Will Arizona leave John McCain blue?

Barack Obama won't win Arizona, but Democrats down the ballot are poised for a big year on John McCain's home turf.

By Mike Madden

Read more: Politics, News, Mike Madden

Reuters/Jim Young

Arizona delegates hold John McCain puppets at the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., Sept. 4, 2008.

Sept. 23, 2008 | PHOENIX -- This should be a tough year to be a Democrat in Arizona. After all, the state's senior Republican, John McCain, is on the top of the national ticket. For the first time in three presidential elections, Arizona won't be a battleground -- you'd think the GOP would be nicely set up to win races up and down the ballot.

But try telling that to the nearly 1,000 people who turned out for a rally a few weeks ago to open Barack Obama's state headquarters downtown. (Or, for that matter, the 400 people who showed up a day early because a blog post got the date wrong.) Despite McCain, Democrats in Arizona are very much looking forward to the elections. Come November, McCain will almost certainly win his home state -- but he may find he doesn't bring a lot of Republicans to victory along with him. Instead, Democrats look likely to pick up a House seat, hold on to two others they won in 2006, and at least challenge -- if not overturn -- Republican control of the state Legislature.

Like other purple Southwestern states, Arizona has seen an influx of newcomers and rapid growth in the number of Latino voters, two trends that could help tilt it farther away from its conservative past. Which is why Don Bivens, the chairman of the Arizona Democratic Party, is feeling pretty good these days. "We're still going full steam ahead," he said last week. His only regret? "I wish I had some of the resources they're giving to New Mexico" for the presidential race. The presidential campaign is basically passing Arizona by, but even so, McCain was only up by 10 points in recent public polls; private polls for campaigns have Obama even closer in some congressional districts around the state. (Bivens says Obama's strategists in Chicago tell him they'll consider buying ads and spending some money in Arizona if it's still close after the debates.)

Losing on his own turf would be embarrassing for McCain (putting him in a small club with Al Gore and George McGovern, the only nominees in the past 50 years who couldn't carry their own states). The last candidate from Arizona, Barry Goldwater, won his home state (albeit by less than a percentage point) even while losing in a national landslide in 1964. McCain won't be at risk of losing Arizona unless Obama somehow manages to put together an LBJ-size wave of his own in the next 45 days. What has Arizona Democrats excited, though, is the fact that even without a competitive race at the top of the ticket, they're registering voters and raising money much faster than the state's Republicans. Since the 2006 elections, nearly 76,000 new Democrats have signed up to vote in Arizona, compared to about 26,000 more Republicans. The shift has shaved a few points off of the GOP's long-standing edge in party registration, and Democrats now make up about 34 percent of the electorate, compared with 38 percent for Republicans and nearly 27 percent independent. Financially, the state Democratic Party has raised more than seven times as much as the state Republican Party this cycle, finishing the summer with $325,000 in the bank to the GOP's $58,000. "We consistently this year have been seeing unprecedented levels of support," said Maria Weeg, the state Democratic Party's executive director.

Randy Pullen, the state's conservative GOP chairman (who hasn't always been a McCain fan), claims excitement about McCain will help his side this fall. The problem for down-ballot Republicans is that while McCain is popular in Arizona, he doesn't seem likely to draw out straight-ticket Republican voters who weren't already going to turn out. A big bloc in the state's deeply conservative Republican base has always clashed with McCain; his support for comprehensive immigration reform, which he's been trying to distance himself from for the last year, didn't help him with hardcore GOP activists back home who tend to see securing the border as part of an existential struggle for the state's soul. McCain only won 47 percent of the vote in the Feb. 5 Republican primary, with Mitt Romney taking 35 percent -- and this was in a primary that actually mattered, unlike later contests where McCain's total was held down by protest votes. Arizona voters have no problem splitting their tickets -- in 2006, Democrat Janet Napolitano was reelected as governor, Republican Jon Kyl was reelected to the Senate, and Democrats won the state's two competitive House races.

"I don't expect much coattails" for McCain, said pollster Bruce Merrill, a professor emeritus at the Arizona State University's Cronkite School of Journalism who runs a monthly survey for the school and a local TV station. "The presidential election is a personality contest rather than party-based. The issues at the state and local level are heavily in favor of Democrats."

Next page: In 2006, Democrats picked up six seats in the Arizona House and one in the Senate