24,000 have abandoned state GOP this year

As the Arizona Republican Party continues its obsession with the 2020 election — recounting, weighing and inspecting our ballots for nefarious folds and nonexistent water marks — party leaders may want to shine one of their UV lights on a different set of documents.

Arizona’s voter registration rolls. New quarterly numbers show nearly 24,000 Republican voters have walked away from the party since January, when Senate President Karen Fann issued the subpoena that launched her elections audit.

Granted, it’s not a big number — just 1.5% of the party now gone. But you’ve got to actually work at it to be shrinking in one of the fastest growing states in the nation.

No one has worked harder at it that state Republican Party Chairwoman Kelli Ward, a Trump fanatic who sees an election conspiracy behind every bush. The party she leads censured the highest Republican elected official in the state, Gov. Doug Ducey, for telling the truth that Joe Biden won Arizona.

Before Democrats start cheering the Republican losses, they may want to look at their own voter registration numbers. Over 6,000 Democrats disappeared during the first three months of 2021, according to the latest voter registration numbers. That’s well under Republican desertions but still a loss of 0.5% in a growing state.

Meanwhile, independent voters grew by 1.7%, picking up nearly 23,000 voters during the first quarter. There are now more independents in Arizona than there are Democrats.

That’s something for the party’s progressive base to ponder as they consider whether to try to replace the party’s centrist Sen. Kyrsten Sinema with a more liberal candidate in 2024. Democrats are furious with Sinema for the apparently unforgivable sin of standing in the way of President Joe Biden’s sweeping progressive agenda.

There’s a message in the voter numbers. Republicans still lead the state, with nearly 35% of the vote. But independents aren't far behind with more than 32% ... and growing.

“What it shows is the hyperpolarization seen in politics between the two major parties has been pushing folks to the independent column,” pollster Mike Noble, of OH Predictive Insights, told me. “The only issue is, more are leaving the Republican Party than the Democratic Party and that’s because they have a brand issue.”

Noble chalks the declining Republican ranks up to their audit.

“We know a majority of independent or moderate voters don’t believe the election was stolen,” he said. “Yet there is this audit going on that is not very transparent or professionally run. The GOP as a brand, I believe it is im

pacting them and the registration numbers reflect that.”

I hear from those voters all the time, principled Republicans who wonder when the party of conservative values became the cult of Trump.

Count Gary, of Scottsdale, among the 23,559 Republicans who have fled the party during the first three months of the year. He's been a Republican since 1972. In February, he re-registered as an independent. He emailed me a few weeks ago, right after Fann hired a member of the Stop the Steal movement to conduct her “independent” audit of Maricopa County’s election.

“Republican leadership have become right wing extremist and any means to an end operators,” he wrote. “Especially the AZ collection of whackos. I'll continue to vote Democrat across the board until things transform back to normalcy, if they ever do.”

Meanwhile, there is this from the official Twitter account of the Arizona Senate for the Maricopa County audit:

This is the most comprehensive forensic election audit in the history of our galaxy! Everything from voter history and voting machines to paper ballot counts.

— Maricopa Arizona Audit (@ArizonaAudit) May 3, 2021

So says the once-Grand Old Party that has lost 24,000 voters — and its mind.