Still a Contender

Nogales, Arizona

For so many weeks, Arizona was considered a toss up, a battleground, a wild card, a key swing state. OK--admittedly not in the same league as Florida or Ohio, but certainly second tier, like West Virginia or Iowa. Some even thought it might turn blue.

Now it's been left for red; dumped by both of its suitors, who, driven by the polls' prognoses of sure success or demise, have reassigned staff and pulled TV and radio ads. The buzz is that Kerry's head campaigner was sent to Colorado. Even Martin Sheen cancelled a date with Scottsdale for some "other" city in Ohio.

But Arizonans aren't moping. All dressed up, they're already going to the polls, many driven by the presidential election, but also by Proposition 200, an anti- immigrant referendum so blatantly ill-conceived and racist--it would deny "public benefits" to anyone without proof of citizenship--that John McCain and the Arizona Republican Party oppose it. That hasn't stopped it from maintaining an edge in polls (42% in favor, 29% opposed and 29% undecided according to the latest Northern Arizona University poll). The prospect that Prop 200 would pass has kept the NO ON 200 folks working overtime, knocking on thousands of doors state-wide.

"We're definitely getting a lot of people to vote because of 200," says Liz Hillbruner, a recent college grad from Chicago and one of a few dozen activists who packed their bags in June and headed to Arizona to do full-time voter mobilization.

"There are going to be a lot of 'unlikely' voters this year," says Luis Carlos Romero-Davis, who's getting out the vote in Nogales, a small border town that's really one big town with a border dividing it. "It's impossible to predict what's going to happen," he says. Born and raised there, Romero-Davis, 26, convinced Moving America Forward to let him do voter registration in Nogales instead of sending him north to Phoenix or Tucson. "I said, 'If it doesn't work, then move me somewhere else. But at least let me try.'" They not only didn't move him, they gave him a budget.

On Saturday afternoon, Romero-Davis drives me by the bustling Democratic campaign headquarters. "We've never had this much activity," he says. "This is the first time I've seen the Democrats here." Across the railroad tracks and up a steep hill, we pull into a driveway. The 12-foot high U.S.-Mexico fence is a stone's throw away, snaking up and down the hills. "This family you'll meet switched their registration from Republican to Democrat," he says.

Inside, we sit around the kitchen table with Lupita Martinez and her mother, the senior Lupita Martinez. The two list many reasons for the change, but mainly, they're moved by the deaths in Iraq and the seemingly unmoved president. They are both sure that Arizona will go to Kerry. "You can just hear it in people's conversations, says the younger Lupita. Her 24-year-old sister Alejandra, who has been registered Democrat since 2000 says her coworkers are proud to say they're voting for Kerry but won't admit it if they're voting for Bush. "And now all they talk about is Prop 200," she says.

Romero-Davis is relishing his hometown of 20,000 springing to political life. Since he began knocking on doors in July along with three New American Freedom Summer college students--from Boston, LA, and Bulgaria--he's registered 1,500 new voters, and he says the Dems have registered another 1,500. The results are already palpable. The Santa Cruz county registrar is swamped with early ballots: 4,115 up from 1,689 in 2000--an increase of 140 percent. Six hours north in Navajo Nation, Moving America Forward has registered 9,000 new voters.

To be sure, Navajo and Santa Cruz won't turn Arizona blue by themselves. But Pima County, home to liberal Tucson, just might. With 70,000 new voters and a reputation for the highest voter turnout state-wide, it won the Democratic governor, Janet Napolitano, her seat in 2002, and it carried Clinton to victory ten years earlier, the first Democratic candidate to do so since Truman.

With some 470,000 more voters than in 2000, GOTV organizers here would like to think their state is still in play. And the momentum to quash Proposition 200 may be the true wild card. It went from close to 74% support in July to 42% now, thanks to a high-energy ground campaign. "From what we're hearing knocking on doors, I think Arizona going to eke blue," says an optimistic anti-200 campaigner, hesitant to threaten his group's non-partisan status by going on record. "It seems to me like blood is starting to boil."

Jennifer Block

Comments (0)