Can Arizona save the nation?
APHOENIX few hours before the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was announced, I was sitting in the central Phoenix location of Salvadoreño. Owner Ysenia Ramirez and her son arrived in the Phoenix area from Southern California in 2006, joining her parents who had made the move a decade earlier.
Ramirez, who came to the United States from El Salvador as a child, thought little about politics when she first moved to Arizona. “I didn’t even realize it was a Republican state,” she told me. But she slowly became engaged, thanks to two controversies: the scandals of former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and the passage of the anti-immigrant Senate Bill 1070, which allowed law enforcement to ask people for their immigration paperwork if they suspected they were undocumented.
Now? Ramirez is so supportive of Joe Biden, she took part in a small-business roundtable last week designed to promote his campaign. “One of the biggest things I’ve noticed about the Trump campaign is that it comes at a cost,” Ramirez said. “They rave about wanting to be conservative and family comes first, but which family? It’s not my color family that’s coming first. It’s not my gay friend’s family.”
It’s voters like Ramirez who are turning once solidly Republican Arizona into a presidential swing state. In 2012, Mitt Romney defeated Barack Obama by a 10-point margin. In 2016, Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by just four points. In 2018, Arizona voters sent Democrat Kyrsten Sinema to the Senate — the first time a Democrat won a Senate election since the early 1980s. Now polls show Biden with a small but consistent lead over Trump. He’s leading Trump among women, Latinos and even voters over 65 who are horrified by the president’s inept handling of the COVID19 pandemic.
As a result, Arizona is shaping up to be a pivotal state — perhaps the pivotal state — in the presidential election. Without it, Trump’s path to victory is extremely narrow. “We have the opportunity to decide the next president of the United States,” says Bettina Nava, owner of Phoenix-based OH Strategic Communications and a former regional campaign manager for Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign.
Much of the opportunity for Democrats rests in demographics. Arizona is one of the fastest-growing states in the nation, fueled, in part, by former Californians such as Ramirez attracted by the state’s relatively low real estate prices and reputation for economic opportunity. The state’s Latino population is growing — as longtime Republican political consultant Jim Ellis recently pointed out, Latinos and Blacks are responsible for two-thirds of the state’s population growth since the last presidential election.
But it’s also true that the political change in Arizona would almost certainly not be possible without Republicans who are troubled by what Trump has wrought over the past four years. McCain voted to prevent the Trump administration from overturning the Affordable Care Act. Former Sen. Jeff Flake says he’s backing Biden.
In the view of Yasser Sanchez, a conservative immigration lawyer, Trump’s violation of norms, not to mention open racism, is a turnoff to many traditional Republicans. College-educated voters, for instance, “respect institutions” and don’t like Trump’s open politicization of the courts. Sanchez is so outraged, he’s paying out of his own pocket to place anti-Trump messages aimed at the state’s Latino community on billboards on the side of Interstate 10, the main highway in Maricopa County. “I left the GOP a year ago. Or I should say the GOP left me,” he told me.
Ginsburg’s death could cut both ways in Arizona. It could serve to further cement the movement of suburban white women to Biden, but it could also remind Republicans of the stakes and bring some back to Trump.
But maybe the more important point is the arc of history. Arizona, in some ways, experienced the Trump years long before Trump was president, as Andrei Cherny, former chairman of the Arizona Democratic Party, reminded me. SB 1070 became law in 2010 and spent years in court challenges. The rhetoric in Arizona was heated and charged, violent and ghastly.
It’s hard not to wonder, looking at the poll numbers, if Arizona is simply tired of political divisiveness and those who would incite it. When I touched base with Ramirez on Monday, she said Ginsburg’s death highlighted the stakes of the election for many of her friends and relations. “Before it was OK but a little passive,” she told me. “I think I’ve seen a surge in support toward Biden.”