Yes , it was an unusual election cycle. . .Had Lake and her fellow extremists won, the result would have presented one of the greatest challenges to American democracy in modern times, with the political apparatus of a major swing state now dedicated to perpetuating Trump’s Big Lie and the corrosive, authoritarian politics that follows in its wake. Fortunately, enough independent voters shunned the GOP to head the extremists off at the pass.
Feature
How Democrats Beat Arizona’s Extremist Republicans
Had
the likes of Kari Lake taken office, it would have presented one of the
greatest challenges to American democracy in modern times.
Sasha Abramsky
"...In 2020, Arizona went for Biden by a 10,000-vote margin. The result sent Trump and his acolytes into paroxysms of rage and ultimately led to the much-derided Maricopa County “audit.” Two years later, with the state’s GOP primary voters having plunged the party into the realm of QAnon madness, none of the wounds of 2020 have fully scabbed over. The trio of candidates for top statewide offices—Lake, the charismatic onetime Fox News anchor, for governor; Abe Hamadeh for attorney general; and Mark Finchem for secretary of state—were all election deniers who’d pledged to use the power of their office to ensure Republican victories in closely contested races. “The GOP governor’s candidate is talking about nothing but the supposedly stolen election and culture war issues,” said Tom Prezelski, who served as a Democratic state House member from 2003 to ‘09 and is now an author and political analyst. “The Democratic candidate is talking about water issues and people’s actual problems and governing, whereas Kari Lake is mostly about grievances.” Meanwhile, Hamadeh has presided over campaign rallies at which his supporters chant “Lock them up!” in reference to Maricopa County election officials.
Many moderate Republicans, including John Giles, the mayor of Mesa—who boasts that it’s one of the most populous cities in the United States with a Republican mayor—joined liberals in seeing the Lake-Hamadeh-Finchem combo as an unprecedented threat to the functioning of American democracy. Giles had very publicly endorsed Katie Hobbs, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, as well as Mark Kelly. He worried that if Lake were elected, there would be no brakes on an increasingly extreme GOP caucus in the state Legislature, and he feared what her election would mean for the future of fair political competition in his state. “Silence is not an option in this election,” he said. “Silence is acquiescence.” In the final weeks of the campaign, outgoing Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney came to Arizona to stump for Democrats and against the election-denying troika of GOP hopefuls.
“American democracy runs through the state of Arizona in ‘22. You can’t put it any other way,” said Kris Mayes, a onetime Republican who quit the party in disgust during Trump’s presidency and was now running for attorney general as a Democrat. On the wall in her dining room was a black-and-white photograph from the early ’80s showing her and her brother as young children sitting on a cliff atop Mount Whitney. She was, she said proudly, the youngest person in 50 years to reach its summit. Now Mayes wanted her 9-year-old daughter to know one day that her mother had the strength and moral fortitude to leave a GOP that, she believed, had committed itself to a “hellish road” under the amoral leadership of Donald Trump.
Summiting a mountain is an eerily apt metaphor for the political challenge she and her fellow Democrats faced as they attempted to defy midterm patterns and wrestle a traditionally conservative state away from their Republican opponents. Hamadeh, Mayes said with contempt, would “impose an 1864 abortion ban and would probably engage in a coup against our government if given the opportunity.” By her reckoning, the results would come down to which way a relatively small number of independent voters broke in the final weeks of the race. “The independents of Arizona are going to determine the future of the country,” she said. “It’s an all-out battle for their votes. It’s a do-or-die moment.”
Although Arizona has historically been a Republican state, in recent election cycles it has gone from red to purple to, at least in federal elections, a light shade of blue. Many moderate GOP voters, said a regional Republican consultant who asked to remain anonymous, “woke up and said, ‘I can’t take four more years of this shit.’ Donald Trump’s persona—people just said, ‘Enough is enough.’” The state has two Democratic senators, both elected under Trump, and in 2020, after the vast voter registration and mobilization efforts spearheaded by Unite Here Local 11 and other unions and a huge voter turnout for Biden in the Navajo Nation and other tribal communities, its Electoral College votes went to Biden.
On many of the key issues of the day, from abortion to January 6 to climate change and immigration, Arizona voters are to the left of the GOP politicians who run the state and the candidates who ran for statewide and federal office in 2022.
Tucson, in Arizona’s far south, has long been a liberal redoubt. Over the past several election cycles, it has increasingly been joined by the population center of Phoenix (America’s fifth-largest city) and surrounding Maricopa County, which have gone from being bastions of the sort of racist, demagogic politics preached by longtime sheriff Joe Arpaio—who was finally booted out by voters in 2016 after 24 years in office—to leaning Democratic. The mayor of Phoenix, Kate Gallego, is a Democrat, and its city council has a Democratic majority that pushes progressive housing, labor, and wage ordinances.
Yet, mirroring the urban/rural divide in so much of the country, most other areas of Arizona remain in thrall to a radical-right vision of politics. These days, in place of Barry Goldwater and the John Birch Society, the state’s GOP hews to Trump, Steve Bannon, QAnon, and other toxic emblems of the far right. High-profile figures like state Senator Wendy Rogers and US Representative Paul Gosar routinely pay homage to white nationalist groups, and Republican primary voters routinely reward them for their excesses. On November 8, Rogers and Gosar both coasted to reelection.
As a result of this increasing divergence between the urban centers of Phoenix and Tucson and the rest of the state, Arizona went into November on a political precipice. The governor’s race was listed as a toss-up, although Lake, the firebrand MAGA candidate, maintained a small lead over the last couple months of the campaign. Kelly, the Democratic senator, was favored to win against his challenger, Blake Masters, who’d been catapulted into the Republican nomination through a combination of Trump’s endorsement and PayPal founder Peter Thiel’s copious financial backing. In the final weeks of the campaign, with early voting under way, the polls tightened dramatically, and the race went from “leaning Democrat” to being a dead heat. The races for secretary of state and attorney general were polling within the margin of error, though over the last month of their campaigns both GOP candidates led in the polls, despite the fact that their Democratic opponents far outspent them on TV ads. At least three of the state’s nine congressional seats were in swing districts, and Republicans were favored to make gains on the back of a redistricting process that, while nominally independent, had heavily skewed in the GOP’s favor. Both houses of the state Legislature had two-seat Republican majorities that, at least at the start of the campaign season, and especially in the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, senior Democratic Party strategists were hopeful they’d be able to flip. . .
> O’Halleran lost to Eli Crane by more than eight points. But statewide, as the votes were slowly tabulated, it became apparent that things weren’t going according to the GOP’s plan. True, the newly redrawn congressional districts, tailor-made to hurt O’Halleran and two other Democrats, had garnered the Republicans an additional few seats, which would prove to be crucial given the tiny majority the party would have in the new Congress. But other races hadn’t gone as well. . .
> Tyler Montague, a moderate GOP consultant based in Mesa who cut his teeth during the McCain years, has made increasingly urgent entreaties about the danger to democracy represented by the likes of Kari Lake. He couldn’t help but feel some schadenfreude witnessing the GOP’s troubles. He had, after all, been warning about the extremists and their “clown show” for months. A big man dressed in shorts, a T-shirt, and sandals, he talked politics standing in his kitchen, mixing up a batch of onion dip for his teenage daughter’s party later that day. Every so often he gleefully grabbed a handful of chips and tasted his concoction, continually adding spices, chopped onions, or mayonnaise.
“It should have been a no-lose year for Republicans—nationally, but in Arizona as well,” he said slowly. “But these super-Trumpy candidates weren’t selected by Trump for their electability, but for their willingness to repeat his election conspiracies.”
Montague took particular pleasure in the voters’ passage of Proposition 308, which allows undocumented students to pay in-state tuition at public universities and colleges. He’d helped run the campaign for the ballot initiative and had solicited donations from moderate Republicans such as former senator Jeff Flake. In the end, in the face of a concerted effort by much of the state’s extremist GOP to defeat the measure, Arizona voters had repudiated its appeals to nativism. Lake had said she would activate state forces to repel an “invasion” at the southern border and had ramped up the anti-immigrant rhetoric as the election wore on. But Arizonans not only rejected her; they also sided with their better angels when it came to the state’s thousands of Dreamer youth.
As Adrian Fontes settled into his new job, he pondered the close call that democracy had just undergone in Arizona. He was under no illusions that the dangers from election deniers and anti-democracy voices had fully receded. “As long as there are people willing to buy snake oil, the snake oil salesmen will make money,” he said. But, he added after a short pause, he was feeling somewhat optimistic about the future.
“God willing and the creek don’t rise, we’ll still be here after the next cycle,” he declared. “We’re going to come in with an open heart and an open mind and show the naysayers and the doubters that the people running our election system are not frauds and fakers. They are our neighbors.”
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