Politics in Santa Cruz and Mohave counties: Arizona's bluest of blues and reddest of reds
There are no elected Republicans in Santa Cruz County, and no elected Democrats in Mohave. What has turned these rural areas so one-sided?
The drive to Santa Cruz County is marked in kilometers, on road signs left over from a failed experiment with the metric system. The road to Mohave County is punctuated with a homemade campaign billboard: “Hillary for Prison.”
These two counties sit a few hundred miles from each other, on opposite ends of Arizona. They look similar, each sparsely dotted with rural communities, and their politics are distinctly low-level. There are few career politicians, and fewer locals who move into the political spotlight.
But they're also on opposite ends of the political continuum, the extreme sides of America's partisan politics.
Each county is controlled by its respective political party: Mohave County as a Republican stronghold left behind by progressive movements, and Santa Cruz County as Democrats’ potential pathway into the state’s rural electorate.
Party dominance in these counties is total. Except for slivers of legislative or congressional districts anchored in other counties, there are no Democrats holding partisan office in Mohave County, and no Republicans holding partisan office in Santa Cruz County.
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There may be redder or bluer regions of Arizona — Republicans win reliably in Yavapai County (where Donald Trump recently visited Prescott Valley) just as Democrats do in Pima County (where Gabrielle Giffords served in Tucson). But Mohave and Santa Cruz counties seem to operate apart, each rooted in decades of single-party politics.
In a year when Arizona has become a battleground state in the presidential campaign, its red and blue bleeding together, Mohave and Santa Cruz counties remain two desert outposts, tugging on the state from opposite corners of the political world.
Santa Cruz County: Baked into the demographics
This election was their chance to root the party even deeper in the county, so Santa Cruz County Democrats rented a cramped office in Nogales, close enough to the border that cellphones nearby will ping “Welcome to Mexico!”
Knowing they couldn’t afford the rent past November, the party brought in folding tables and covered the walls with pictures of Democrats. Propped against one wall, a cartoonishly orange drawing of Donald Trump had been stapled to a picket.
“Chale con Trump,” the sign declared. It means something like "Down with Trump," but nobody in the office knew precisely what the phrase translated to. The red line through Trump’s face got the idea across.
The Democratic Party’s largest advantage in Santa Cruz County is baked into demographics: 82.7 percent of the population is Hispanic. That number climbs to 95 percent in Nogales, the county seat and largest city. And for years, Hispanic voters here have leaned Democratic.
“I think they believe in the principles of what the Democratic Party stands for,” said County Supervisor Manny Ruiz, the son of Mexican immigrants. “It’s always been, as far as I’m concerned, a very caring party.”
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Down here, many people vote Democratic because their parents did, or their grandparents before them. The Democratic dominance in Santa Cruz County is built as much on party loyalty as liberal ideas.
In the border city of Nogales, the Mexican influence is obvious. Road signs and storefronts are in Spanish. Advertisements for cellphones promise cheap calls to Mexico, just yards away. Traffic on the city’s roads stalls on Friday evenings, when the border crossing backs up with people heading home for the weekend or visiting family on the other side.
Nogales sits in a valley framed by the Santa Rita Mountains, beneath the high ground where Spanish missionaries built Arizona’s first European settlements.
Outside the city, Santa Cruz County rises into a hilly picture of old Arizona rangeland and the vineyards of the new Arizona wine country. In the 1950s, film directors used this part of the state as the backdrop for old Westerns. Bird-watchers gather here every summer, binoculars raised in hopes of seeing a Mexican Rose-throated Becard. Nobody has seen one in a decade.
The area surrounding Nogales is wealthier, and whiter, than the city. People often come here to retire, and they bring their politics with them. The tiny towns of Elgin and Sonoita, combined population 769, have a healthy "tea party" membership.
But that conservative minority has been overwhelmed by a tradition of Democratic families. No Republican holds local office in the county. In many elections, the race is over after the Democratic primary.
“It’s been very generational,” said Ruiz, a Democrat running for his fifth term. “I think that once you’re a Democrat, you’re always a Democrat.”
Ruiz’s campaign manager is his father, a 90-year-old immigrant from the Mexican border state of Sonora. When Ruiz’s parents were granted citizenship, they registered to vote and became Democrats. Ruiz joined the party on his 18th birthday and has voted Democratic in every election since.
Like many small American cities, Nogales has watched for decades as its brightest children leave for college and never come back. The area’s economy is built on agriculture and trade with Mexico, with as many as 2,000 trucks a day crossing the border.
The Great Recession of the late 2000s hit immigrants and low-wage laborers hardest, and Santa Cruz County has been slow to recover. The median household income is more than $10,000 below the state average; almost one in four county residents lives in poverty.
The voters Ruiz meets typically have the same concerns: job creation, access to affordable health care and reforming an immigration system that has split many families on opposite sides of the border.
Fear of illegal immigration is rarely mentioned. The flow of border crossings has moved into the open desert far from Nogales, leaving less impact on the city.
Molly Anderson, a local physician and acting chairwoman of the county Democratic Party, has seen only two undocumented patients at her clinic in Patagonia: One man carried in a dehydrated stranger, and the other asked her to call Border Patrol for a ride back to Mexico.
To win in Santa Cruz County, a candidate has to win with Hispanics. Democrats have almost always done so.
In 2008, a group of women brought a giant poster of Barack Obama to the county party headquarters. Without any practical use for it, party officials hung the poster on the wall of a hotel in the center of Nogales. For weeks, drivers pulled into the hotel parking lot to take a photo with Obama’s 20-foot-wide face, pointing to the community’s temporary slogan printed across the bottom:
“Nogales con Obama.”
Mohave County: Conservative values feed the politics
Sam’s Shooters Emporium is one of six gun shops on Lake Havasu City’s McCulloch Boulevard, which curls past rows of restaurants and across London Bridge to the lake shore. A five-minute walk can take an enthusiast from Sam’s to Gun Solutions, Southwest Firearms, Ryan’s Gunsmithing, Havasu Guns or Against All Enemies.
Across the street, in an unadorned green-and-yellow building, is the Mohave County Republican Party’s largest office.
“It’s a very pro-gun state,” said Sam’s owner, Sam Scarmardo, sitting between a shelf of rifles and a case of Glocks. “If Hillary (Clinton) wins, I’ll sell out in one day here.”
Republicans here tend to follow the “God, guns and gays” model of right-wing conservatism: largely evangelical, staunchly pro-Second Amendment and uncomfortable with evolving social issues like same-sex marriage.
“We’re a country who’s forsaken God,” Scarmardo said. “This is a country that was founded by God-fearing people in the 18th century, and now that we’ve started murdering babies and allowing for ...” He fell quiet.
It seemed as if Washington was allowing for everything lately. The Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage across the country, even after two-thirds of Mohave County had voted against it. Government spending was growing. Everybody was talking about gun control and global warming, and it seemed like nobody cared about abortion anymore.
A lifelong Republican who cut his children’s names from his will after they voted for Obama, Scarmardo studied newspapers and the Bible. He believed they had started to overlap, so he had started preparing for the apocalypse.
“A lot of people think we’re in the final chapter of the Bible here,” he said. “They’re just trying to figure out which portion of Revelations we’re talking about.”
He knew places like Mohave County were often ignored. It was why a lot of people had moved here in the first place. The land was cheap, the nights were quiet and residents could live in peace.
But now, many felt conservatism was under attack. And nobody ever asked what the people here wanted.
“This election is about the people versus the New York-Washington-Los Angeles-Boston-Philadelphia establishment,” said Larry Schiff, a prominent local conservative and host of a twice-weekly radio talk show. “We have nothing in common with the Northeast, in terms of the government. Nothing.”
This was one of the original counties of the Arizona Territory, split from New Mexico in 1863. The first railroads arrived 20 years later, but pieces of that frontier mind-set remain, popping up still when people wear holstered handguns to Starbucks.
The early ranchers tended to vote Democratic, and for decades Mohave County was solidly in the hands of conservative Democrats. Republicans had no foothold until the mid-1970s, when the election of a conservative judge started a slow shift to red.
Now, settlers here are often retirees, lured to Mohave County by low taxes and its reputation for conservative values. People here claim to be the most patriotic in the country and see voting for conservatives as a product of that patriotism.
“I don’t think the party is responsible for the conservatism of the area,” County Republican Party Chairman Michael Ward said. “I think it’s more the other way around, that the party benefits from the conservatism.”
The population here is overwhelmingly white. The median household earns $11,000 less than the state average, and one in five county residents lives in poverty. Locals like to point out that Kingman, the county seat, has one steakhouse and at least 70 churches.
Outside city limits, roads roll through hills, swerving around mountains and sparse stands of Joshua trees. State lines disappear into the desert, and shells of empty towns litter the highway.
When scattered towns come into view, small neighborhoods spread across dirt roads and driveways. In places, the earth is too firm to hold a Trump yard sign, so a few people have tied them to a fence or a mailbox.
Most houses don't bother. Why spend the money? Their neighbors were probably voting Republican anyway.
Santa Cruz County: Keeping people engaged
Anderson, the county's Democratic Party chairwoman, strode to the counter in Gariola Coffee House, her favorite lunch stop in Nogales. Four Hispanic women were working in the kitchen, and Anderson decided to take a quick poll.
“Everybody voting here?” she asked.
All four women nodded.
“Voting Democrat?”
One cashier thought for a moment, then nodded again. “Democrat, of course,” she said. “No Republican.”
Anderson shrugged as if she already knew the answer. Down here, prompting people to vote Democratic was easy. Her task was persuading them to actually vote.
Every four years, the Democratic presidential candidate wins an overwhelming majority of votes in Santa Cruz County. But turnout is consistently low: Just over 58 percent of registered voters in Santa Cruz County cast a ballot in the 2012 general election, the lowest turnout in the state.
It was enough for candidates to carry Santa Cruz County — any turnout would be, really — but Arizona Democrats’ long-term goal of flipping the state relies on building from their bases in large cities and along the border.
“It’s been frustrating,” Anderson said. “Because we believe if we could get a reasonable turnout throughout the state, that we would be a Democratic state.”
In local races, the general election has become an empty process. The Democratic candidate was almost guaranteed to win, so excitement shifted to the primaries. In Santa Cruz County, it wasn’t whether the Democrat would win, but which Democrat.
“The real decisions are made in the primary,” Anderson said. “And that is a challenge, getting people to come out for the general.”
The Democrats’ largest advantage in Santa Cruz County worked against them in state and national elections. Historically, Hispanic voters have turned out at a drastically lower rate than the national average. In 2012, 61.2 percent of eligible voters nationwide cast a ballot. Among Hispanics, that number was 48 percent.
Nobody has been able to settle on just one cause. The national Hispanic population is generally younger than the rest of the country and less likely to hold U.S. citizenship. Election Day is not a national holiday, and many lower-income people can’t afford the time away from work. Democrats argue that voter identification laws disproportionately affect minorities.
Santa Cruz County Democrats don’t have the funding to overcome those barriers, but they try their best. From their tiny office they call voters, organize phone banks and plan door-to-door campaigns. They have focused on Ann Kirkpatrick’s bid for the U.S. Senate, hoping to pounce on their first chance in years at turning Arizona blue.
"If the turnout is high, she will win," Anderson said. They're hoping otherwise uninterested Democrats will turn out this year, motivated by a common enemy: GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump.
Mohave County: Getting Republicans out to vote
There’s a saying that Republicans in Mohave County like to repeat with a smirk. Independents, they say, are just disgruntled Republicans. The phrase makes no mention of Democrats.
Here in the state’s furthest northwestern reaches, Democrats are considered irrelevant. Although Democrats hold Arizona’s 1st Congressional District and 7th Legislative District, the boundaries of both barely poke into Mohave County. People here don’t count that.
“No one is going to get elected as a Democrat in Mohave County,” Ward said. “They’re just not.”
To make sure of it, the Mohave County Republican Central Committee filled the cafeteria of a local church last month, the party’s last meeting before the general election.
Donald Trump yard signs lined the walls, affixed below painted verses from Psalms 139: See if there be any wicked way in me, one read, and lead me in the way everlasting. A stack of signs in a corner urged “No on 205,” the recreational-marijuana proposition on the ballot. There were a few “I’m a Deplorable” shirts. A life-size cutout of Trump greeted each member at the door.
“Take my picture!” a woman dressed in all red said, bounding into the room. She cozied up to the cardboard candidate and laid a hand on its chest. “Oooooh, Donald,” she cooed.
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Trump would win in Mohave County, that much was assured. But the rest of Arizona was tilting toward the Democrats: Hillary Clinton had taken the lead in some presidential polls and voters were flirting with legalizing marijuana. So the county party prayed for their nominee, pledged allegiance to the flag and set out to turn out Republican voters.
“We have no idea what Trump is going to do if he’s in the White House,” Ward said. Then he corrected himself. “When he’s in the White House.”
In the crowd, a man with a cane leaned over to the woman next to him. “We know exactly what he’s going to do,” he whispered loudly enough to be overheard. “He’s going to get in there and fire everyone.”
“Hillary will continue to destroy us,” Ward said, and the audience shouted its opinions.
“I know she’s a traitor!”
“Opening the border.”
“Lock her up!”
The room seemed to agree: Hillary Clinton should be in prison, but the Democrats would rig the election for her. The only way to stop her, they decided, was to get Republicans to the polls.
Voter turnout here has historically hung at least 5 percentage points below the rest of the state. In this year’s presidential preference election, Mohave County turnout beat the state average. Trump took 65 percent of votes in the county.
Mohave County was already the most deeply Republican part of the state, and now Trump was painting over it, filling in the gaps and leaving it redder than ever.
On his way out the door, a committee member picked up the cardboard Trump and tucked it under his shoulder, taking it with him into the bright morning sun.
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The messages on Joe Longoria’s truck were simple, nothing outrageous. Four years later, he couldn’t recall exactly what he had written, only that his medium was shoe polish on tempered glass. But he stuck out back then, at the height of the 2012 election, driving around Kingman with his Obama-Biden bumper sticker and the handwritten endorsements on his truck.
At stoplights, people would motion for him to roll down a window. Longoria, chairman of the Mohave County Democratic Party, obliged.
People would scream obscenities at him, waving their middle fingers. "Get out of our county!"
In 2016, people call the local radio station and demand its sole liberal talk host be taken off the air. Longoria’s brother found his car window smashed in and figured it was because of a Hillary Clinton sticker on the back. One gay Democratic staffer found her car riddled with shotgun pellets.
“It is hard for Democrats to come out, for fear of some retribution,” Longoria said. “There’s a concern something’s going to happen to you.”
To be a Mohave County Democrat is to be constantly outnumbered, to search the county for people willing to sacrifice time and money in order to lose an election by 40 points.
To win in Mohave County, Longoria said, a candidate would have to run as a Democrat in disguise. He or she would have to be a gun-rights activist, have a strong religious identity, denounce Common Core education standards and pledge to be fiscally conservative and shrink the government. Being a nature survivalist wouldn’t hurt, either.
“You almost have to be Republican-ish to win here,” Longoria said. “You almost have to run like a Republican,” and Democrats have started doing just that, either switching parties or running for nonpartisan offices and avoiding the conversation.
It’s the same situation for Republicans in Santa Cruz County, its power at risk of being diluted even more because of a presidential campaign obsessed with a wall.
Along the border, the Republican Party had already been pushed out. Lifelong conservatives filed for office as Democrats just to have a chance. Then came Donald Trump's wall, deportation forces and a spike in anti-immigration candidates. Now, many people in Santa Cruz County aren't just voting for Democrats. They're voting against Republicans.
"If somebody's basis for judging a candidate is the letter on their registration card," Republican state Rep. Chris Ackerley said, "then that kind of ends the conversation."
Each of Arizona's 30 legislative districts sends two representatives to Phoenix. District 2 stretches across Santa Cruz and Pima counties, covering tea party strongholds and dark-blue Nogales. "I represent a schizophrenic district," said Ackerley, who lives in Sahuarita in Pima County.
When Ackerley first ran in 2012, he was defeated by two Democrats. When he ran against two more Democrats in 2014, his opponents split the Santa Cruz County vote. Ackerley won enough Republican votes in Pima County to finish second. He became the lone Republican representing Santa Cruz County, but finished a distant third among county voters.
It wasn't a Republican insurgence, but it was progress.
"Our goal is not to convince everybody to be Republicans," Ackerley said. "At some level, there has to be some healthy tension between political camps in order to keep things in check."
In September, the Republican Party opened its first-ever office in Nogales, renting a side room in a Mexican bazaar. The building was painted to stand out, like an American flag had wrapped itself around the bricks.
The front window was a mess of campaign signs for Republican candidates: Ackerley for state House, Shelley Kais for state Senate, Bill Abatecola for Congress. A patch of dirt around back held a half-dozen Trump signs, and somebody had painted the word “Jobs” on the wall six times.
“Nuestro Poder,” read one poster. Our power. “Hispanic Roots, American Dreams.”
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Red and blue do not make yellow
On the election maps used by television news shows and online news sites, Arizona has in recent weeks turned an unfamiliar shade of yellow. For the first time in two decades, Arizona is a toss-up. Trump and Clinton have stepped up their efforts to claim the state's 11 electoral votes.
The outcome could hinge on how much of Arizona's Hispanic population turns out to vote, or how its large cities vote, or what the 20 percent of voters who are still undecided choose to do.
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But in the corners, away from campaign rallies and national attention, Election Day could be another dull Tuesday. The outcomes here were mostly decided years ago, the lines drawn by race, religion and Arizona’s earliest history.
Democrats will almost certainly win Santa Cruz County. Republicans will almost certainly carry Mohave County.
It’s what happens.
“Your Democratic candidate would have to do something illegal to lose in the general election here,” Molly Anderson said of Santa Cruz County.
In Mohave County, said Larry Schiff, “If you’re not a Republican, you can’t get elected dogcatcher.”