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
Had
the likes of Kari Lake taken office, it would have presented one of the
greatest challenges to American democracy in modern times.
By Sasha Abramsky Twitter
January 3, 2023
"...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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