Since Arizona has only 15 counties (14 until 1984), I will first do an overall analysis of the state followed by analysis of each county.
County maps 1948-1976: http://www.thepoliticsgeek.com…
County maps 1980-2008: http://www.thepoliticsgeek.com…
Cross-posted at my blog and Daily Kos.
Arizona began trending Republican after World War II with the migration of snowbirds from the Midwest and to a lesser extent the Northeast, with the Republicanism peaking in the Goldwater and Reagan years. After the Reagan years, the trend has been slightly Democratic, mostly because of Bill Clinton’s declaring the Grand Staircase area as a National Monument in 1996.
These days, Arizona Republicanism is a quirky brand of Republicanism, with the overwhelming vote for a sales tax hike earlier this year, and incumbent Republican governor Jan Brewer considering more tax hikes yet doing no worse than a statistical tie against Democratic Attorney General Terry Goddard. Coconino, Maricopa, Pima, and Santa Cruz Counties are the only counties in the whole country so far that rejected a ban on same-sex marriage (November 2006) and supported a tax increase (May 2010). Most of Arizona’s Republicanism comes from law-and-order issues.
Looking ahead to 2012, if the Democrat campaigns hard on environmental and law-and-order issues, then Arizona could flip.
Now I will go through each county starting with Apache. After trending the same way as the state voting-wise, Apache broke away from that pattern in the 1970s as the local Native Americans, mostly Navajo, began voting Democratic in large numbers. Now Apache is the most Democratic county in the state.
Cochise and Graham Counties remained largely rural and had similar trends to Arizona until 2000, when they trended slightly more Republican because of law-and-order issues.
Coconino County, home to the Grand Canyon and Lake Powell, has been more Democratic of late due to a large college employee population in Flagstaff and many federal employees at the U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Geological Survey and the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Greenlee County was a Yellow Dog Democratic bastion, having voted much more Democratic than the state as a whole until the 1990s, when it trended Republican like many white-majority counties in the South. Gila County mimicked Greenlee to a lesser extent, except for a flirt with voting for Reagan in the 1980s, and including a sharp swing Republican after the 1990s.
La Paz County has been a consistently Republican-voting county since it was carved out of Yuma County in 1984.
Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, Tempe, Mesa, and many other cities, voted strongly Republican from the 1960s to the 1980s because of the migration of many Midwestern snowbirds who were very receptive to Goldwater, Nixon, Ford, and Reagan. The declaring of the Grand Staircase Monument in adjacent Coconino County brought out the environmentalism in many of these Midwesterners, resulting in Maricopa voting less Republican in the 1990s and early 2000s. A positive reception to native son McCain resulted in a slight Republican trend in 2008, but don’t be surprised to see a Democratic trend here in 2012 if the environment becomes a hot topic again.
Mohave County, home to Lake Havasu and part of Grand Canyon National Park, saw a slight moderation from its usual strongly Republican voting patterns thanks to the Grand Staircase National Monument resonating positively with local voters.
Navajo County has leaned Republican because conservative white voters turn out in greater numbers than the Native American voters.
Pima County, home to Tucson, has historically been a swing county, though of late has leaned more Democratic again mostly because of environmentalism from Midwesterners that settled in the area. The college vote from the University of Arizona is balanced out by the military vote from employees of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base.
Pinal County, between Maricopa and Pima, has been a swing county since WWII ended, though some suburbanization from Maricopa County has produced a slight Republican trend.
Santa Cruz County was a swing county for much of the post-war period until the 1990s, when Bill Clinton began helping make Democratic Party policies more palatable to Hispanics. Now Santa Cruz is the second-most Democratic county in the state.
Yavapai County, home to Prescott and most of Democratic-leaning Sedona, has remained a strongly Republican county due to a large evangelical population in Prescott.
Yuma County voted more Democratic than the country from 1948 to 1960, though Goldwater in 1964 had made the county turn sharply Republican and trend Republican since then, because of law-and-order issues.
Tabulated PVIs can be found here. I was able to collect all of Arizona’s county voting data from 1912 to 2008, though for now, like the other states, I am focusing on the elections since 1948.
way wrong on a few counties.
The large majority of the American Indians in Navajo County are in fact Navajos. The reason that Navajo County is now generally slightly Republican is because it has a slight White majority and those conservative Whites often turn out better than the American Indians. Also, members of the Hopi nation certainly do not vote “strongly Republican.” Look at precinct-level results for the parts of Coconino and Navajo County that are in AZ-02; you cannot tell their toplines apart from those on the Navajo Nation. Hell, Trent Franks always loses his shares of Coconino and Navajo Counties, despite the squadron of smurfs he’s faced in the last ten years.
Also, I don’t think there has been much “suburbanization” of Yavapai County. Sedona is sort of a suburb of Flagstaff I suppose, but Sedona leans Democratic. Yavapai County votes Republican because the Prescott area leans Republican, in large part due to a large (for Arizona) Evangelical population.
Finally, the reasons that Coconino County lean Democratic are a lot more complicated than Grand Staircase, though environmentalism is of course a major issue. I think the biggest single reason that Coconino County votes Democratic is that Flagstaff is full of state and federal employees. Northern Arizona University is pushing on 20K students with tons of employees, and the US Forest Service, US Geological Survey and the Bureau of Indian Affairs also have huge installations in the area.
That all being said, your PVIs all look solid, so good work there.
but I don’t necessarily agree with some of the conclusions. (This is strictly anecdotal and opinion – that’s why I try not to comment even though I read SSP religiously – there are so many well-informed posters here I wouldn’t want to look stupid.)
I’m a Phoenician, born and raised. I live in AZ-03 currently but grew up in and still have many ties to the Phoenix part of AZ-07. I have almost never heard voters here raise environmental issues when asked about their reasoning, and even if they did, it’s almost always in a conservative context (“We need to drill to lower the darn gas prices”, etc). The reason Maricopa is verrrrry slowly bluing is because of the minority population, it would seem, and until recently that was counterbalanced by conservative whites moving here/”escaping” from more liberal states – CA, etc. There is and always will be a strong Libertarian, live-and-let-live component to AZ and Maricopa (in 2006 we defeated the gay marriage ban – still the only state to ever do so.)
Will AZ be competitive in 2012? Who knows. If the GOP runs a Bible-thumper and especially if the economy picks up then it would seem likely (see 1996), but then again Obama is REALLY unpopular here.
I lived in AZ for 5 years. More notes on counties:
Apache, Navajo, Graham: the white population in these counties is heavily Mormon.
Coconino: also has a large Navajo population. It is 30% Native American overall.
Greenlee: is dominated by the Morenci open pit copper mine so it has a lot of union members. Like many mining areas, it has shifted to the right lately.
Yavapai: The impression I have is that it’s dominated by retirees, not evangelicals. Its state senator when I was there was Carol Springer, who was basically a libertarian on both economic and cultural issues.
Mohave, La Paz: also dominated by retirees to some extent.
The eastern Arizona counties have historically elected a lot of Blue Dog-type Democrats to the state legislature. These are locally known as “pinto Democrats”.
Santa Cruz county is 80% Hispanic, and Yuma county 57%.