Democrats Are Optimistic in Arizona – The New Yorker

As a Navy combat pilot, Mark Kelly landed fighter jets on aircraft carriers hundreds of times. He flew twenty-two million miles in space as a NASA astronaut, orbiting Earth eight hundred and fifty-four times. His toughest trip may have been his last. In May of 2011, he rocketed to the International Space Station, a few months after his wife, U.S. Representative Gabby Giffords, was gravely wounded by a would-be assassins bullet while she was meeting with constituents in Tucson. During that mission, which delivered a fifteen-thousand-pound cosmic-particle detector designed to study the formation of the universe, Kelly greeted Giffords by spelling out Its a Beautiful Day in letters that drifted through the zero-gravity air.

Kelly left NASA after that flight, to devote himself to Giffordss recovery and, soon after, to building a nonprofit advocacy organization for gun safety, now called Giffords. He emerged in countless interviews, often with his wife by his side, as a genial and respectful partner in a cause that mattered to both of them, partly because they themselves own guns. In the 2018 election cycle, Giffords and other national gun-safety groups outspent the National Rifle Association, and more than eighty per cent of the candidates whom Giffords endorsed went on to victory. As Arizona sputtered through fractious policy debates and coped with the death of one Republican senator (John McCain) and the departure of another (Jeff Flake), Democrats often asked Kelly to run for office. Kelly demurred. He said he felt good about his career and his choices, although he once told an interviewer, I wish I couldve gone to Mars.

This campaign cycle, with control of the U.S. Senate at stake, he changed his mind and now finds himself well ahead of the Republican incumbent, Martha McSally, herself a former fighter pilot, who has aligned herself closely with the increasingly unpopular President Trump. Polls show Joe Biden ahead of Trump in a state that has been carried by only one Democratic Presidential candidateBill Clinton, in 1996in the past seventy-two years. As Flake put it to me, Arizona is as much the state to watch as Wisconsin. Suburban women, minorities, millennialssome of whom, particularly in the millennial camp, have been walking away from the Party for a whileare now in a dead sprint.

Among many factors is the halting response to the COVID-19 crisis by Trump and Arizonas Republican governor, Doug Ducey. An ABC News/Ipsos poll released last week found that sixty-seven per cent of Americans disapprove of Trumps handling of the pandemic. In a separate survey, an academic consortium reported that Ducey has a thirty-two-per-cent approval rate for his handling of COVID-19, the lowest of any governor in the country. Ducey took the pandemic threat lightly and raced to reopen the state, only to see confirmed cases and hospitalizations climb. On July 1st, he asked the Trump Administration to send hundreds of reinforcements for the states health workers. Aides have warned Trump that he is in trouble in Arizona, which he won by less than four points in 2016, just four years after Mitt Romney won by nine. But when I asked the Trump campaign to discuss its Arizona efforts, the spokesperson Samantha Zager sounded unconcerned. She replied, by e-mail, that Republicans have held over two thousand events during the 2020 election cycle and are seeing remarkable enthusiasm from Arizona voters, while Joe Bidens campaign seems to have just located Arizona on a map.

Much can happen in four months, but to look at this moment in freeze-frame is to see Trump, McSally, and any number of Republicans across the country struggling to find a message. Amid a pandemic that has killed more than a hundred and thirty thousand people in the United States and pushed more than forty million workers to file for unemployment, Trump seems to have abandoned his original 2020 slogan, Keep America Great, while offering neither explanation nor apology for his handling of the coronavirus and the economic fallout. His principal answer to the Black Lives Matter protests that have spread from cities into the largely white towns that helped produce his Electoral College majority has been to tweet, in all caps, LAW & ORDER! Flake, for one, does not think that Trumps tough talk, including his vilification of undocumented immigrants and his trade wars, will work. Anger and resentment are not a governing philosophy, Flake said. You can, in an election here or there, drill down on the base and pull out a win. But it runs its course, and you end up in a demographic cul de sac.

If Republicans are headed toward a reckoning in November, Arizona offers warning signals for a beleaguered party that is defending seats up and down the ballot for the second election cycle in a row. Energized Democrats have spent years building a grassroots operation, especially in the big cities that often determine statewide success. Its one of those states thats moving our direction little by little, Josh Schwerin, the communications director of Priorities USA, a pro-Biden super-PAC that is running an ad accusing Trump of failing America, said. Schwerin reported that the organization plans to spend eleven million dollars on advertising in Arizona before Election Day. The Lincoln Project, an increasingly high-profile effort led by Republicans who aim to defeat Trump and many of his supporters in the Senate, is running withering ads in Arizona, targeting Trump and McSally.

One sign of change is visible in voter registration, which has grown by twenty-five per cent since 2012. During that time, Democrats have cut the Republican registration lead in half, with about one-third of Arizonans registering as independents. Significantly, Latino voter registration and turnout have increased, favoring Democrats. An Arizona State University poll, conducted in March, before Biden became the presumptive Democratic nominee, showed a wide preference among Latino voters for Kelly and any Democrat running against Trump. An intensification of old-fashioned canvassing helped. We know that we can improve voter turnout and that, over time, once you get people voting, theyll continue to vote, Eric Meyer, the former Democratic leader in the state House, told me.

On a Sunday afternoon in June, two Democratic candidates for state representative on Meyers old legislative turf, District 28, held a Zoom call to mobilize volunteers. For more than ninety minutes, forty people discussed issues ranging from health care to the challenge of attracting fence-sitting Republicans. One of the candidates was Kelli Butler, who won office on November 8, 2016, the night that Trump stunned Hillary Clinton. I thought it was going to be this wonderful election party, and I felt like Id boarded the Titanic, Butler told me. Yet Trumps election had a silver lining for Democrats in her district, which includes the prosperous Paradise Valley and parts of North Central Phoenix: it inspired anti-Republican activism. Just a huge jump of people, she said. Christine Marsh, a high-school English teacher who was once Arizonas teacher of the year, was the other candidate on the Zoom call. She is in a rematch of the 2018 state-senate race, when she came within two hundred and sixty-seven votes of defeating the incumbent, a moderate Republican named Kate Brophy McGee. To win this time, Marsh said, her team has helped register four thousand more Democrats and is making about two thousand phone calls a week.

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Democrats Are Optimistic in Arizona - The New Yorker