Reply With QuoteThose darn wildcats.
2000 Election: Bush won by 5.7
Bush 50.9
Gore 45.2
Nader 3.0
www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bi...425&EDATE=
Bush 54
Kerry 38
www.kaet.asu.edu/horizon/...-24-04.htm
Bush 47
Kerry 39
Those darn wildcats.
they better vote for BUSH!
www.economist.com/researc...id=1527355
Swing states
Arizona's drift to the left
May 13th 2004 | PHOENIX
The Economist
The second in our series on swing states ponders how on earth the home of Barry Goldwater became disputed territory
ARIZONA, some experts claim, is the most surprising swing state this year. The stamping ground of Barry Goldwater, the first properly conservative presidential candidate in 1964, voted Republican in every presidential election between 1952 and 1992. Last time round, George Bush won by six points—one of his widest majorities among this year's battleground states.
Yet Mr Bush is vulnerable. In 2002, a moderate Democrat, Janet Napolitano, won the governorship. Democrats have halved the Republicans' advantage in party registration, from 11 percentage points in the 1990s to five now. Arizona contains one of the Republicans' most vulnerable congressional seats, the immense first district, which stretches over the northern half of the state with 640,000 people in an area the size of Illinois. About a quarter of them are Native Americans and if Paul Babbitt, the Democratic challenger, can turn out 20,000 Navajo to vote for him, that alone may be enough to tilt the state for John Kerry. There is also Senator John McCain to contend with: a Republican but no friend of Mr Bush's, he could swing 4% of the vote either way.
The dead-heat between Messrs Bush and Kerry in the polls reflects the same demographic trends that have turned Phoenix into the fifth-largest city in the country, recently surpassing Philadelphia. Maricopa County alone is almost as big as the whole state was in 1990. Arizona is the second-fastest-growing state in America after Nevada. Two in three Arizonans were not born there.
My place in the sun
This is not all the result of immigration from Mexico (though some is: the Hispanic population almost doubled in the 1990s). Rather, it reflects an increase and a shift in migration from other states. In Goldwater's day, the typical new Arizonan was a wealthy Republican voter from the mid-west who had come to retire in the air-conditioned sun and cared about defence and taxes. Now it is a 30-something Democratic-leaner from California, who has come to work and cares about schools, crime, the cost of living and the environment. These are classic swing voters—fiscally conservative, socially liberal.
Yet these newcomers explain only part of Arizona's emergence as a swing state; many of them, particularly Latinos, are not diligent voters. The more important explanation lies in the contrasting strengths of the two parties locally.
Until about 2000, the local Democrats were losing members and looked disorganised. But a new local chairman, Jim Pederson, has invested $3m of his own money in state-of-the-art computerised voter files and reorganised the party on approved business-school lines. In the 2002 mid-term elections the Democrats halved the Republicans' advantage in turning out voters. In the past six months, Democrats have added 3,000 names a month to their rolls while Republicans have lost members. Miss Napolitano's chief of staff, Dennis Burke, says Mr Pederson is the best state chairman his party has ever had.
In contrast, Republicans are engaging in fratricide. None of Arizona's top elected officials is much interested in party building (Mr McCain is more concerned with national politics). Two recent Republican governors have left under clouds. Worst of all, conservative activists have pushed the party to the right just when new voters have moved to the middle. Moderate Republicans, says Earl de Berg, a local pollster, are now starting to break for Mr Kerry.
In most places, being a swing state is synonymous with becoming more centrist. That is partly true in Arizona: Miss Napolitano campaigned and now governs as a moderate. But Arizona's divided status has more to do with populism; this is often far from moderate, but it has untethered voters from parties and from whatever establishment ever existed. The Arizona Republic used to be able to make and break politicians. Now it is owned by a national chain and barely tries.
The populist strain goes back to its foundation. The Populist Party was in control then, and wrote into the state cons ution provisions for ballot initiatives and voter recalls familiar from California. Goldwater was arguably a populist as much as a conservative (and, for that matter, so is Mr McCain). The populist tendency has been exacerbated since by two factors: the new arrivals, who tend to leave their political affiliation behind them (independents are the fastest-growing political force in state politics), and the fading power of old business elites in Arizona's booming cities.
All swing states are unpredictable, but populist ones lurch more wildly than most. This year, the crucial touch may come from the main instrument of populist politics: there could be a conservative-backed referendum to prevent illegal immigrants and their families from getting state-financed social services and from being allowed to vote. Polls put support at around 70%—though how this plays out in presidential politics is unclear. Mr Bush is much more warmly disposed towards illegals than many local Republicans are.
In California, when Republicans seized on a similar anti-immigrant initiative in 1994, they won handsomely. But it ended up allowing Democrats to paint them as extremists (particularly to Latinos); and the state lurched towards the left. Local Democrats hope that in the long term, Arizona will also become a stronghold for them. But this year it still looks Mr Bush's state to lose.
AZ will vote for BUSH:next3
ducks, you like bush?
<----
Oh, wait. You didn't ask me. 8o
Yes I like Bush
I can not stand Mccain. He wants to take my guns away.And is to busy doing other things instead of voting on things.
Bush is the easy choose between Kerry and Bush.
ducks, you have "guns"?
www.bradenton.com/mld/bra...692289.htm
Sep. 13-14
625 LV
MOE 4.0
Bush 50
Kerry 39
yes I have guns
and bullets to!
Rasmussen
9/12-9/25
500 likely Voters
4.5 Margin of Error
Bush 51
Kerry 44
Nadar
bush is lossing a little ground right now here
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