This former GOP stronghold in Phoenix shows how Democrats are gaining ground in Arizona

If Republicans can count on winning any legislative district this year, surely it should be the one that is home to former Vice President Dan Quayle and Gov. Doug Ducey.

But in District 28, they've got a problem.

And at a time when the Republicans’ majority in the state Senate might ride on the fate of this district, plenty of eyes will be on it.

The changing political attitudes in District 28 reflect something broader than the support for any one legislator. The area also shows how suburbs that were once a linchpin of Republicans’ electoral success in the Valley — and, in turn, Arizona — are swinging toward Democrats.

The number of Democrats has swelled in this part of Maricopa County, which includes Paradise Valley and parts of north central Phoenix.

The district gained about 17,000 voters over the past six years and about 13,000 of those voters are Democrats.

Eight years ago, the Republican candidate for state Senate won by more than 11 percentage points.

But President Donald Trump lost the district in 2016 and in 2018, and Republican Sen. Kate Brophy McGee eked out a victory with just a few hundred votes.

The same candidates who ran in 2018, Brophy McGee and Democrat Christine Marsh, will face off again this year in something of a rematch.

Candidates are making their pitch down the middle 

However much the presidential election weighs on this race, though, neither candidate really wants to talk about it.

“That’s not what I’m running about,” Marsh said.

Instead, both candidates have spent a lot of time talking about education and health care as they try to make the case for how they could represent a district where the gap between Republicans and Democrats continues to shrink.

While other candidates are simply trying to rally their bases, candidates in District 28 are appealing to a fluid section of voters who may not feel at home in either party but will give both a look.

For Marsh, that means emphasizing her experience in education. A longtime educator currently teaching middle school in Scottsdale Unified School District, she was named Arizona Teacher of the Year in 2016.

The pandemic has also frustrated voters dismayed by the state’s response, she said.

“It really has laid out in stark vividness the lack of leadership, whether voters are using that term or not, they are seeing the lack of leadership. People are frustrated with the governor and they would really like leaders to follow science,” Marsh said.

In turn, Marsh added, more voters are paying attention to the closely divided Capitol and the role their district plays in deciding which party holds power.

As the district increasingly votes Democrat, Brophy McGee has held on with retail politics, helping broker a resolution to a neighborhood dispute over an outpatient drug treatment facility and speaking fluently the language of school district funding.

Brophy McGee is a longtime resident of north central Phoenix who served on the Washington Elementary School District governing board and chaired the Arizona School Facilities Board.

Elected to the state House in 2010 and the Senate in 2016, she has said education is the reason she ran in the first place and went on to sponsor the extension of Proposition 301’s $0.06 sales tax for education.

“People at the end of the day, as partisan as people may get, they want stuff done,” she said.

Brophy McGee has often frustrated members of her own party. She has backed legislation to prohibit discrimination against LGBT Arizonans in housing and in the workplace, for example, bucking party orthodoxy. And she was one of a few Republicans in the Senate to vote with Democrats to adjourn the legislative session this year amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Republicans, Democrats spending big

As irksome as some of her votes may be to fellow Republicans, a victory for Brophy McGee is key to them holding a majority in the state Senate.

Ducey has endorsed her campaign and a political action committee linked to him is spending money to support her.

Brophy McGee’s campaign had raised $443,000 this election cycle by mid-July. Marsh had raised about $246,000.

And Brophy McGee argues that her opponent's campaign is, more than anything, about the Democrats' effort to win power at the Capitol.

Meanwhile, Democratic groups are pouring money behind efforts to back Marsh, seeing an opportunity.

Democrats have criticized Brophy McGee, for example, for sponsoring legislation to allow insurance companies to sell short-term health plans that she argued would provide a flexible option for some people priced out of the individual marketplace. But opponents contend the proposal would open the door to the sale of junk plans that provide little actual coverage.

Whatever happens, the race is unlikely to be decided by a single candidate or issue. Instead, District 28 is where several trends are colliding.

For one thing, the district is changing, gaining thousands of additional voters in recent years.

At the same time, the district's voters are changing. Republicans have recently faced electoral headwinds in the suburbs.

With Trump, suburbs shift from GOP

Sarah Longwell, a political consultant who has spent years running focus groups mostly with suburban voters, said Trump has accelerated a shift of college-educated suburban voters away from the Republican Party.

That could make a difference in a district where about 17% of residents have a post-graduate degree (a higher rate than most Valley legislative districts).

If one assumption of American politics is that college-educated voters will mostly gravitate to the Republican Party when they get married, have children, buy a home in the suburbs and start paying more attention to property taxes, that conclusion no longer seems to hold up.

“With this Republican Party, with its emphasis on nationalism and populism — with rhetoric that is gross to a lot of these voters — that switch that happens to 30-year-old suburbanites just isn’t taking place,” said Longwell, executive director of Defending Democracy Together, a group of conservatives critical of Trump.

Another version of the Republican Party might appeal to these voters but this year, it’s a tougher pitch, she argued.

Contact Andrew Oxford at andrew.oxford@arizonarepublic.com or on Twitter at @andrewboxford.