Photo Illustration by Alex Cochran. Filed under: Politics. Share this story Share this on Facebook Share this on Twitter Share All sharing options Share All sharing options for: Arizona still feels red as voters embrace a conservative shade of blue. Reddit Pocket Email Linkedin. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga. Arizona is seeing a change in voting preferences J. The West How highways changed the West and the West changed highways. Mitt Romney says young people are key.
In a nod to the Independent Legislature Doctrine, Eastman and Trump tried to persuade Vice-President Mike Pence to halt the certification of the Electoral College vote, instead throwing the election to the state legislatures. Pence was not persuaded. Eastman, who recently retired, under pressure, from Chapman University, and was stripped of his public duties at another post that he held, at the University of Colorado Boulder, told me he still believes that the election was stolen, and thinks that the audits in Arizona and other states will help prove it.
The Bradley Foundation declined to comment on him, or on Mitchell, when asked about its role in funding their activities. Both men have argued strenuously that American elections are rife with serious fraud, and in they got a rare opportunity to make their case, when Trump appointed them to a Presidential commission on election integrity. Within months, after the commission was unable to find significant evidence of election fraud, it acrimoniously disbanded.
Adams and von Spakovsky, who are members of what Roll Call has termed the Voter Fraud Brain Trust, have nevertheless continued their crusade, sustained partly by Bradley funds. At Heritage, von Spakovsky has overseen a national tracking system monitoring election-fraud cases.
But its data on Arizona, the putative center of the storm, is not exactly alarming: of the millions of votes cast in the state from to , only nine individuals were convicted of fraud. Each instance involved someone casting a duplicate ballot in another state. There were no recorded cases of identity fraud, ballot stuffing, voting by non-citizens, or other nefarious schemes. The numbers confirm that there is some voter fraud, or at least confusion, but not remotely enough to affect election outcomes.
In , when he lost the popular vote by nearly three million ballots, he insisted that he had actually won it, spuriously blaming rampant fraud in California. More than a year before the election, Cleta Mitchell and her allies sensed political peril for Trump and began reviewing strategies to help keep him in office. But, arguably, the Constitution permits state legislatures to take this authority back.
Legislators could argue that an election had been compromised by irregularities or fraud, forcing them to intervene. In August, , e-mails show, Mitchell co-chaired a high-level working group with Shawnna Bolick, a Republican state representative from Phoenix. Among the topics slated for discussion was the Electoral College. The working group was convened by alec , the corporate-backed nonprofit that transmits conservative policy ideas and legislation to state lawmakers.
The Bradley Foundation has long supported alec , and Mitchell has worked closely with it, serving as its outside counsel until recently. Then, early this year, Bolick introduced a bill proposing a radical reading of Article II of the Constitution, along the lines of the Independent Legislature Doctrine. Bolick has since announced her candidacy for secretary of state in Arizona. Her husband, Clint Bolick, is an Arizona Supreme Court justice and a leader in right-wing legal circles.
Clarence Thomas, one of the three U. Supreme Court Justices who signed on to the concurring opinion in Bush v. If Shawnna Bolick wins her race, she will oversee future elections in the state. And, if the Supreme Court faces another case in which arguments about the Independent Legislature Doctrine come into play, there may now be enough conservative Justices to agree with Thomas that there are circumstances under which legislatures, not voters, could have the final word in American elections.
Months before the vote, Lisa Nelson, the C. A video of the proceedings was obtained by the investigative group Documented, and first reported by the Washington Spectator. In her speech, Nelson noted that she was working with Mitchell and von Spakovsky. A younger member of the organization, Charlie Kirk—a founder of Turning Point USA , which promotes right-wing ideas on school campuses—injected a note of optimism.
He suggested that the pandemic, by closing campuses, would likely suppress voting among college students, a left-leaning bloc. Turning Point, which has received small grants from the Bradley Foundation, is headquartered in Arizona, and it has played a significant role in the radicalization of the state, in part by amplifying fear and anger about voter fraud.
In the summer of , Rally Forge helped Turning Point use social media to spread incendiary misinformation about the coming elections.
In September, the Washington Post reported that Rally Forge, on behalf of Turning Point Action, had paid teen-agers to deceptively post thousands of copycat propaganda messages, much as Russia had done during the campaign. Adult leaders had instructed the teens to tweak the wording of their posts, to evade detection by technology companies. In , the company fabricated a politician—complete with a doctored photograph—to run as an Independent write-in candidate against Andy Biggs, a far-right Republican seeking an open congressional seat in Arizona.
The Guardian has shown how Rally Forge also created a phony left-wing front group, America Progress Now, which promoted Green Party candidates online in , apparently to hurt Democrats in several races. In October, , Rally Forge was banned from Facebook, and its president, Hoffman, was permanently suspended by Twitter. Undeterred, he ran as a pro-Trump Republican for the Arizona House—and won. This past spring, at a private gathering outside Tucson, Jessica Anderson, the executive director of Heritage Action—the politically active arm of the Heritage Foundation—singled out Hoffman for praise.
Another bill by Hoffman banned state election officials from accepting outside donations to help pay for any aspect of election administration, including voter registration. There is nothing more important than ensuring every American is confident their vote counts—and we will do whatever it takes to get there.
Hoffman, who formerly served as a town-council member in Queen Creek, a deeply conservative part of Maricopa County, did not respond to requests for comment. Nevertheless, the video went viral. The next day, as Trump furiously insisted he had won an election that he ended up losing by roughly seven million votes, protesters staged angry rallies in Maricopa County, where ballots were still being counted. Adding an aura of legal credibility to the conspiracy theory, Adams, the Public Interest Legal Foundation president, immediately filed suit against Maricopa County, alleging that a Sharpie-using voter he represented had been disenfranchised.
Her Sharpie ballot was cancelled without cure. Within days, the mainstream media had called the election for Biden, based on late returns from Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Georgia.
At the same time, another version of the Independent Legislature Doctrine argument was being mounted in Pennsylvania, by the Honest Elections Project, the group tied to Leonard Leo, of the Federalist Society.
Local Republicans had challenged a state-court ruling that adjusted voting procedures during the pandemic. The Honest Elections Project filed a brief with the U. Supreme Court, which declined to hear the matter, but it waited to do so until March.
In the meantime, election-fraud conspiracy theories in Arizona were growing out of control. On November 12th, Biden was declared the winner in Maricopa County. He and his wife are the legal guardians of a teen-ager whose father, a Ugandan, was nearly killed by henchmen for Idi Amin.
Gates, who moved to Arizona as a teen-ager, was a latchkey kid whose idea of entertainment was watching C- Span. But, as the final ballots were counted and Trump fell behind, Maricopa County became the focal point of conspiracy theorists. Inside, Gates recalled, one Republican member after another rose to denounce the county supervisors. Gates said that after he received death threats he fled with his family to an Airbnb. You are not a Republican. Some of the most pronounced trends include:.
Encompassing Phoenix, it is one of the fastest growing counties in the country, chiefly due to migration from neighboring states such as California, which has leaned more liberal, increasing Democratic vote margins. There remains a large cohort of older white retirees whose mail in ballots broke strongly for Trump in However, the proportion of white men without a college education in the state has dipped by 5 percent since White women with a college education, who backed Trump 48 percent over Clinton 46 percent in , changed their votes radically, backing Biden by 60 percent.
There has been a percent increase in the Spanish-speaking population in the past 20 years, from , in to 1. Latinx voters tend to be majority Mexican American and skew young and progressive. The reason for the progressivism is specific. It was aggressively enforced in ways that were found to be racial profiling by Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was later convicted of criminal contempt of court.
Trump pardoned him in There is lingering distaste for Arpaio, who is at once charismatic and cruel: his rapid rise to power and prominence was matched by an equally precipitous fall, evident in his extremely small vote share when he failed to secure the Republican primary for US Senate in SB spurred grassroots organizing and Arizona is now one of the most activist states for organizing alongside, notably, Nevada and Georgia.
In addition, the disproportionate and devastating impact of COVID on Latino populations has spurred a repudiation of perceived failures in Republican approaches to public health. The impact of COVID has been devastating and the votes have also been seen as a repudiation of failed pandemic policies. The police shooting of Dion Johnson , 28, on May 25 th while he was asleep in a car in Phoenix, brought Arizonans out in protest in the streets and a surge in organizing and political engagement.
Other constituencies have also been seen as contributing to the Democratic win, such as the overseas vote. Having won state-level races in Arizona in , the Democratic Party has no time to rest on their laurels, and not just because Mark Kelly has another election in Their presidential and US Senate successes were extremely narrow and are fragile in a state with an energized core of hard right supporters.
The college educated white women voters who backed Trump in and then changed their minds might return to Republicanism in As in Georgia, successful political organizing has been conducted by grassroots organizations more than by the Democratic National Committee.
Despite statewide successes, local races in suburban and rural districts have not turned Democratic, demonstrating a lack of down ballot traction. Increasing diversity in the largest county, Maricopa, cannot be guaranteed to deliver results for Democrats without strong voter engagement given a long history of non-party voter registrations and independent voters.
Please read our comments policy before commenting. She was recently a Visiting Fellow in history at Oxford. Usually it is my impression that the English do not understand how Americans live or think.
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