Independents hold power in AZ

There are still votes to be counted in Arizona and races to be decided. But the key takeaway is already clear: Independents are now the political kingmakers in the state.

The focus on the extent to which Arizona has turned blue has obscured this. There’s no question that Democrats have substantially improved their standing. They narrowed the Republican registration and turnout advantage. In this election in Arizona, they substantially outraised and outspent the GOP. That was true of what candidates raised directly and what was spent by independent expenditure campaigns.

But, in terms of share of the Arizona electorate, Republicans remain the plurality party. While the Republican advantage has narrowed, undoubtedly still more Republicans than Democrats voted in this election.

And party loyalty has, if anything, strengthened. Crossover voting – a Republican voting for a Democrat or vice versa – doesn’t appear to have played as much of a role in this election as it did in 2018, when Democrats won some statewide offices for the first time in over a decade.

That leaves independents as the decision-makers, even if they continue to lag behind in turnout.

Tracing trends since 2014, which was the height of Republican domination of state politics, is instructive.

That year, Democrats fielded an allstar team of highly qualified candidates for state offices, from governor to school superintendent. Yet they all lost, most bigtime, by around 10 percentage points.

In 2014, Republicans in the state outnumbered Democrats by 178,000 registrants. They constituted more than 40% of turnout. They didn’t need to do all that well with independents to get over the top.

In April of this year, Democrats had narrowed the registration disadvantage to just 94,000. That increased to 130,000 by Election Day. Republicans actually outperformed Democrats on this score going into the election.

But that is a meaningfully smaller GOP advantage in an electorate that is a million voters larger than it was in 2014. Republicans can no longer simply assume that they will get sufficient independent votes to get over the top. They have to compete and earn them, which they failed to do this election. Every indication is that independents tilted strongly toward Democrats in this election.

That was true nationwide, but was particularly influential in Arizona, where independents are nearly a third of the electorate.

Arizona’s changing political results are often attributed to demographic changes, out-of-staters moving into Republican strongholds and increasing numbers of Latino voters. But the demography of the state isn’t that much different than it was in 2014, when Republicans swept the table, and those trends were in place in the years leading up to 2014.

Instead, I think it is the Trump effect. Donald Trump has been highly damaging to GOP fortunes in Arizona.

He was a weak candidate here in 2016, winning the state by just 3.5 percentage points, compared to the 9 percentage points by which Mitt Romney had carried the state just four years earlier. Trump ran more than 100,000 votes behind John McCain in 2016, who was on the same ballot for U.S. Senate.

Trump is a base rattler, but not a base expander or a persuader of independents. The consequences of that can be seen here in Maricopa County.

Republicans still outnumber Democrats in the county by more than 100,000 registrants. But Democrats are doing well in races for county offices, low-visibility affairs that usually are decided on the basis of party identification.

Trump’s problems in the suburbs have been widely discussed and well documented. Well, the Phoenix metro area is, in substantial part, one giant suburb. And independents in Maricopa County actually outnumber Democrats.

Independent turnout still lags considerably behind that of Republicans and Democrats. But, in this election, that will probably still total around 900,000 votes.

It used to be that independents had to tilt strongly in one direction or the other to determine the outcome. With Democrats substantially narrowing the Republican registration and turnout advantage, just a nod can now make the difference.

Some think independents are mostly closet partisans and aren’t really that much up for grabs. My observation, at least in Arizona, is different. I think they do toggle between the parties, depending on the year, the candidates and the issues.

Among them is where at least the next few Arizona elections will be decided. And fought, if Republicans have the wit to learn how the political landscape has shifted underneath them.