Year of the woman? In Arizona, it’s
PHOENIX — Melinda Merkel Iyer was a stay-at-home mother and political novice when Donald Trump was elected president. She did not sleep that night.
The next day, Iyer pored over the state legislature’s website, discovered how to track bills, and soon turned her notes on thwarting conservative proposals into a do-it-yourself newsletter.
Five months later, Iyer was live-tweeting from the statehouse to rouse alarm over a school voucher bill that looked likely to pass. Together with Save Our Schools, an alliance of educators and parents that sprang from a postelection Facebook group, she helped collect more than 100,000 signatures against the bill — forcing the issue to a referendum on the ballot this fall.
“We’re not going to sit back anymore and let policies go through in the middle of the night,” Iyer said recently at the Arizona Capitol Museum coffee shop. “I never thought I’d be in a place where I’d know the Koch brothers’ lobbyists by sight — and they’d know me.”
If this is the Year of the Woman in politics, few places are a better showcase than Arizona, where a surge of female activists and candidates is reshaping policy debates and campaign conversations up and down the ballot. In a way, it’s only fitting: Arizona, long an emblem of conservatism, also has a history of shattering stereotypes about women in power. The state leads the nation in electing women as governor — two Democrats and two Republicans — and ties with Vermont for the highest proportion of women in legislatures at 40 percent.
Arizona is a coveted target for Democrats, who hope to flip House seats and the state Legislature. Yet party leaders have repeatedly tried and failed to win big here. Hillary Clinton held out hope of carrying Arizona in 2016, but Trump won by more than 3 percentage points. The state has elected deeply conservative leaders like former Gov. Jan Brewer, and it has been a testing ground for harsh immigration policies later embraced by Trump. Women are playing leading roles in both parties, with Republicans fielding strong female candidates at all levels — a reminder after Clinton’s loss that women do not vote in a bloc.
The state embodies dynamics