Arizona blue

Democrats make a play to turn Arizona blue

Operatives and elected officials are pushing the Clinton campaign to invest real swing-state resources in Arizona for the first time in years.

By Theodoric Meyer

It has been two decades since Arizona’s red-state status was in doubt in a presidential election. But that was before Donald Trump and his build-a-border-wall platform won the GOP primary and inflamed anti-Republican sentiment among Latino voters.

On Tuesday, Trump’s campaign is dispatching vice-presidential nominee Mike Pence to the state for two public events, a tangible sign of Republicans’ concern that Arizona could be competitive this year — while local Democrats, thinking along the same lines, are intensely lobbying Hillary Clinton’s campaign and national Democratic groups for the resources to help make it happen.

Prominent Arizona Democrats have been urging Bill Clinton to press the campaign to direct more money into the rapidly changing, Hispanic-heavy state, which he carried in 1996, the last time it went Democratic in a presidential election. They continued that push with officials during last week’s Democratic National Convention, making the case that Arizona should be on equal footing with a state like North Carolina, which President Barack Obama carried in 2008 and where Democrats are feeling increasingly confident.

There are already signs Arizona is on Trump’s radar: The businessman’s campaign has identified the state as a potential battleground, and recent polls have shown a close race between him and Clinton. Then there’s Pence’s rallies Tuesday with voters in Phoenix and Tucson. In 2012, neither presidential candidate held a public event in Arizona after the party conventions.

Leading Democrats’ charge for swing-state status and resources is Rep. Ruben Gallego, a rising Democratic star who represents a heavily Hispanic Phoenix-based district.

“I've spoken with almost anyone who will listen to me, to be honest,” Gallego said, from big Democratic donors to labor unions to national progressive nonprofits.

Jim Pederson, a top Democratic bundler who once ran for Senate, urged Bill Clinton to commit resources at a fundraiser he hosted at his Phoenix home in June.

“We made the pitch to him,” Pederson said. “I got a call from him after the event, and he said, ‘We’re going to take a hard look at it,’” Pederson added.

Democrats here believe a confluence of factors put Arizona in play, four years after Mitt Romney carried the state with 54 percent of the vote. Trump is deeply unpopular among Hispanics, as is Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a prominent Trump ally. And Arizona has a higher percentage of eligible voters who are Hispanic than any other battleground state.

Democrats also say it’s easier to build a field operation in Arizona than in other states, because more than three-quarters of voters are concentrated in just two metro areas: Phoenix and Tucson. The state Democratic Party already has 100 paid staffers working on voter registration, as well as hundreds of volunteers.

“We just need the resources and funds to put us over the top,” Gallego said.

Yet it’s unclear if those additional funds, get-out-the-vote staffers and TV ads will ever materialize. Recent polls show a tight race, and Clinton even led in one public survey last month. But Arizona is not even close to a state Clinton needs to win to capture the presidency, and her campaign has already been focusing on more time-tested battleground states like Florida and Ohio.

So far, North Carolina is the only state that Romney won in 2012 where Clinton, Priorities USA Action and other Democratic groups have set up traditional battleground operations backed by major TV advertising.
 Republicans are betting that national Democrats and outside groups won’t put enough resources into the state to tip it into their column.

“It would take millions and millions of dollars,” said Sean Noble, a longtime Republican operative in Arizona. “Do they put their money into states where there’s a better opportunity to win? I think the answer is yes.”

But Arizona Democrats argue investing in voter-registration and turnout in 2016 will pay dividends for years to come. And there are signs Clinton's campaign has started to turn an eye to the state.

The campaign is installing Seth Scott, who’'s on leave from his job as Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton’s top aide, as Clinton’s new Arizona state director.

“I think what we have now is a perfect storm,” Scott said, citing Trump and Arpaio, whose own reelection prospects appear shakier than ever.

Guy Cecil, Priorities USA’s chief strategist, told Bloomberg this week that Arizona is an “intriguing state” for Democrats.

“I think we’re at 90 percent locked-in [on our battleground map],” Cecil told Bloomberg. “I do think Arizona is an intriguing proposition: You have a competitive Senate race there, you obviously have a rapidly growing Hispanic community, you now have the Arpaio race that I think will be a huge motivator. That’s an intriguing state for us, and one we’re going to take a look at over the next month or six weeks to make some decision about investment there.”

Former Rep. Ed Pastor went to last week’s Democratic National Convention with a plan to pitch old friends and allies on Arizona, after delivering the same message to Bill Clinton during that Arizona swing in June, when the former president met with Hispanic elected officials. (Clinton’s trip ended up generating headlines for very different reasons when he met privately with Attorney General Loretta Lynch, whose Department of Justice was still investigating whether Hillary Clinton would face criminal charges related to her private email server.)

“I’m gonna say, ‘Hey, guys, do you have a little bit of money that you can send to Arizona?’” Pastor said in a pre-convention interview.

The timing of last week’s convention was crucial, with national Democrats deep into the process of allocating resources for a general election now fewer than 100 days away.

“Those types of conversations in 2012, in terms of putting real national resources into Arizona, didn’t happen until it was too late,” said Alexis Tameron, the state Democratic Party chairwoman.

Tameron ran Richard Carmona’s Arizona Senate campaign that year. The Obama campaign invested little in Arizona, and Carmona wound up losing by 3 percentage points to Republican Jeff Flake.

Stung by Carmona’s loss, Tameron has vowed that this time will be different. The state Democratic Party has been registering voters since April, she said, three months before the field operation began in 2012. And nonprofits like Mi Familia Vota are running their own voter registration efforts.

There are hundreds of thousands of unregistered Latinos in Arizona, and they have driven predictions that the state will turn blue eventually. But it’s not going to happen automatically, Tameron cautioned.

“The Latino community is not a monolithic community, in which you can count on them to vote Democratic because of some crazy thing that Donald Trump said, or because of Joe Arpaio,” Tameron said. “You have to really go out and earn their vote.”

Clinton isn't the only Democrat who stands to benefit from greater Hispanic turnout. Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, who's waging an underdog campaign to topple GOP Sen. John McCain, has staked her campaign on registering more Hispanic voters and turning them out on Election Day.

“It’s turnout, folks," Kirkpatrick said in July as she rallied about 60 volunteers at a newly opened field office in Glendale, a Phoenix suburb with a substantial Hispanic population. "We’ve got the numbers. They’re there. We just have to make sure they vote.”

McCain remains skeptical that Clinton can carry the state. In an interview, he noted that Republicans traditionally do well with the state's many independent voters.

"But in an election year like this, I would take nothing for granted," McCain said.

Meanwhile, Trump's campaign in Arizona hasn’t always been smooth, though he easily won the GOP primary.

Arizona is one of 17 battleground states identified by the Trump campaign, and he recently brought on a new state director, Brian Seitchik. But Seitchik questioned Trump's prospects as recently as March, when he told POLITICO that “Trump’s impact on congressional races and other down-ticket races could be disastrous."

Seitchik declined to comment.

Tameron also sees a compelling wild-card reason for the Clinton campaign to invest at least as much in her state as in a place like North Carolina: Gary Johnson.

The Libertarian Party presidential nominee and former New Mexico governor is likely to pull more votes in Arizona than in North Carolina or Georgia, another traditionally red state some believe could be competitive, Tameron argued.

"The last time a Clinton won in Arizona, in 1996, was because Ross Perot was on the ballot, and he won by a plurality," Tameron said. (Perot took 8 percent of the vote that year.) "And I think there’s a very good chance that whoever wins, Democrat or Republican, in the state of Arizona is going to win by a plurality.”