Due to Arizona’s shifting demographics our state is becoming more and more purple, due to new residents moving here from more liberal states, the increasing diversity from non-white residents, and as our state gets progressively younger with older, more reliable conservatives are being countered by younger voters who tend to vote less often for Republicans.
In my youth, Arizona was a reliably solid red state similar to Utah or a less wack-a-doo and weird Texas.
Arizona gave its eight electoral votes to Bill Clinton in 1996. But that was the last time a Republican nominee for president won Arizona until Joe Biden won Arizona’s 11 electoral votes in 2020, although Hillary Clinton came close in 2016, only losing Arizona by 3.6%, better than Barack Obama, John Kerry and Al Gore, who lost Arizona by 6.3% to 10%. Prior to 1996, Democrats tended to lose Arizona by 20% to 30%, primarily because they did not campaign in our lost-cause state.
Because of Arizona’s conservative lean, Republican lawmakers in the House and Senate have rarely had to rely on any Democrats to pass their budget. So while Democratic lawmakers at the State Capitol in Phoenix can hem and haw to voters as members of the loyal opposition, the Democratic legislative caucus really had to accept what Republicans were willing to throw their way and hope for next year to do better at the polls.
But the Republican hold in the legislature has slowly diminished over the years. With Republicans first losing their supermajority in 2012, they now only hold a one-seat majority in the House and a one-seat majority in the Senate. In the last election cycle personal feud between Arizona Sens. Kelly Townsend [R-District 16] and Michelle Ugenti-Rita [R-District 26] had both women spiking each other’s bills so neither passed, failing by one vote each.
Thus, if Republicans want anything to pass they need to require support from all their legislators, without exception, because even if one defects, the vote ends up tied — which is legislative death because Arizona’s constitution writers wisely did not allow for tiebreakers, thus forcing compromise.
Also last cycle, the legislature passed an omnibus, catchall budget bill that the Arizona Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional because the parts of the bill, not related to the budget, did not break down all of the items by title as required by state law, violating the public’s ability to search for items.
The Arizona Supreme Court takes public records accessibility very seriously, which should be a warning to any local official trying to circumvent state law.
The ruling threw out the budget and lawmakers weren’t called back, in part because much of the Republican bills that passed in omnibus form due to being tied to the budget would fail if voted on item by item.
Republican lawmakers who had labored without any Democratic input effectively had the vast majority of the session nullified by their own partisanship.
This year, Arizona state lawmakers did the unthinkable — they passed a bipartisan budget.
“I am grateful that such a large majority of House members, Republicans and Democrats, have had enough wisdom and courage to work together to find answers to the major problems of our state,” Arizona Speaker Russell “Rusty” Bowers [R-District 25] stated. “Reaching bipartisan agreement on taking care of the needs of the people of Arizona shouldn’t be a rare or historic event, as this was. My hope is that this inspires and fosters a renewal of the cooperative spirit that our great state was built upon.”
Across the aisle, House Minority Leader Reginald Bolding [D-District 27] said, “this is what a negotiated compromise budget looks like. This is what our state — where voters are nearly evenly divided by affiliation — has long asked of us. Work together. There are things in this plan we like, things we don’t. Things we love, things we hate. But weighed all together, the good in this budget — finally— outweighs the bad.”
We commend our lawmakers who were putting aside their partisanship in passing a budget bill that neither side loved, but by which both could live with. That’s the purpose of democratic governance: Majority and minority factions compromising to pass a bill with overwhelming though never universal support. No one gets everything they want, but no one goes home empty-handed and in the end, we, the voters, benefit.
Christopher Fox Graham
Managing Editor
