As Arizona Moves Towards The Center, The State Republican Party-- Rightly Blamed For The Pandemic-- Moves Further And Further Right

On Saturday, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey gave Arizona a present: 3,740 new cases of COVID-19 (and, a bonus: another 144 COVID-deaths, the highest of any state reported on Saturday). Yesterday, Governor Ducey added another 1,973 new cases and today another 1,813, bringing the state total to 163,827. That's 22,508 cases per million Arizonans. Using that metric-- cases per million residents-- Arizona is doing worse than any country in Europe. In fact the only countries in the world doing worse than Arizona are Qatar, a nation filled with slaves, and French Guiana, a sparely-populated, swampy prison colony. Of the half dozen U.S. states with numbers anything like Arizona's two, New York and New Jersey, have the pandemic under control-- at least for now. The other 4 are in deep trouble with drastically worsening numbers:

• Louisiana- 23,644 cases per million Louisianans
• New York- 22,642 cases per million New Yorkers
• Arizona- 22,508 cases per million Arizonans
• New Jersey- 20,913 cases per million Jerseyites
• Florida- 20,149 cases per million Floridians
• Mississippi- 17,794 cases per million Mississippians

Ducey believes in Trump, not science and he was very consistent in following his beliefs when it came tp confronting the pandemic, which explains why Arizona is worse-hit than almost anywhere else on Planet Earth. Sure, there are worse elements in the Arizona politisphere than Doug Ducey... but she isn't going to win an election to anything... except to lead the GOP. I'm talking about a mentally deranged former state Senator, Kelli Ward, who primaried John McCain and was defeated with 39% of the vote, primaried Jeff Flake/Martha McSally and lost again, this time with 28%. A fringe extremist, she then ran for the Republican Party chair and won it, in a 3-way race, with 51.7%. The state is changing drastically but Arizona Republicans still love their fringe extremists. And, yes, she is much, much crazier than Doug Ducey.

In her much-read piece for The Atlantic over the weekend, How To Lose A Swing State, Elaine Godfrey reported that pretty much everything has gone wrong for the GOP in Arizona since Ducey and Ward have risen to prominence and that "One might think that, in its moment of peril, the Arizona GOP would attempt to win over moderates. Yet the person charged with shepherding the party to victory in this most crucial moment is the state GOP chairperson Kelli Ward, a pro-Trump zealot with a soft spot for conspiracy theories... Just as polls show Arizonans-- especially those in the suburbs-- souring on Trump, the state party has veered sharply to the right." Not the state; the state party.

During her time as a state senator representing parts of the ultra-red La Paz and Mohave Counties in northwest Arizona, Ward paid a visit to Cliven Bundy’s Nevada ranch in solidarity with the rancher’s standoff against the Bureau of Land Management; suggested that the Affordable Care Act was part of a broader plot to push rural Americans into urban areas; and entertained constituent concerns about the chemtrail conspiracy theory, the idea that the government is using airplanes to poison American citizens. In 2016, during her Tea Party–style challenge to McCain, Ward defended Trump’s attacks on the senator’s experience as a prisoner of war. Later, in a primary bid against McSally, Ward made national headlines for suggesting that the McCain family had deliberately timed an announcement about the senator’s brain cancer to damage her campaign. (She lost both primary elections-- badly.)





But as Republicans nationwide began to embrace Trumpism, Ward moved from the fringes of the party to its center. She was elected the state party’s chair in 2019, and has since used her perch primarily to help wage the president’s wars. Most recently, Ward, who is a family physician with a master’s degree in public health, made headlines for encouraging protesters planning to demonstrate against local stay-at-home orders to dress like health-care workers. She and her husband, Mike, an ER doctor, appear regularly on Facebook Live to discuss “fake news” and the tyranny of mask laws, while sipping coffee out of bright-red Trump mugs. In the past month alone, Ward has tweeted warnings about the threat of “antifa,” compared the New York Times to the devil, and shared multiple videos of Black teenagers fighting and looting stores.

But now that Arizona’s political sands are shifting, Ward’s leadership is damaging the Republican cause, her critics in the party told me. As presidential candidates, Republicans McCain and Mitt Romney each won the state by nine percentage points; Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016 by just four points. For the past few months, Biden has been leading the president in the polls here, and unaffiliated Arizona voters, who typically swing right, are overwhelmingly supportive of Kelly in his race against Trump-endorsed McSally, according to Mike Noble, the chief of research at OH Predictive Insights, an Arizona-based nonpartisan research firm.

This is partly because of the state’s changing demographics: The Latino population, which makes up part of the Democrats’ base in Arizona, has grown, and more left-leaning young people are settling in red states. But the most important shift has been the leftward movement of suburban voters. Maricopa County, which covers the Phoenix area and accounts for 60 percent of all votes cast in the state, has been rapidly trending away from Republicans in the past few years. Barack Obama lost here by 11 points in 2012, but four years later, Trump defeated Clinton by just three points. In 2018, Sinema won Maricopa County 51 to 47 percent.

Perhaps unaware that Sinema, former chair of the Blue Dog caucus, was the single most right-wing Democrat in the House-- and is currently the Senate Dem with the most Republican-like voting record-- Godfrey referred to her win as part of a "leftward shift." There is a Demographic shift in Arizona-- more Latinos-- and there is the Trump factor, but hardly a leftward shift. Sinema has nothing to do with the left-- and neither does Biden; both are creatures of the right, although Sinema is, perhaps more so than even Ward, certifiably insane and not wedded to any ideology at all. Godfrey continued that no one wins "a statewide race in Arizona without keeping a tight grip on affluent Republicans, GOP women, and the unaffiliated voters who make up roughly one-third of the electorate, said the Arizona-based Republican strategist Chuck Coughlin-- and those are the exact voters whom the president and his ilk have alienated. 'Trump has changed everything,' Grant Woods, the former Arizona attorney general, told me. Woods was a lifelong Republican who once served as McCain’s chief of staff, but after Trump’s election, Woods reregistered as a Democrat. He’s observed a growing gap between Republican voters and their elected officials in the party and believes that gap has been stretched further by people like Ward. If Republicans 'want to double and triple down on Trumpism, then she’s perfect,' Woods said. But 'she is exactly the wrong person to be the party chairman for the Republicans if they want to have a future in the state of Arizona.' ... Jeff Flake, the former Arizona senator who retired in 2019, echoed Woods’s concerns. It’s 'tremendously damaging,' for moderates and independents to see 'virtually every Republican officeholder on stage with the president laughing at his jokes, looking at their shoes while he demeans their colleagues,' he told me. And attracting interest in the local party is difficult when the only issues discussed at precinct meetings are 'the deep state or immigration or the latest conspiracy theory.'"

The coronavirus pandemic has made a bad situation much worse for Republicans. Voters in poll after poll have been unimpressed by Trump’s handling of the crisis, and Republicans in Arizona have faced similar scrutiny: Cases of the virus surged after Governor Doug Ducey took early action to reopen the state in mid-May. In June, Arizona had the highest infection rate in the country. This spike in cases corresponded with a 13 percent increase in Arizonans reporting that the state was going in the wrong direction, according to OH Predictive Insights. Yet all the while, Ward, like Trump, has been encouraging opposition to stay-at-home orders, and dismissing mask wearing as “virtue signaling” on her daily live-stream. This has been a major turnoff to an important part of the Republican electorate, Flake said. “Suburban women and Millennials have been walking away from the party for a while. In many ways, they’re in a dead sprint now.”





Some on the right, however, dispute moderates’ diagnosis of their party’s problems. These Republicans-- best described as pro-Trump populists-- believe that the state GOP has not embraced the president enough. Steve Slaton, who runs a store in Show Low selling Trump-themed merchandise, feels that Ward, in her capacity as chairperson, has been too supportive of McSally in the primary, giving her an unfair advantage over Daniel McCarthy, her more populist opponent. Ward “got sucked into the whole McCainite-controlled party apparatus,” Slaton told me. Jennifer Esposito, a former state-committee member from Mohave County, campaigned for Ward back in 2019. “We thought as chairman she would be willing to go against the establishment,” Esposito said. “She appears now to be a sellout.”

Ward’s job, in other words, has in some ways become an impossible one. It’s unclear, at this point, whether there is anything she can do differently to change her party’s trajectory. It’s possible-- even likely-- that, come November, Arizona will turn blue. That sort of change has happened before. In 2000, Republicans controlled the Virginia state government; they held both of the state’s Senate seats, and they’d just given its electoral votes to a Republican presidential candidate. But Democrats made huge gains in the suburbs, the state GOP moved to the right instead of moderating, and by 2019, Democrats had turned the tables completely. “Unless something big changes between now and the middle of October,” this will happen in Arizona too, said Larry Sabato, the director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.

If it does, Woods, the former attorney general and lifelong Republican, told me he’ll be relieved. “I want ’em all to go,” he said. “I hope the Republican party regroups and starts over.”