When I first moved back to my native Arizona in 2018 after almost a quarter century in Los Angeles, I had no idea how much the political culture had changed, even though I visited at least once a year. My conservative friends would grouse a lot about what John McCain and Jeff Flake (doesn’t that feel like 40 years ago?) were doing in the Senate, but I was hoping that was something that could be fixed with a McCain retirement and Flake returning to the politician he was when he was in the House of Representatives.
We all know how that worked out.
Despite being the home of Barry Goldwater, the Grand Canyon State has always had some purplish tendencies. The governorship, for example, had ping-ponged between Dems and Republicans for much of my life. Still, it was decidedly red-leaning.
I began to find out that was no longer true with the election of then-Democrat Kyrsten Sinema to the United States Senate 10 months after I moved back here. Arizona hadn’t had a Democrat in the Senate since the waning days of the 20th century.
The purple swing state experience was new to me, and still feels kind of weird. Given that we’re really embracing our political polarity, I wonder if the purple state is an endangered species. Could Arizona be a blue state in the near future?
The seismic shift in Colorado has me spooked, to be honest. For the longest time, Colorado looked like it was reveling in it’s purple status. I don’t know if it’s all the weed — you can’t walk outside in Denver without getting a contact high now — or wealthy liberal ski buffs from California opting for a slightly less onerous cost of living, but the state is singing the blues now. Maybe it’s just my outsider’s perspective, but that all seemed to me to have happened relatively fast.
One problem with the exoduses from California and New York is that it’s not just conservatives who are fleeing. At first, Florida was the beneficiary of conservatives leaving New York state. That almost certainly contributed to Florida’s shift from being the biggest swing state prize in every presidential election to a solid electoral vote prize for the Republicans. Obviously, Governor Ron DeSantis had a lot to do with that too. As we are all painfully aware, Republicans don’t always handle political largesse well. DeSantis did. Polling has indicated that almost a million people might flee New York City because of Mamdani. They’re not all going to be Republicans, I can assure you. Florida can probably absorb a significant influx of Democrats, though.
Here in Arizona, however, Dem flight from California has been a big contributing factor to our newfound purpleness. The cost of living is so much lower here that California Democrats have been relocating here for quite a while. The problem is, they don’t understand why things got so out of hand in California and they vote for the same kinds of politicians here. Couple that with the fact that the Arizona GOP is a hot mess with no bench to speak of, and the makings of permanent blue status are there. I take comfort in the fact that most our representatives in the House are not only Republicans, but members of the Freedom Caucus as well.
Moving to the middle of the country, what happens if the rural Republicans who are still lending a purple hue to states like Michigan and Wisconsin decide they’re sick of being disenfranchised by Detroit and Milwaukee, respectively? The mood in the country is so ugly at the moment that people who thought they were dug in might decide they’ve had enough.
This is all just speculation, of course. The Colorado thing really got me going. Also, I’ve seen a lot of people on both the left and the right openly fantasizing about, or advocating for, the Balkanization of the United States. Peaceful coexistence doesn’t seem to be on the table at the moment.
While I do think that Arizona could course-correct, it is my fervent hope that all of the other swing states keep on swinging.
OK, I’m off to not type the word “purple” for about six months.
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