On Phoenix’s hundred-and-eleventh straight day of triple-digit temperatures, when the weather was variously described to me as “warm,” “pretty nice, actually,” and “not horrible horrible,” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard were scheduled to make their first joint stage appearance on behalf of Donald Trump, at Arizona Christian University, in the suburb Glendale. An hour before the event began, the line stretched down the block, past an anti-vaccine activist strumming a guitar, his case open to receive tips. Nearby, a handful of entrepreneurs had assembled. Trump’s first assassination attempt had been metabolized into merch. A stand flying a “Fuck Joe Biden” flag sold T-shirts with a picture of the former President, ear bloodied and fist raised, that said, “You Missed Me Bitch,” alongside ones that read, “Make America Godly Again.” A man driving a golf cart was attempting to turn people away. “They’re at capacity,” he warned a woman in a pink “Women for Trump” T-shirt. “You won’t get in.”
Inside the gym, the air-conditioning struggled to keep up with the number of bodies, but the crowd was undaunted, verging on peppy. They were there to see two former Democrats throw their support behind the Republican candidate for President. “Every single vote will make a difference in this state, and therefore in our country,” Gabbard urged. “This is the most important election of our lives.”
It was hard to imagine that anyone needed reminding in Arizona, where intersections are crowded with campaign signs and the election feels as inescapable as the heat. The state is one of seven battlegrounds for the Presidential election. It also has important congressional races, including one for a Senate seat that may prove crucial to control of the chamber; high-profile ballot measures about abortion and immigration; and a chance for Democrats to win control of the state legislature for the first time in decades. “We’re battling this abortion ban, but we’re also battling voter fatigue, because the ballot is going to be four pages long,” Chris Love, a spokesperson for the nonpartisan group Arizona for Abortion Access, said.
The Arizona electorate can be difficult to pin down, particularly since the emergence of Trump. When he selected the Phoenix Convention Center as the location for one of his first major rallies, in the summer of 2015, Arizona was considered a solidly red state; its electoral votes—presently eleven—had gone to the Republican candidate in almost every election for more than sixty years. “When I first moved out here, to work for John McCain in 1985, all you had to do was put ‘Republican’ by your name, and you were good to go,” Chuck Coughlin, a former G.O.P. strategist, told me.
Trump’s instincts were right: MAGA has found a strong foothold here. Plenty of Arizonans have an appetite for a self-styled maverick, even if—or especially because—there’s some race-baiting populism or camera-hogging authoritarianism in the mix. But Trump’s ascendance has also eroded old alliances, as long-tenured Republicans have left politics or lost in primaries to MAGA-affiliated challengers. And the state is fast-growing and quickly urbanizing, with a booming tech economy and a growing Latino population. Since Trump’s emergence, voters have elected a Democratic governor, secretary of state (twice), and attorney general, and two Democratic senators—although one of them, Kyrsten Sinema, left the Party to become an Independent and chose not to seek reëlection.
“The whole thing has shifted now,” Coughlin said. “It is dramatically different, since 2016.” Polls have shown Trump with an edge in the Presidential race, while the Democratic candidate to replace Sinema, Ruben Gallego, is favored over his Republican opponent, Kari Lake. It’s looking increasingly likely that voters will approve both pro-abortion and anti-immigration ballot measures; it’s anybody’s guess which party will end up in control of the state legislature. During a week in Arizona, I saw a woman wearing a Tupac-themed Trump shirt, and another wearing a Notorious B.I.G.-themed Trump shirt. “If it’s not close, they can’t cheat!,” a billboard looming over the highway read.
The day before the Kennedy-Gabbard event, Kari Lake appeared at a “Back the Blue”-themed rally outside a Nashville-themed bar in Chandler, a suburb southeast of Phoenix. Palm fronds riffled in the hot breeze as the sky darkened and the air smelled, mysteriously, of salad dressing. At a merch table, a stack of posters depicted Lake in a Rosie the Riveter pose, showing off her taut arms.
Lake is one of the politicians who emerged in the Trump era, a former newscaster who reinvented herself as a political outsider—a media figure who now hated the media, aggressive and impeccably polished. She treated interviews as hostile engagements; when people questioned her repeated assertions that the 2020 election had been stolen, she’d give them a pitying look and ask why they didn’t care about election integrity. The tactics made her popular among Republican primary voters; when she ran for governor in 2022, she handily defeated her more traditional G.O.P. opponent. “We don’t have any McCain Republicans in here, do we?” she said during a campaign event that year. “Boy, Arizona has delivered some losers.” Her approach proved less appealing to the general electorate. At what was supposed to be her victory party, at a resort in Scottsdale, women in red cocktail dresses mingled underneath a net of balloons. They were never released. Lake lost, although she was loath to admit it.
Two years later, Lake has still not conceded the governor’s race, despite multiple court rulings against her. At the Chandler rally, one of her fans told me that deep-state machinations must have been to blame for the result. “Arizona is turning Democratic? I don’t think so,” he told me. “I’ve yet to see a rally, I’ve yet to see anything that indicates there’s a Democrat out here, much less lots of them,” he told me.
It’s true that, despite the number of Democrats elected to high-level positions, Arizona is still a red state by many measures. Republicans remain the largest share of the electorate. Immigration and the economy, often considered Trump’s two best issues, play well: at one point, Phoenix had the highest inflation rate of any metro area in the country (although inflation rates have fallen more quickly there than than they have on average). Even so, Lake has consistently run behind Trump, and recent polls have shown her trailing Gallego by more than seven points. Her efforts to win over the moderate Republicans she once seemed bent on alienating have had only middling success. Earlier this year, Lake publicly appealed to Meghan McCain as a fellow Mama Bear and requested a meeting. “NO PEACE, BITCH!,” McCain replied. According to polling by Samara Klar, a professor of political science at the University of Arizona, and Truedot, a survey company, fifteen per cent of prospective Trump voters plan to vote for Gallego; the most common reason given was “not Lake.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, the Chandler event sometimes seemed more like a rally for the former President than for Lake. Tom Homan, an acting director of ICE under Trump and an early proponent of the family-separation policy, opened by praising “the greatest President in my lifetime, Donald Trump” and promising that, during a second Trump term, he would come back to “run the biggest deportation operation this country has ever seen.” Then he seemed to remember who the rally was for. “President Trump can only be so successful, I can only be so successful, if we don’t have the Senate. It’s imperative that Kari Lake wins this seat,” he said. Homan said he’d have to leave soon; he was flying to Florida for a Trump event.
Ruben Gallego, who was elected to the House of Representatives in 2014, has had a trajectory that’s superficially similar to that of J. D. Vance: a working-class childhood in the midwest (Chicago, in Gallego’s case); an uneasy experience in the Ivy League (Gallego wrote in his memoir that he “flamed out” at Harvard, although he returned to finish his degree later); a stint in the Marines (Gallego’s unit suffered some of the highest casualty numbers of any Marine company in Iraq) and, ultimately, a career in politics. Over five terms in the House of Representatives, Gallego established himself as a pragmatic and straight-talking progressive who wasn’t afraid to criticize his own party for what he saw as its emphasis on academic language over connecting with voters. Klar told me that, when she asked Trump-Gallego voters why they preferred the congressman over Lake, they frequently described him in such terms as “unproblematic.”
The day after Lake’s rally, Gallego spoke at American Legion Post 41, where he himself is a member. Post 41 was established in 1945, for returning Latino veterans, who felt unwelcome at the existing Legion club. Murals celebrated Latino service members in uniform. A small crowd of mostly older veterans had assembled to hear Gallego speak in front of a backdrop of American flags; his young son, who has been accompanying him on campaign stops, leaned against the podium, distracted by his Nintendo Switch. In his brief remarks, Gallego struck a tone of grounded, nonpartisan patriotism. He choked up when he recalled how members of the post had helped him when he returned from his deployment. “War was hard for us. We lost a lot of our friends. I lost my best friend,” he said. His son looked up from his Switch when he heard his father’s voice catch. Then Gallego quickly veered back into stump-speech territory: “I’m still a marine, I love this country, I will fight for this country, and I will fight to make sure that every veteran has a chance, again, to live the American dream.”
As a Congressman, Gallego represents a solidly blue district and has generally voted accordingly; running for statewide office, he’s trod more cautiously. He’s quietly left the Congressional Progressive Caucus. This summer, the Arizona Police Association, the state’s largest law-enforcement coalition, endorsed Gallego, as well as Trump. The day after receiving the endorsement, Gallego angered some Arizona progressives by calling for the Department of Justice not to pursue further federal oversight of the Phoenix Police Department. (After a nearly three-year investigation, the D.O.J. issued a report in June that detailed “pervasive failings” in the department, which has used excessive force, relied on dangerous tactics, and engaged in discriminatory practices.)
Like many of his colleagues in Congress, Gallego also appears to have moved to the right on immigration. He voiced support for a bipartisan border-security bill that would have enabled new asylum restrictions. (It was killed in the Senate after pressure from Trump.) “Something that kind of neutralizes the border issue for Arizona Democrats is that Republicans and Democrats don’t really sound that different from each other when they’re talking about the issue,” Klar told me. “If you’re concerned about the border, it’s not as though one party is coming out with this exciting, novel solution.”
In 2010, the Arizona legislature passed S.B. 1070, the so-called “show me your papers” law, which gave state law enforcement broad power to detain anyone suspected of being in the country illegally, and was at the time considered the harshest immigration law in the nation. Parts of the law were struck down by the Supreme Court, but not before galvanizing a generation of Latino voters and activists. “The children of SB1070 ten years later grew to change Arizona,” Gallego tweeted in 2020. This year, Arizonans will have the chance to vote on Proposition 314, a ballot measure that’s arguably even more extreme; if passed, it would empower state officials to detain, arrest, and deport undocumented border crossers. (A similar Texas law was blocked from going into effect earlier this year, and it continues to work its way through the courts.)
The current proposition is likely to face much less resistance than the 2010 bill. Few high-profile Democrats have spoken out against it; the Arizona Republicans are so confident that the measure will pass that they have not made any specific contributions to promote it. “People are going to focus, and rightly so, on the issues that actually need help,” Ben Toma, Arizona’s Republican Speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, told the A.P.
At Kobalt, a drag and karaoke bar in central Phoenix, an N.F.L. game played on the televisions. During a commercial break, an ad in which a Democrat talked about stopping fentanyl from coming across the border was immediately followed by one in which a Republican talked about stopping fentanyl from coming across the border. The bar was unusually crowded for a Sunday afternoon, full of volunteers gathered to hear a briefing before they set out to canvas in favor of Proposition 139, which would enshrine in the state constitution the right to an abortion until the point of fetal viability—in other words, restore Roe v. Wade.
As canvassers continued to fill the bar, Chris Love, the Arizona for Abortion Access spokesperson, lifted her braids from her neck, then dabbed at her forehead with a towel. I asked if she was planning to head straight to Cancun after Election Day. “Cabo San Lucas, actually,” she said. “You know, I haven’t had a vacation in two years. But I booked it for January”—when the election will be certified and the results will become official. “We have people who want to mess with us, and I want to make sure it’s done.”
Since Roe v. Wade was overturned, the legal status of abortion in Arizona has been in flux, with much of the confusion centering on a pre-statehood law that banned abortion in nearly all cases. Earlier this year, and after much internal drama, the Republican-controlled legislature voted to repeal the nineteenth-century law, effectively prohibiting abortions after fifteen weeks. Some have theorized that having Proposition 139 on the ballot will help Democrats, but Love told me that her coalition was “intentionally nonpartisan.” “We have a lot of voters who are going to vote Republican up and down the ballot but feel really strongly about this,” she said. “It’s an issue that goes in conjunction with their conservative values—they don’t want the government in the doctor’s office with them.” Around two-thirds of Arizona voters support establishing a right to abortion in the state constitution, according to a poll earlier this year.
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Publish date : 2024-10-03 23:00:00
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