Arizona: A loose brick in Republicans’ red wall

Felecia Rotellini’s father, who is 104, was incensed when his family took away his car keys two years ago. He was born in a Wyoming company town that no longer exists because the coal company that owned the town is long gone. The town of Cambria, and elsewhere in Wyoming, had many coal-mining immigrants from Italy, including some relatives of Leon Panetta, the former defense secretary, CIA director and White House chief of staff.
Rotellini’s father’s father was a union organiser at a time when that was a more hazardous occupation than his day job of subsurface mining. He died of black lung disease. The organiser’s granddaughter, an apple that did not fall far from the tree, came by her politics by family transmission. She calls herself “a John Kennedy Democrat.”
Petite in size but large in ambition, as chair of Arizona’s Democratic Party she travels constantly in her effort to deliver the state’s 11 electoral votes (more than Wisconsin’s 10) to Joe Biden, who currently has a lead of up to eight points over Donald Trump in state polls. This is one of three states (the others are Texas and Georgia) where, for Democrats, tomorrow is always full of promise but is always a day away. In 2020, however, Arizona, which has long been emblematic of Sun Belt conservatism, might be where Democrats do unto Trump what he did unto them in 2016.
Then he won by carrying three states (Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania) that had voted Democratic in at least six consecutive presidential elections. Arizona voted for President Truman in 1948. The next year, a harbinger of its conservative-libertarian future, 40-year-old Barry Goldwater, was elected to the Phoenix city council, en route to the US Senate in 1953 and the Republican presidential nomination in 1964. Arizona was the only state to vote Republican in all 11 elections 1952-1992.
It voted for Bill Clinton in 1996, but since then has remained in the Republican fold. In 2012, Mitt Romney carried it by 9.1 percentage points. But in 2016, Trump won 24 of his 30 states by larger margins than the 3.6 percentage points by which he defeated Hillary Clinton (48.7% to 45.1%) in Arizona.
Under its current master, who holds it on a short leash, the Republican Party has difficulties in suburbs, where education levels are inconveniently (for Republicans) high, and women have a peculiar abhorrence of ignorance coarsely expressed. Phoenix, the nation’s fifth-largest city, has suburbs that are cities: Tempe is larger than Providence, Rhode Island, Scottsdale is larger than Salt Lake City, Mesa is larger than St. Louis, Glendale is larger than Des Moines. Phoenix and its suburbs are in Maricopa County, where Hillary Clinton came within 45,000 votes of defeating Trump, and which in 2016 cast 60% of Arizona’s votes. Another 18% come from another two of the state’s 15 counties, Pima (Tucson) and Coconino (Flagstaff).
In 2018, Arizona Democrats won a 5-4 majority in the US House delegation and elected a Democratic US Senator, Kyrsten Sinema. This year the Democratic candidate, former astronaut Mark Kelly, is favoured to defeat Sen. Martha McSally. She lost to Sinema but was appointed to the Senate after the death of John McCain. The last time Arizona had two Democratic senators was 1952, when television sets were still novelties. Democrats need to gain only two state House seats and three state Senate seats to control the legislature for the first time since 1966, when many
television sets were still black-and-white. The secretary of state and superintendent of public education are Democrats.
Every day an average of 200 people bring their politics with them as they move to Phoenix. Arizona trails only Florida and Nevada among states with the lowest percentage of native-born residents.
Rotellini had the misfortune to run for state attorney general in two dreadful years for Democrats, 2010 (during the tea party
backlash against George
W. Bush’s Troubled Asset Relief Program – TARP, Obamacare and other grievances) and 2014 (the midterm election during the second term of a president from her party). As she toils to turn Arizona blue, Trump is being helpful.
In his exuberant disregard of constitutional niceties, he “repurposed” (Washington’s preferred euphemism for nullifying Congress’ power of the purse) $30 million appropriated for construction at Arizona’s US Army Fort Huachuca to spend on his $18 billion border wall, which a majority of Arizonans oppose.
Speaking of walls, this year Trump will have to spend time and money to hold Arizona, another increasingly loose brick in the red wall that has protected Republicans’ increasingly narrow path to 270 electoral votes. Two other such bricks are Texas and Georgia. Stay tuned.

—The Washington Post

George F. Will is an American
conservative political commentator. He writes regular columns for The Washington Post and provides commentary for NBC News and MSNBC