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Perhaps the end of the Republican rule over Arizona began in November 2016 when Joe Arpaio was ousted from office after 24 years.
Arpaio was a sheriff in Maricopa County, the largest county in the country. He called himself the toughest sheriff in America. He locked the prisoners in the scorching heat in tent cities and put iron chains on the feet of the prisoners. Arpaio was Arizona, until suddenly she wasn’t.
Luis Ávila locates the change earlier. Ten years ago, the Democratic Party began to systematically build a voter base, Avila says by phone. As a community organizer in Phoenix, he helps immigrants prepare for government and party positions.
Half a million new voters
“We work all year long, not just like we did in election years,” he says. “We have registered half a million new voters in ten years. We have forged a coalition of youth, urban voters, Latinos and other minority groups.”
That coalition should lead Democrats across the country to victory. But as these elections have shown, in some places it is more a wish than a reality. In Arizona, he helped Joe Biden and his party win.
Before Biden, Bill Clinton was the only Democratic president in Arizona to win in 68 years. Trump was still nearly four percentage points ahead in 2016.
And not only that, for the first time since the 1950s, Arizona is sending two Democratic senators to Washington. Former astronaut Mark Kelly clearly defeated Republican incumbent Martha McSally.
This is not just the result of the construction work that the party has done here. The state has fundamentally changed in the last 30 years and with it the political landscape.
In some places, Arizona, it appears that the American border is still being defended by pioneers. Not surprisingly, the “Museum of the West” is located here, which means the Wild West.
Arizona is changing rapidly
Other regions, on the other hand, have seen impressive developments. The Phoenix metropolitan area is one of the fastest growing regions in the United States.
Some of the newcomers come from the Midwest. They are people fleeing the freezing winters of their homeland. Many also come from California, where life now costs so much that fewer and fewer citizens can afford it. They are middle class people who are not tied to a party.
And then there are the immigrants from Mexico, Central and South America. Latinos now make up nearly a third of the population. Activists like Avila have built a wide network to win over the Democrats. According to initial polls, Latinos voted more than 70 percent for Biden in 2020.
The party has also learned from its mistakes. Hillary Clinton largely ignored Arizona in 2016 under the false belief that she didn’t need the state. Biden and his runner-up Kamala Harris, on the other hand, held campaign events in Arizona and invested millions in campaigns.
20,000 saved votes
Democrats have gradually built a powerful grassroots organization. This has allowed them to take action against voter suppression, which is also widespread in Arizona. According to the party, around 20,000 votes that were supposed to be counted as invalid were later declared valid in 2016. The party was well prepared for 2020.
In the end, a local factor may also have contributed to Biden’s victory. The late Republican Senator John McCain was worshiped across partisan lines by Arizonans. Trump, on the other hand, had said of him, among other things, that McCain was not a hero because he had been captured in the Vietnam War. Trump on the highly decorated airman: “I like people who weren’t caught, okay?”
Even the Republicans were outraged. McCain’s widow Cindy even asked on Twitter to vote for Biden:
His former adviser, Mike Murphy, said that Biden’s choice was McCain’s belated revenge. The sentence can be heard over and over again on CNN’s election shows and the experts surveyed.
But the reasons for Arizona’s tips run deeper. “What we have built is stable,” says Ávila. “That will last longer than this election.”
