Barack Obama is again back in Arizona today. He was here a couple of months ago to announce the mortgage relief plan. He also rescued Janet Napolitano from the Governor’s mansion with the Homeland Security position. Arizona is in a horrible budget mess and no governor is going to be popular having to slice spending and raise taxes.
While McCain won Arizona easily, the state is changing. There are more people moving from California than Midwestern retirees. The Republicans have to be very careful with their anti-immigration base. Local talk radio, Sherriff Joe, and the Letters to the Editor section of the Arizona Republic show a Republican base that is obsessed with immigration. This could really hurt the Republicans in coming years as Pete Wilson’s anti-immigration stand did in California.
So, can Arizona become like Nevada and Colorado? If not solid blue, at least a strong purple?
Sure he is. If you remember there were some surprisingly tight polls right before the election and there was even some talk of Obama pulling off an upset in Arizona. That was always unlikely and McCain won comfortably but it’s quite possible that Obama would have beaten someone else in the state. Arizona isn’t immune to geographical and demographic trends so it’s a leading candidate for a red state going blue.
Obama probably isn't going to need Arizona to win re-election; if he wins there he will have won the election elsewhere but ideally he wants a blow-out in 2012 with somewhere close to 400 EV's giving him a big mandate going into his next term.
The only reason Arizona voted for McCain is that he’s their senator. If he hadn’t been the nominee, it would have gone blue. Also, I wouldn’t exactly call 9 percent a comfortable margin.
Arizona probably would have been a bit closer if it wasn’t obvious that Obama was going to win as returns came in. Also, the Yes on Marriage folks were very highly organized and I imagine most of them voted for McCain. Unlike CA, there was almost no opposition to the gay marriage ban in Arizona. AZ had rejected a ban earlier, so the supporters of the ban were extremely motivated to get out and vote.
Well Bill Clinton won Arizona in 1996. You have to remember Obama’s win was really a reaction against GW Bush not an endorsment of him. Just like a vote for Humphrey was pretty much an endorsement against the much hated LBJ.
Plus historically when the economy tanks the party in office, gets thrown out.
We won’t really know till 2012 if this was a real change, like Reagan’s victory in 1980 or just a backlash.
The wave of Californians coming here is over for now. It will come back for sure, but who knows if that will be before 2012. Possible, but I kind of doubt it. There are a lot of them here, indeed, but the population of Arizona is still largely whites from the midwest and the south (incl. TX), native Americans who don’t vote, and Mexicans who are split on the abortion issue.
On Edit: And just to clarify I mean people whose roots are in the midwest and south, not necessarily that they moved here after they were born.
One the one hand - Bush won Arizona by 11%. McCain, with his hometown advantage, won it by a smaller 9%. On the face of it one would say that it is moving purplish - you gotta figure at least 4% for native son effect - so it was probably within only 5% of a GOP partisan advantage. Right?
Wrong. What matters is how partisan the state is to the mean. Overall Bush won in 2004 by 3% and Obama won by 7%. AZ was 8% over the national mean GOP in 2004 and 16% over that mean in 2008. 8% more. Sure some of that was native son effect but in comparison Obama’s IL victory, large as it was, was only an additional 4% over Illinois’ Democratic lean in 2004. Native son advantage does seem to be worth that much.
No, Arizona is not yet leaning too purplish. But Obama the political animal thinks a long game. Large Hispanic population, pretty damn poor, a growing youth vote, and may benefit from some stimulus investments … four years, eight years, small investments now may bear fruit for the party that he personally may not need or even benefit from, but he’ll still water those seeds.
It is the fastest growing state and while we may think of it as a very rural area it actually has the highest proportion of people who live in cities of 100K or more. About 30% of the population is Hispanic and that is the state’s fastest growing population. “Arizona is projected to become a minority-majority state by the year 2035, if current population growth trends continue.” Religious ID? 25% Catholic and 22% “non-religious/unaffiliated”.
Obama recognizes that urban metro areas are his demographic strong suit and that the Democratic party needs to become the home for Hispanics if it is to consolidate its place on top for a long haul. This means attending to AZ even be it still quite Red. Heck it even means that he’ll put some not so subtle campaigning into a Texas Senate campaign if indeed Hutchison resigns to run for Governor as Cornyn predicts.
Internal polling up the last month or so had Arizona as a toss up. The Obama campaign had to decide which state(s) to put resources into: Indiana, Georgia, Arizona, Virgina, et al.
I think Arizona was towards the end of that list, but with more pushing, it could have been very light pink, instead of red.
