Amid all the Democratic hand-wringing and backbiting that followed Donald Trump’s election in 2016, some progressives found solace in the Sonoran Desert. After a twenty-four-year reign as the sheriff of Maricopa County, Joe Arpaio, the politician who made Arizona ground zero for the confrontational nativism taking over the GOP, had been vanquished. That meant an end to the sheriff’s pretext-less “crime suppression sweeps” of Latino neighborhoods in Phoenix and the closing of Tent City, a sweltering outdoor jail that Arpaio proudly called a “concentration camp.”
“Arpaio’s loss represents a sea change in Arizona,” Mother Jones proclaimed, pointing to the surge of Hispanic participation in the election, the culmination of years of organizing by civil rights groups and fundraising by national Democrats. The consultant Andy Barr echoed the sentiment in an interview with the Arizona Republic: “There are plenty of signs that we’re making a lot of progress and we’re moving in the direction we want to be moving.”
By that point, the mirage of a blue Arizona had already been on the horizon for decades. The Grand Canyon State was one of several that caught the eye of national Democratic strategists in the wake of California’s swift transformation from a conservative to liberal bastion, mostly thanks to a rapidly growing Hispanic population radicalized by 1994’s Proposition 187, a since-reversed ballot initiative that prevented undocumented immigrants from attending public schools or accessing state health care programs. Given the demographic similarities, it seemed plausible that the rest of the West would follow California’s lead. The obvious marks were New Mexico, where the population was already majority minority, and Nevada, since Las Vegas spent the 1990s as the fastest growing city in the country. Ruy Teixeira and John B. Judis, the authors of The Emerging Democratic Majority, were particularly intrigued by Colorado, writing that “the Denver and Boulder area votes like the San Francisco Bay Area.” They were similarly bullish on Arizona, given its rising Hispanic population, “which went from nineteen to twenty-five percent of the state in the 1990s.”
Two decades on, a surface-level assessment is enough to make oracles of Teixeira and Judis. Democrats have barely invested any resources into the campaign for Colorado or New Mexico’s electoral votes, so seemingly secure is their hold on those states. Though still swingy, Nevada has likewise tacked left in recent elections. Meanwhile, Arizona has a Democratic governor and two senators who were, well, elected as Democrats—whatever Kyrsten Sinema is, she is not John McCain. All these states have only gotten more diverse, their cities increasingly similar to the metropoles of the Pacific Coast. Sure, the presidential polling in Arizona remains competitive, just like for the Senate race between Democrat Ruben Gallego and anchorwoman-turned-conspiracy-monger Kari Lake, but that’s a short-term concern. Viewed through sunglasses tinted the rose of the Painted Desert, it’s easy to assume the 2024 election will mark Arizona’s long-awaited emergence as a Democratic stronghold: a new keystone between California and New Mexico in the Solid Southwest that will keep the party competitive in future presidential elections regardless of their fortunes around the Great Lakes.
Say any of this to a progressive activist who actually lives in Arizona and brace yourself for either uproarious laughter or a rueful glare. Arizona, the next California? The state’s politics have never followed such a straightforward trajectory. This is a place, they’ll surely remind you, where protecting abortion rights takes the form of celebrating the reimposition of a fifteen-week ban as if it were liberatory. Where diminishing water is channeled not to residents but to multibillion-dollar microchip factories and industrial-scale farms. Where less money is devoted to public education than in any other state, save that classic presidential battleground of Idaho.
Demographics have never been destiny, but in Arizona they’ve proven particularly ill-suited to overcoming a culture fully in thrall to the growth economy. From the date of its designation as an American territory in 1863, visions of turning Arizona ever more verdant by industry and cash have proven far more persuasive to its mutable electorate—even as this singular focus comes at the expense of any commitment from the government to actually provide for the tens of thousands of new residents who arrive in the desert every year, their aspirations as blinding as the sun.
What’s It Pay?
Nearly all of the arid land seized from Mexico after the conclusion of the Mexican-American War in 1848 was understood by its new overseers as a vacancy in need of filling by ambitious American entrepreneurs. Stephen Shadegg, a former actor and insurance salesman who would become one of Barry Goldwater’s closest advisers, recounted the founding of Phoenix during this period in a 1942 essay for the state-sponsored tourist magazine Arizona Highways. It reads like a manifesto for what set Arizona’s political culture apart from the rest of the nation.
Phoenix’s mythology revolves around its rise from the ashes of a vanished civilization, a story told ad nauseam by politicians and visiting journalists.
Shadegg’s heroes were “Tragic Jack” Swilling and John Y. T. Smith (the Y. T. stood for “Yours Truly”), a pair of veterans from either side of the Civil War who each gave voice to a distinct strain of the base imperative toward profit that proved formative in territorial Arizona. While the two men did eventually go into business together, Shadegg dramatized their partnership by imagining them meeting one night at a saloon in the gold-rush boomtown of Wickenburg, where they got to chatting over a few hands of poker. Tragic Jack had a bullet permanently lodged in his side that he took morphine to forget, but he managed to follow along as the straightlaced Smith described the system of ancient irrigation channels he’d observed along the Salt River, dug by the ancestral Sonoran Desert peoples who had once farmed the land. Those old canals now irrigated fields of wild wheat.
“What’s your job, Mister?” Swilling asked.
“Haulin’ hay to Fort McDowell.”
Tragic Jack responded with a question that has animated life in Arizona ever since: “What’s it pay?”
Despite the haze of drugs and alcohol, Swilling knew a get-rich-quick scheme when he heard one. In 1867, when the Arizona Territory had fewer than ten thousand residents, he established the Swilling Irrigation and Canal Company, with Smith as a principal investor. A year later, Phoenix was officially founded on the north bank of the Salt River—and ever since, the city’s mythology has revolved around its rise from the ashes of a vanished civilization, a story told ad nauseam by politicians and visiting journalists, with few of them ever bothering to note that some of the O’odham descendants of the original canal builders were hard at work just south of where Swilling set up shop, farming the banks of the Gila River. Such an observation would disrupt the narrative woven by the likes of Shadegg, so focused on how the new city “would change the economic and political pattern of a state not yet born.” Indeed, Phoenix’s principal founders set the tone for the entire state: while Smith was a classic entrepreneur, Swilling was a creature of the frontier, just crazy enough to see a sunbaked valley and imagine an empire.
By the 1890s, twelve different irrigation systems comprising over two hundred miles of canals extended from the Salt River. Rather than grow a wide array of foods to feed the local populace, Phoenix’s farmers chased the national market. At the onset of World War I, hundreds of acres of citrus groves were turned over to cotton fields; as soon as the war ended, the market for cotton evaporated, and the farmers got hosed. A path out of the boom-and-bust uncertainty of commodity agriculture came by way of the U.S. Army, which set up airfields throughout the Southwest in the years before World War II because the climate offered ideal conditions for testing aircraft and training pilots.
A few months before he penned his Highways story on Smith and Swilling, Shadegg wrote an ode to a Goodyear Aircraft factory that had opened in 1942. That facility replaced a cotton farm not far from the Air Corps’s Luke Field and augured a new era for the Valley of the Sun: between 1940 and 1963, the manufacturing output of Phoenix would balloon from under $5 million to over $435 million, surpassing agriculture as the region’s largest industry in 1955. Shadegg sought to persuade the readers of Highways that embracing industry was consistent with the state’s bootstrapping ethos. “Cowboys, who a year ago were riding the range,” he wrote, had joined together with “insurance salesman and grocery clerks, accountants, and professional athletes” to build flight decks for the war effort. “These are the children of victory. Their goal is production. They will not be denied.” In Shadegg’s jingoistic vision, the frontier spirit of Arizona’s founding aggies became part and parcel to its reinvention as an aerospace hub.
Throughout Arizona’s turn from agriculture to aerospace in the 1940s, the Democratic Party dominated the state. That was in no small part because of the influence of George W. P. Hunt, a progressive who served as governor for sixteen years, all the while affirming that “this country, its institutions, its resources and its rewards for industry belong to the people whose labor makes them possible.” By the 1950s, however, the state began drifting to the right, powered mostly by the influx of Midwestern Republicans drawn by plentiful jobs and winter golfing.
Shadegg, once a registered a Democrat, recognized that a generational political shift was underway; in Barry Goldwater, he found a candidate who could personify that transformation. The scion of a family that owned a chain of department stores in Phoenix, Goldwater had entered the public eye as a vocal opponent of the New Deal, particularly the Fair Labor Standards Act, which forced his family to give their employees a raise. As the president of the local chamber of commerce and a member of every social club—including the Phoenix Country Club, which his father had helped found—Goldwater was easily elected to city council in 1949. The next year, the World War II pilot set his sights on the governor’s mansion but seemed unable to persuade enough local Republicans that he was more than, as then Phoenix mayor Nicholas Udall put it, “a young merchant prince who liked to get his picture taken and fly airplanes.” Ultimately, he was outflanked at the nominating convention by a savvier rival.
Undeterred, Goldwater soon turned to an even more daunting challenge: a U.S. Senate bid against the veteran Democrat and Majority Leader Ernest McFarland in 1952. Shadegg agreed to manage Goldwater’s campaign, perhaps viewing him as the perfect fusion of Smith and Swilling: a businessman with a wild-eyed sense of destiny. Harnessing that energy meant running a simple campaign that revolved around milking Goldwater’s well-heeled buddies for donations and keeping the candidate’s statements limited to patriotic avowals and the need to lower taxes. Amazingly, it worked: the forty-three-year-old city councilman upset the esteemed McFarland by a mere seven thousand votes.
The bigger test came six years later, when Goldwater faced a rematch against McFarland. In Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, Rick Perlstein writes that Shadegg commissioned a survey that demonstrated voters had little feel for the ideological differences between the two candidates but that they “valued Goldwater as a kind of walking embodiment of Arizonans’ independent streak.” The trick was to make that streak synonymous with conservative orthodoxy, ideally Goldwater’s personal vendetta against organized labor. When the AFL-CIO sent a political consultant to Tucson to help the McFarland campaign, Shadegg found the opening he needed. He planted stories in the Arizona Republic about the dreaded Jimmy Hoffa dispatching his carpetbaggers to steal the election for MacFarland, which incensed all the new Arizonans who didn’t want some Chicago Democrat ruining their fantasy of the good life in the desert. Goldwater won handily, his margin boosted by the increasingly conservative electorate. While Democrats had enjoyed a three-to-one registration advantage over Republicans six years earlier, by 1958 the ratio was already closer to two-to-one.
As a senator, Goldwater’s speechifying against labor and his staunch opposition to the Civil Rights Act made him a darling of movement conservatives, who rallied behind him as their candidate for president in 1964. But while his personification of the can-do frontiersman helped to confirm free-market ideology as integral to the culture of Arizona, the same was not yet true for the rest of the nation, and he got clobbered by Lyndon Johnson. Of course, as Teixera and Judis point out in The Emerging Democratic Majority, Goldwater’s landslide loss set the table for Richard Nixon’s triumph four years later. Because Goldwater did “surprisingly well among the constituencies that would become the heart of the new [Republican] majority,” he remains an enduring symbol of the rebirth of the party in the late twentieth century.
Red Hot Jokers
By the time Goldwater finally retired from the Senate in 1987, Arizona’s transformation from the domain of rough-and-tumble farm workers to a retreat for white-collar sunseekers was complete. Between 1960 and 1990, the population nearly tripled, from 1.3 million to 3.6 million. The state was 80 percent white, and its population skewed toward retirees—indeed, there were four times as many Anglos over the age of sixty-five as there were black people, total. Most importantly, registered Republicans outnumbered Democrats. All of this meant that a GOP affiliation and a chamber of commerce endorsement were often all it took to convince a majority of Arizonans of one’s fitness for office.
Throughout Arizona’s turn from agriculture to aerospace in the 1940s, the Democratic Party dominated the state.
Still, Arizonans kept a light on for the occasional Democrat willing to court the growth lobby. Chief among them was two-term governor Bruce Babbitt, an avowed moderate who cofounded the corporate-friendly Democratic Leadership Council. Babbitt was at one point viewed as the favorite to succeed Goldwater in the Senate, but his decision to pursue a long-shot presidential run effectively ceded the seat to John McCain, whose status as a war hero and maverick self-mythos guaranteed a twenty-point romp over the little-known state legislator who ran in Babbitt’s place.
If both Babbitt and McCain had more John Y. T. Smith in them than Tragic Jack Swilling, there were plenty of Republicans from that era for whom the ratio was inverted. Take Evan Mecham, a John Birch Society-backed auto dealer who, in 1986, dispatched Ronald Reagan’s handpicked candidate for governor in the primary before squeaking out a general election victory with just 39 percent of the vote, prevailing over an establishment Democrat and a real estate developer running as an independent. Mecham is the only modern Arizona governor to have been elected without the support of Phoenix’s business community; rather than recognize the fragility of his position, he ruled from the hard right. He eliminated Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a state holiday, insisted to the members of Scottsdale’s Ahavas Torah Synagogue that the United States was “a great Christian nation that recognizes Jesus Christ as the God of the land,” and endorsed a textbook that described black children as “pickaninnies.” After just fourteen months in office, Mecham was impeached by Republican legislators who had concluded that his antics were undercutting Arizona’s national reputation as an oasis of economic prosperity.
The next election cycle produced a governor in the Smith mold who initially appeared better equipped to keep the growth machine lubricated: a real estate developer named J. Fyfe Symington III. A descendant of the steel magnate Henry Clay Frick who sported a “Goldwater for President” button as a Harvard undergrad, Symington campaigned as a CEO, telling reporters, “What Arizona needs right now is a business mind.” Apparently that meant signing a bill sanctioning the use of Freon and other chlorofluorocarbons that had been outlawed by an international treaty to close the hole in the ozone layer. In Symington’s opinion, the whole CFC kerfuffle was “hokey science” that would just drive up construction costs for his developer buddies who were busy blanketing the Valley of the Sun with tract homes. This was his way of endorsing the bizarro grassroots campaign against government intervention into air conditioning, led by an activist named Becky Fenger, whose rallying cry was “Free the Freon!” Alas, Symington’s talent for folding a loony like Fenger into the political mainstream couldn’t save him from the fraud indictment that forced his resignation in 1997.
It was this combination of corruption and budget problems precipitated by twelve years of shortsighted tax cuts and corporate giveaways that set the stage for the Democrat Janet Napolitano to slip into the governor’s office in 2002, drawing just 46 percent of the vote in a four-way race. That campaign is a key datapoint in The Emerging Democratic Majority. “Janet Napolitano’s victory,” Teixeira and Judis write, “showed that Democrats can be competitive in the Southwest.” The authors neglected to note how that particular campaign was informed by their central thesis about demographic and economic change, perhaps because it wasn’t. Though Arizona’s overall population crossed the threshold of five million in 2000, its demographics were little changed in that year’s census, which pegged the Anglo population at 75 percent. Instead, Napolitano’s election had more to do with the hole in Arizona’s finances torn open by the wingnut strain of the GOP. Her message was that Arizona needed fiscal responsibility, even if “it’s going to hurt”—hardly a progressive rallying cry, but one that resonated with the white-collar professionals who had come to outnumber workers in manufacturing.
Unlike Mecham, Napolitano recognized the weakness of her mandate and settled on a simple enough solution: preside over Arizona as if there were a capital R next to her name, slashing another $500 million from the tax rolls. When the state’s budget imploded during the 2008 financial crisis, Napolitano responded with $2.2 billion in budget cuts that, as the Arizona Capital Times summarized, “included eliminating state funding of all-day kindergarten, Dial-a-Ride and state parks as well as cutting funding for K–12 education, universities and services for the mentally ill.”
Napolitano’s governorship coincided with the accelerating trend of voters in the state to reject identification with any party at all. Over the course of her two terms, the portion of independents surged, from about 22 percent to nearly a third of the electorate. Flight from the parties was driven by the widening gulf between wealthy retirees and the poor—supercharged by the Great Recession—since low-income people are the most likely to register as independent. By 2010, the proportion of Arizonans living in the state’s poorest census tracks had risen from 24 percent to 33 percent, a shift that nearly mirrors the trend toward independent registration.
It is all too tempting to celebrate the current crop of Arizona Democrats in state and national office as saviors, the blue wave riders who will set things straight once and for all.
Napolitano failed to recognize this growing group of low-income, independent voters as worth pandering to, which may have opened the door for Republicans to reestablish their dominance after she departed to join the Obama administration. Since Arizona lacks an office of lieutenant governor, Napolitano’s successor was the Republican secretary of state, Jan Brewer. Staring down the same budget crisis, Brewer proposed raising the state sales tax, which sent the legislature into hysterics and tanked her approval rating. To recover, she embraced the nativist wing of her party, signing State Bill 1070, the infamous “show me your papers” law that sanctioned the racial profiling of Hispanics and Latinos. Suddenly, Brewer was on Fox News nearly every night, a fire-breathing embodiment of the sublimation of economic angst over the Great Recession into anti-immigrant rage.
In the fifteen years that have passed since Brewer took office, public funding for public education has withered, the cost of housing has increased faster than almost anywhere else in the nation, homelessness in Phoenix and Tucson has spiked, and water insecurity has spread from rural ranches to bedroom suburbs. While most Republicans have responded the same way Brewer and Kari Lake did—by becoming mired in an echo chamber of white supremacist conspiracy theories—even purportedly reasonable conservatives have shown little interest in earnestly confronting the state’s problems.
Doug Ducey, an ice cream magnate who won the governorship in 2014 as a Symington replicant, maintained a monomaniacal obsession with reviving Arizona’s recession-battered economy during his tenure, telling a local radio station, “We are focused on making Arizona the best place in the country to launch a new idea, relocate, or expand a business.” Every governor since George W. P. Hunt could have offered the same vague list of priorities, but they gave Ducey cover to curry favor with his chief benefactors, the Koch brothers. His governorship amounted to eight years of delusion that perpetual growth would allow the state to forever outrun the consequences of its chronic underinvestment in education, health care, and housing, let alone its blithe disregard of dwindling water and rising temperatures. The popularity of this myopic fantasy has a lot to do with one of the countervailing factors working against the state’s growing diversity: the skew of new arrivals toward retirement age. Arizona may have added 759,000 citizens between 2010 and 2020, but more than 80 percent were over the age of fifty-five. These empty nesters with healthy 401(k)s evince little interest in the future, preferring instead to pad their present earnings as much as possible.
With the memory of Arpaio, Brewer, and Ducey so fresh, it is all too tempting to celebrate the current crop of Arizona Democrats in state and national office as saviors, the blue wave riders who will set things straight once and for all. After a few undistinguished terms in Congress, Ruben Gallego now stands as the only thing between Arizona and Kari Lake as senator. Her visage is so bone-chilling to most Arizonans that Gallego has skated by in this summer’s campaign by exclusively focusing on his biography: an immigrant son who made it to Harvard before enlisting in the Marines and serving in Iraq. When it comes to policy, though, he remains a cipher, with little congressional record to draw on and a platform cribbed from the DNC.
Senator Mark Kelly cuts a more impressive figure, having secured copious federal funding for drought mitigation projects, all of which he has justified as—you guessed it—necessary to maintain growth. That holds even for projects that appear counterproductive, like the microprocessor factories funded by the CHIPS Act. Ahead of his 2022 reelection campaign, Kelly lauded that legislation, writing that it was “going to grow our state’s economy, bring down costs on all kinds of everyday products, and reduce our dependence on foreign supply chains for critical technology”; never mind the wisdom of building such water-intensive facilities in a place where wells now regularly pump sand.
And then there’s Katie Hobbs, whose talents as a public speaker rival those of a saguaro cactus. Miraculously, the former social worker managed to edge Kari Lake in the 2022 gubernatorial election by around seventeen thousand votes, perhaps due to Lake’s obsessive focus on “the rigged election of 2020” and a panoply of half-baked proposals, like addressing water scarcity by building a one-thousand-mile aqueduct to the Mississippi. Exit polls from that bitter contest revealed just how little the state’s growing diversity has thus far translated into a progressive political profile; both Anglo and Hispanic voters were divided roughly fifty-fifty between the candidates. More determinative was education, as Hobbs won the 40 percent of the electorate with a college degree by 57 percent. (Naturally, Lake also refused to accept the results of that election and still maintains she is the “lawful governor” of Arizona.)
Though Hobbs’s response to Arizona’s water crisis last summer—a moratorium on new residential development in metro Phoenix that is not a new policy order but merely the enforcement of a statute that Bruce Babbitt signed into law back in 1980—generated international headlines, it’s in the more mundane corners of the state government that she has confirmed herself as yet another corporate Democrat, happy to take her cues from the state’s Republican legislature. She recently caved on extending Phoenix’s light rail system in order to secure funding to further expand the state’s already sprawling highway network, then signed a bill aimed at enriching landlords by preventing cities and towns from collecting taxes on rental properties, which will gut municipal coffers by an estimated $230 million after it goes into effect next year. Those shortfalls will be exacerbated by yet another massive budget deficit, only kicking in now thanks to the delayed rollout of Ducey’s signature flat tax. The parallels between Napolitano and Hobbs are obvious: after Arizonans have had enough years of Republican nonsense, they are game to put a Democrat in charge of the state, so long as she doesn’t actually change anything about the way it has been run for generations.
Stephen Shadegg recognized the Arizonan affinity for the territorial era, a tendency among the state’s ever-renewing population of recent arrivals to imagine themselves as pioneers securing themselves a fortune out in the badlands. He understood that delusion transcended party affiliation, which, seventy years later, is less important than ever, given that more voters are now registered as independents than with either party. But even though so many of today’s independents are people for whom New Deal-style politics could prove uplifting, politicians in Arizona remain fixated on the chamber of commerce, convinced the only path to victory is a pledge of allegiance to the growth economy.
Rocky Mountain Blues
Say Gallego beats Lake, and Biden—still running as I file this—somehow ekes out another win in Arizona this November. Washington pundits will surely clamor about the final transformation of the Grand Canyon State, declaring that it has gone the way of Colorado and can be similarly relied upon in future elections as a key component of the Democrats’ new Sunbelt coalition, a perfect inversion of the “Southern Strategy” that Nixon pursued in 1968. If there’s any truth to that narrative, already in the early stages of formation, it’s worth taking a moment to scrutinize the timing.
These empty nesters with healthy 401(k)s evince little interest in the future, preferring instead to pad their present earnings as much as possible.
If growth alone had some correlation with political preference, Arizona ought to have turned bluer much more quickly than Colorado, given it has added an astounding 2.3 million residents this century, compared to a (still admittedly eye-popping) 1.6 million for Colorado. New Arizonans have become less and less white, with the state’s population shooting from 25 percent to 32.5 percent Hispanic; meanwhile, only about one in five Coloradans are Hispanic. No, the demographic shift that aligned the Rocky Mountain State with the West’s other blue redoubts was less about its racial makeup or raw population than a flood of highly educated workers. Between 2000 and 2020, the share of Colorado’s population with at least a college degree jumped from 32 percent to 44 percent. Arizona’s remains at around 33 percent, two points lower than the national average. (Luckily for Democrats all over the country, the political engagement of highly educated voters means they typically represent a disproportionate share of the electorate, as Hobbs’s election in 2022 attests.)
Given the recent gains Republicans have made with minorities, educational attainment has become a more reliable predictor of voting behavior; it certainly does a better job of explaining why Colorado’s politics changed so dramatically at the same time Arizona has been largely stuck in neutral. In 2004, Democrats took control of the Colorado legislature for the first time in four decades and elected Ken Salazar to the Senate, even as George W. Bush narrowly carried the state’s electoral votes. The Los Angeles Times called Colorado a “bright spot” in “a year of crushing disappointment” for Democrats, yet the state GOP remained complacent, with an aide to then governor Bill Owens telling the paper, “We were caught napping . . . If we do the mechanics, we’ll be fine.” White knowledge workers kept flooding in, lured by exceptional hiking, craft beer, and legal weed. A Republican hasn’t won a statewide election since.
While the national polarization of the electorate along educational lines gives some credence to Teixeira and Judis’s argument about a postindustrial economy being fertile ground for progressive politicians, the countervailing trend of non-white voters drifting conservative has made the electoral alliance they envisioned a fleeting one. In 2022, Teixeira took stock of why his Democratic majority never really emerged. “If you look at the nonwhite working class—black, Hispanic, Asian, but particularly driven by Hispanics—Democrats have lost 19 margin points between 2012 and 2020, while they’ve gained 16 margin points among white college-educated voters,” he told the Wall Street Journal. It seemed clear to him that the strength of Democrats in that year’s midterms had less to do with the party having forged an enduring electoral coalition than the toxic politics of Donald Trump. “You won’t always have Trump to kick around. You’re going to have to deal with smarter, better versions of a similar thing.”
Sub in Kari Lake, and you have a pretty good warning for Democrats in Arizona. Yes, liberals are on a great run in the state; squint, and you can even make an analogy to California, with SB 1070 playing the role of Prop 187. But while three out of every four Californios supported Joe Biden back in 2020, only about 60 percent of Hispanics in Arizona voted the same way. Not only do voters in the Golden State have higher educational attainment, they’re also far less likely to be registered as independents. The reality of politics in Arizona is that many voters are persuaded less by policy than by candidates who reflect their proud iconoclasm.
Still, the slight blue tilt of Arizona has lasted long enough that the trend may very well continue through election day. If it does, the state will have only proved itself to be a microcosm of the twenty-first-century Democratic Party. As much as they may espouse their commitment to racial justice and bodily autonomy, national Democrats have fallen fully under the sway of corporate benefactors, making them incapable of offering any coherent plan for regulating financial services, tech, oil, or any of the other industries that have created contemporary America, where the rich keep getting richer as we speed toward ecological catastrophe. Little will change the longer Democrats lean so hard into the center that they become the country club Republicans of yesteryear, this time with gay friends. Whatever electoral gains this soulless brand of Democratic politics translates to in the short term are sure to be temporary, especially in a place like Arizona, where a deregulated market and infinite growth are tantamount to the state religion.
There will always be John McCains and Doug Duceys waiting in the wings, and who knows, once the Arizona GOP gets tired of losing close elections, they might just start nominating those guys for office. Once all the Blake Masters and Abe Hamadehs have skulked back to their lairs, Arizonans will face a not particularly challenging choice. Would you rather elect the Democrat who promises tax cuts with a side of social progressivism you don’t care about? Or a Republican who stays quiet on abortion and LGBTQ rights but will guarantee you a bigger portion of your paycheck? For anyone who would prefer that the curtain of the voting booth be the swinging door of a Wickenburg saloon, the choice is perhaps best put in even simpler terms, as the only question that ever seems to be on anyone’s mind out there in the Sonoran Desert: “What’s it pay?”