He’s annoyingly popular outside of Arizona. Tough “law and order” guys always have a following. They’ve never had to deal with the downside on a daily basis - the lawsuits specifically, but the general buffoonery as well. They may have found the abuses of power something they would have liked, though.
Other than the politics, Arizona is a nice place to live. But the politics! Ugh. We may not get Arpaio, but we might get “Chemtrail Kelli”.
Johnny Ace, you’re probably right, but if the Bannon/Mercer conservative takes enough votes from the ‘establishment’ candidate and those most stalwart Arpaio voters stick with him, well, we’ve already seen what can happen in Alabama.
But he is 85 and according to rumors, hearsay, and innuendo, he’s mentally ‘not all there’. And as others have pointed out, it will energize the opposition something fierce.
Not that this appears to be a insolvable problem in American politics (and I’m not just talking about the present, check out our interesting history sometime).
There’s also the Green party candidate (whoever he is) that will run and suck votes away from the Democrat. I wouldn’t make any kind of prediction on this one, other than that my general sense is that Arpaio would lose. And none of my senses are reliable since Nov. of 2016.
The good thing is that Arizona Democrats don’t tend to be especially pure and most understand they don’t have the luxury of throwing their votes away on silly Green party candidates.
Immigration issues shouldn’t dominate in 2018 unless the economy heads seriously south. Arizona was walloped in the housing crisis and Jan Brewer and the Republicans hid their tax increases behind the stupid ‘papers please’ law. The Democrats do need to make sure they don’t make DACA a hill to die on, however. Get something done, but don’t make it front page news for months at a time.
Arpaio might be able to raise money out of state, but I wonder how much serious donations will an 85 year old first time Senate candidate will get during a year which is shaping up to be a Democratic wave.
Bear in mind one other point: the Sheriff’s election in 2016 happened two weeks before Arpaio was indicted. I’d expect at least a little blowback from that scenario as well.
Arpaio vs Kyrsten Sinema, the likely dem candidate… Who wins?
tbh I’ve been puzzled why everyone considers her to be such a strong recruit. She’s a bisexual agnostic running in Arizona… this to me sounds like a poor fit for a southwestern purple state. With her last name, the attack ads practically write themselves.
And when you consider that we did when we got rid of Arpaio in the past election, I see that a similar thing will take place in the senate election.
Over here in Arizona even Republicans did notice that some of their leaders do cost dearly to the treasury with their pursuit of their extremist views (not only on the money wasted defending the likes of Arpaio, but with the lost opportunities when businesses avoided coming to Arizona when Arapaio and law maker henchmen where making bigoted laws and enforcing them.)
We really need to purge all those Republican congress critters. Specially when they are clearly incompetent and with the ugliest character.
Arizona is one of the less religious states, and I think it’s the only state where a referendum against gay marriage failed back when those were in vogue (it later passed in a watered-down form, but I think there were no other states where the harshest version of the ban was put up for a vote but failed).
Would it be wrong if I thought it would be great if Joe Arpaio was to suffer a stroke and brain damage that left him completely paralyzed, in immense physical agony, and fully conscious but intermittently afflicted with terrifying hallucinations and periodic drops in dopamine and serotonin levels that turned his consciousness into a Black Mirror-style nightmare?
I’m truly thinking about whether or not this would be wrong. You know, I think it would be wrong.
If I’m going to fantasize about things, my fantasy should be something positive. So my fantasy is going to be that Joe Arpaio spontaneously decides to donate all of his assets to the families of all the people he hurt and killed, delivers a vociferous speech completely disavowing and denouncing the abuses of the US penal system and admitting that he was a part of it and apologizing for it, and then takes a vow of poverty and goes to live in a monastery and spends the rest of his existence asking God for forgiveness and performing labor at the monastery to produce some kind of item that is sold to raise money to be contributed to help the needy.
Yes, that’s going to my fantasy about Joe Arpaio.
Definitely.
Really.
I’m not going to think that first thing anymore. I’m seriously going to try to not think it at all. In fact I am trying right now. Very hard.
The Green candidate is Eve Reyes Aguirre - https://www.evereyesaguirre.com/
The Democrats include former Iowa state Representative Richard Sherzan
and Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema