![]() And it could tell us whether vote patterns are looking more like 2016, when Republicans held enough suburban voters to win, or 2018, when they didn’t. 3, Arizona, like Florida, could offer the first clues to how the election is going, as election officials count early votes before Election Day begins. Though it’s one of the last states to close polls Nov. Immigration, which has often reshaped politics in the state, has been subsumed by other issues this year, and one Democratic bet is that Trump, who pardoned Arpaio in 2017, has taken the wrong side of the state’s culture wars.ĭemocrats also look fondly at Arizona for a very 2020 reason: Like Florida, it has a robust early-voting tradition and allows votes to be counted before Election Day. ![]() The president has a devoted base in Arizona and made one of his very first campaign stops here, alongside Arpaio, when some media outlets did not take him seriously. Doug Ducey (R) responded to the coronavirus.īy signing up you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy And the state’s Republican legislative majority is seen as vulnerable, both because of the parties’ shifts and because of voter unhappiness with how Gov. The state’s GOP chair, Kelli Ward, made her name as a fringe Senate candidate (“Chemtrail Kelli”). The late senator John McCain faced conservative challengers in his final two campaigns former senator Jeff Flake retired rather than face likely defeat over his criticism of President Trump.īut the conservatives were losing, too, with Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio ousted by voters in 2016 and Republicans ceding a Senate seat and the secretary of state’s office in 2018. 1070, one of the country’s strictest anti-immigration laws, won votes at first but galvanized the left and the Latino vote. One in 11 Arizonans are military veterans, and for a long time, the suburbs blossoming across Maricopa County gave the GOP an unbeatable advantage in presidential elections.Īlways conservative, Arizona’s Republicans moved further to the right since 2008 - and it has cost them. The advent of air conditioning transformed Arizona from a collection of small cities and sprawling Native American reservation to a beacon for people - often retirees - fleeing the Midwest. On paper, Republicans can win the presidency without Arizona, but they never have before. Just one of those would make the state competitive, but you add them together and we’re seeing a surge.”ĭemocrats narrowly lost the state in 2016, and they won two statewide races in 2018 thanks to a further leftward shift in the once-solidly Republican suburbs of Phoenix. “If the Democratic Party is doing well in highly educated, urbanized, suburbanized areas, we’re doing well in Arizona - it’s 80 percent urban and suburban, and the same time, we have a rising young Latino community that is voting Democratic. Ruben Gallego, who has represented downtown Phoenix in Congress since 2015. “The Arizona electorate is primed for the Democratic Party,” said Rep. ![]() By nominating Arizona’s senior senator for president in 2008, and by picking the first-ever Mormon nominee in 2012, Republicans ran stronger here in other states with similar Latino populations and similar urban-rural splits. ![]() One in 4 voters are non-White, an electorate that’s heavily Democratic here, and a slim majority of voters were college graduates, according to the 2016 exit polls.Įvery other state with that profile, every other state with rapid urban growth, has been moving briskly toward Democrats since 2016. How did the home of Barry Goldwater become a swing state? If it flips from red to blue this year, the question - not hard to answer - might be why it didn’t flip sooner. ![]()
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