney General Mayes told POLITICO’s Zack Colman, in an interview published Oct. 26, that Arizona has “way, way too much grass” and “probably has too many golf courses in Arizona right now,” adding, “I’m sure the golf industry is not going to like this when I say this.” Senate President Warren Petersen, her Republican opponent, recast that hedge as a pledge — “Kris Mayes is promising to get rid of golf courses. I promise to get rid of Kris Mayes. Save golf” — a framing conservative outlets repeated. She named no course, proposed no closure and offered no mechanism.
The setting matters as much as the sentence. The remark landed roughly ten minutes into a 25-minute conversation about the Colorado River, rising power bills and her push to pause new data center approvals — not at a press conference unveiling policy.
That distance between a podcast aside and a campaign slogan is exactly what her own response addressed. Her answer to the uproar was four words and an emoji: “Relax, nobody’s closing golf courses.” 12News political reporter Brahm Resnik, who says he read the interview verbatim, noted she used the phrase “golf courses” exactly once and that the idea a drought-plagued state “might have too many” is not exactly controversial.
The reaction still found an audience because the underlying numbers are uncomfortable. A Republic/Golfweek investigation found that between 30 and 50 percent of Arizona courses exceeded their state water allotments in most years across two decades, with one Sun City course over its limit 16 years running and regulators rarely penalizing anyone. Courses absorbed further allotment cuts in 2025, stacking reductions of about 4 percent over two years.
The industry, meanwhile, argues it is being made a symbol rather than a culprit. Arizona hosts more than 325 golf facilities serving roughly 650,000 golfers, and the Arizona Golf Association frames the sector as a tourism engine that has cut turf and invested in efficient irrigation. Courses including Sun City’s North layout have removed grass outright to comply with the state’s tighter requirements.
Both sides, however, skipped a jurisdictional catch. Those decisions sit with city and county zoning and with the Arizona Department of Water Resources; the Attorney General’s Office has no direct role in either, which limits the remark to rhetoric rather than policy.
Her broader record gives the comment a throughline. She filed a lawsuit against a Saudi-owned farm over groundwater pumping and urged a moratorium on new data centres, asserting that Arizona struggles with both power and water issues. In each case, the target is the same: large-scale consumption of a resource the state cannot replenish.
Politically, the timing cuts both ways. Mayes faces Petersen in a November race where water has become the defining flashpoint, with federal Colorado River cuts forcing candidates to address scarcity as they never have before. A single sentence about grass travels further than a white paper.
What the episode really shows is how Arizona now argues about water: scarcity converts an offhand observation into an advertisement, and the rebuttal trails the slogan by days. Mayes’ actual claim—that a desert might hold too many lawns—remains an open question the state must answer, whoever wins in November.