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With early ballots counted in most counties, Douglas has less than 22 percent of the vote.

Frank Riggs, a former California congressman who ran for governor in 2014, took the lead Wednesday morning as a trickle of ballots continued to be counted, winning 22 percent of the vote. He’s narrowly leading Bob Branch, a professor of education at Grand Canyon and Liberty universities who ran unsuccessfully on a tea party platform for Congress in 2010, by about 1,100 votes. The race remains too close to call.

Tracy Livingston, a longtime classroom teacher and wife of state Rep. David Livingston, had 20 percent of the vote, while Jonathan Gelbart, the former director of charter school development for Basis charter schools, had less than 15 percent of the vote.

On the Democratic side, Kathy Hoffman, a former speech pathologist at Peoria Unified School District, beat out former state lawmaker and Tempe City Council member David Schapira, with 52 percent and 48 percent of the vote, respectively.

Douglas was seen as among the most vulnerable statewide Republicans, and her competitors warned that if voters chose her, it would spell disaster for the party chances of maintaining the post after the November election.

Douglas won the Superintendent’s Office in 2014 on the thinnest margin of any statewide Republican, on a promise of repealing Common Core curriculum. Within a month of taking office started a high profile-fight with Gov. Doug Ducey by firing several Board of Education employees. It was the first of many headline-generating scandals that plagued her administration.

Since taking office, Douglas has surprised some of her critics, championing more money for public schools and taking charter schools to task for what she sees as a lack of regulation.

But she’s also been dogged by controversy. Most recently she attempted to remove references to evolution in high school standards and said intelligent design should “absolutely� be taught alongside evolution. She called for teachers to be punished for going on strike, which critics called ludicrous in a state with a severe teacher shortage.

And the group that helped foist her onto the statewide scene in 2014, a grassroots anti Common Core organization called Mommy Lobby, slammed her for not repealing the Common Core curriculum as promised and she’s burned bridges with other Republicans, opting to back Riggs instead.

Douglas was unable to collect the 1,500 donations of $5 each that she needed to qualify for public funding through the ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ Citizens’ Clean Elections Commission. Instead, she was forced to switch to private funding for her campaign, and was outspent by nearly every other candidate in the race.

Riggs and Gelbart both raised more than $100,000, though both invested significant amounts of their own funding into their campaigns. Branch raised $35,000, while Livingston clocked in just a few hundred dollars below Douglas.