Arizona has become an epicenter of political discord and conflict over issues that have roiled the national discourse. In the fall, the outrage over an abortion ban from 1864 and a potential ballot initiative on the issue are likely to motivate Democrats, and the outrage over chaos at the border is expected to motivate Republicans.
The margins in recent elections have been razor-thin: Purple Arizona is very much up for grabs in this election and beyond. Democrats might consider building on their success in recent elections to secure the state as a future Sun Belt bulwark, while Republicans want to re-establish dominance in the state.
Democrats are hoping that the future may be embodied by Representative Ruben Gallego, who is running for a Senate seat to replace Kyrsten Sinema. Kari Lake is his likely Republican opponent.
Arizona may be offering a peek at the future of American politics. The outcome of the Senate race will provide evidence for Arizona’s trajectory: Will the state continue to shade blue as its older conservative base ages, or will it act like a Texas or Florida, with a red conservative attitude and blue pockets in the cities?
Gallego neatly personifies some of the state’s emerging demographic trends. Once a progressive, he now presents himself as a centrist Democrat who is young, Hispanic and — importantly — a striver who came here from the Midwest without connections, money or roots in Arizona. Since territorial days, a big part of Arizona’s pitch to the rest of the country is how friendly it is to newcomers despite the heat and cactus thorns. You can move here cold and get plugged in fast.
70 percent of the adults in Arizona weren’t born here.
The easy on-ramp also applies to politics. Arizona has historically sent lots of people to state and federal offices who seemingly moved here yesterday, and the migratory badge is worn with pride. During the 2020 State of the State address, Gov. Doug Ducey proclaimed himself “a kid from Toledo” and noted that over 70 percent of the adults in Arizona weren’t born there. He asked the assembled legislators who else came from elsewhere. Hands shot up all over the chamber.
Gallego, a Marine Corps veteran, found a marketing job here in March 2006. It allowed him to be closer to his future wife, Kate (who would later become the mayor of Phoenix).
“My life fit into two seabags in the back of my beat-up 1998 Jeep Cherokee,” he wrote in his memoir. He was soon working for a candidate for the Phoenix City Council, organizing volunteers into military-style “fireteams” to go door-knocking in the summer heat. They won. Within a few years, Gallego was in the state House of Representatives, and then four years after that, in Congress, representing South Phoenix, which was one of the most economically hard-hit sections of the state.
The voter registration trendlines aren’t good for Gallego’s party. Democrats suffered a net loss of more than 61,700 in the past four years, compared with a more than 76,400 pickup by the Republicans and a gain of some 138,000 for independents and other registrations.
In other words, the state’s in-migration is not a wind at Gallego’s back, contrary to the belief that liberal Californians or Pacific Northwesterners moving to Arizona are turning the state blue.
Crime and immigration
“So many of these domestic migrants are mad about something they left behind: crime spun out of control, houses got too expensive, traffic got terrible, and they dropped their Democratic membership cards when they got to Arizona,” said Stacy Pearson of Lumen Strategies, a Phoenix consulting group that mainly works for Democrats (though not Gallego). “Even the most socially liberal Democrat wants the government to do something about crime and immigration. They are genuinely angry.”
Polling conducted by Noble Predictive Insights in February showed that among Arizona independents, immigration and inflation were the top concerns, with abortion further down the list behind education, health care and climate change.
These opinion patterns typically favor Republicans, but Gallego may get lucky in running against a relatively weak opponent, Kari Lake. Another transplant, she moved here from Iowa. Lake spent more than two decades as a television news anchor before running a smashmouth campaign for governor in 2022 that ended in a flurry of lies about a stolen election.
She has been all over the place on the state’s abortion ban, which has the religious right worried about her commitment to its signature cause, and she has struggled with fund-raising after a long history of alienating the business-minded establishment faction of the state Republican Party.
Still, polling averages suggest a close race. (A recent Times/Siena poll put Gallego up by four points.) He is half Colombian and half Mexican, which certainly helps in a state where Hispanics are projected to be the largest ethnic group by 2045. The prevailing sentiment among this crucial voting bloc is still Democratic, though with a persistent malaise among younger voters and a heavy lacing of Latino support for Trump. The GOP’s traditional message of faith, family and free enterprise sits well with the sensibilities of many Hispanic newcomers.
Gallego’s path to the seat may have been epitomized by another military migrant to the state who propelled himself into Congress within two years of arrival: Senator John McCain.
A maverick with appeal
McCain used to joke about getting lost on the way to his own rallies. He also defined himself as an ideologically flexible moderate Republican — a “maverick” — with an appeal to centrist Democrats wary of party orthodoxy. Ms. Sinema won her own Senate seat with a similar tack-to-the-middle formula in 2018.
In 2022, Senator Mark Kelly (another combat veteran who moved to Arizona because it was home to his wife) made an echo of McCain’s heterodox profile and conspicuous disdain for money in politics.
The key to Arizona politics lies in finding the squishy and slightly reddish group of voters who call themselves independents — the roughly one-third of the electorate who profess disgust with both parties but care enough to stay registered. They turn out every two years in reliably erratic ways, often focused on single issues like guns or public schools.
“They have no meetings, no candidates and no T-shirts,” said Kevin DeMenna, a longtime consultant who works mainly for Republicans. “This is the cul-de-sac of voters who are taking a timeout. And that’s the governing center of Arizona. It makes it very difficult to talk to the whole population.”
Whether Gallego can peel off some of the 1.6 million voters who went for Trump in 2020 may not be as crucial as the appeal to the independent-minded within the flow of recent arrivals. Gallego has the kind of personal qualities that map well onto the ambitions of both the white and the Latino working class: an impoverished background, hard work, a defiant attitude, military service, and first-generation college.
“I was not going to be poor trash”
“Lying on the floor of our apartment one night, hungry and tired because I worked after school earning money to help my mother pay for things, I told myself this was not who I was,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I was not going to be poor trash the rest of my life. I was going to college, no matter what it took.”
Gallego’s future most likely involves that most Arizona of maneuvers: yet another reinvention. He will have to distance himself from a previously liberal record in Congress, probably say at least a few unkind words about Joe Biden and ease up on the hot-tempered and progressive persona that characterized his first years in elective office. He made a point of sounding hawkish in his support for the now-scuttled bill to toughen border security.
Beyond his pro-choice position in a state where many voters of both parties were left terrified by the draconian 1864 abortion ban, Gallego is also likely to emphasize lunch-bucket issues like prescription drug costs, affordable housing and further investments in semiconductor production, which have already brought a mammoth manufacturing plant to the north edge of Phoenix. He must steer between the extremes, stay reasonable-looking and eschew labels.
“The way you win a statewide race is to disavow most things that Democrats do nationally,” Stan Barnes, a Republican consultant, said. “That’s how Sinema and Kelly did it. You don’t talk about Democratic themes. You talk about Arizona themes.”
If Gallego succeeds not only in winning the seat against Ms. Lake but also in dealing a convincing blow to the MAGA minority she represents, it would be one indication that Arizona — while retaining its unpredictable, independent edge — is moving more in the direction of California than of Texas.
Tom Zoellner is the author of nine nonfiction books, including Island on Fire: The Revolt that Ended Slavery in the British Empire, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for the best nonfiction book of 2020 and a finalist for the Bancroft Prize and the California Book Award. He works as a professor at Chapman University and Dartmouth College, and as an editor-at-large for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, The American Scholar, The Oxford American, Time, Foreign Policy, Men’s Health, Slate, Scientific American, Audubon, Sierra, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Texas Observer, The American Scholar, The Wall Street Journal and many other publications. Tom is a former staff writer for The Arizona Republic and the San Francisco Chronicle, and the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Lannan Foundation.
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