Arizona Dreamin’

By Kyle Paoletta

When it comes to Arizona, you’re better off ignoring the pundit’s prognostications. As Kyle Paoletta argues in our latest issue, politics in the Grand Canyon State have never followed an obvious trajectory.

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.”

“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.”

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.

Continue reading “Arizona Dreamin’,” an essay by Kyle Paoletta, on our site.

Subscribe

You received this email because you signed up for The Baffler’s newsletter mailing list, have a Baffler subscription, donated to our foundation, or contributed to the magazine. Want to change how you receive these emails? Update your preferences, or unsubscribe from this list. For questions about your subscription, contact Customer Care.

To ensure our email updates reach your inbox, please add newsletter@thebaffler.com to your email Address Book.