Thinking Arizona
Facts to Inform the Public Discourse
Political Mix Changing Quickly In Pinal County
August 18, 2011
Pinal County hasn’t just seen the future, it’s experiencing it.
Once upon a time, the great tract between Phoenix and Tucson was home to the farming community around Casa Grande and Eloy, the corridor of copper mining communities along its eastern edge, the state prison in Florence . . . and, politically speaking, lots of Democrats.
Today, the north and northwest edges of the county are home to a stampede of exurbanites. The once sleepy towns arrayed along the edges of the Gila River Indian Reservation – notably Apache Junction, Queen Creek, and the municipality of Maricopa – grew like topsy in the last decade. They attracted long-distance commuters, retirees looking to save a few bucks . . . and, politically speaking, lots of unaffiliated voters.
Pinal has become the first county in the state where a plurality of voters doesn’t affix a R or D to their name. The burgeoning numbers of unaffiliateds have eclipsed the once-dominant Democrats and even top the growing ranks of Republicans.
Just 10 years ago, Democrats made up 52 percent of the county’s 71,000 voters. Republicans were 32 percent. The 16 percent of unaffiliateds were barely an afterthought.
Unaffiliated Voters Top All
Today, unaffiliated voters are the biggest segment of an electorate that has expanded just as fast as the county has expanded. They constitute 35 percent of 162,000 voters. Republicans make up 33 percent, and the Democrats now lag at 31 percent. How Pinal compares with the rest of the state.
The rapidly changing mix bears close watching. The county’s population explosion – at the fastest rate in the state and one of the fastest in the country over the last decade – is the result of metropolitan Phoenix busting out of the seams of Maricopa County. The growth rate has slowed in the past two years as homebuyers who were egged on by the easy credit of the housing boom now suffer through the effects of the mortgage crisis.
Even so, the complexion of Pinal County is in flux and so is its politics.
Democrats controlled county offices from the beginning. That ended in 2008, when board of supervisors member Bryan Martyn and Sheriff Paul Babeu became the first Republicans ever to be elected to county-wide posts. They were joined in 2010 by another Republican who was elected clerk of the Superior Court.
Even more telling is the turnover in the legislative district which pretty much matches the county. Through the 2006 election, the senator and two representatives representing District 23 were all Democrats. Today they’re all Republicans.
More change is coming. The influx of new residents, who doubled the county census from 2000 to 2010, has pushed the county past the population threshold whereby it must increase the size of its board of supervisors from three members to five. The supervisory districts to take effect in next year’s election are bound to be controversial when they are released, probably in the next few weeks, but no matter how they are drawn they’ll have to be clustered in the high-growth areas north and northwest. The area also will get more legislative representation as those districts are redrawn this year.
In the middle of all this are the county’s high concentrations of unaffiliated voters. A review of records provided by the county recorder’s office, which handles voter registration, shows that unaffiliateds constitute more than 40 percent of voters in 16 of Pinal County’s 88 precincts. All but two of those 16 precincts are located in the high-growth areas on the county’s northern edge. The concentration can be seen in this map.
That’s not a coincidence, in the view of County Recorder Laura Dean-Lytle. She maintained in a recent interview that the uptick in unaffiliated registrations is directly related to the high growth rate. Her contention is that most have no reason to reconsider their party affiliation until they move and have to re-register.
Speculation As To Why
Why so many end up in the unaffiliated column is a different question. It’s not that most specifically declare they are independents. That group makes up only about a fifth of “other” voters in the county.
The great majority – 78 percent – simply don’t specify their party preference. Their reasons – or lack thereof – are open to speculation.
For some, it may be a sign of neglect or indifference. They may overlook the spot on the registration form where they are asked to specify party preference, don’t care enough to bother filling it in, or don’t realize that information from their previous registration doesn’t carry forward. A new form, which has been designed by the Secretary of State’s office and forwarded for approval by the U.S. Department of Justice, might help. Registrants will be asked to check one of three boxes: Republican, Democrat, or Other.
But the two members of the board of supervisors – Republican Martyn and Democrat David Snider – whose districts are most affected by the surge of unaffiliateds say what is happening is far from careless. They see voters who are either disenchanted or disconcerted.
Martyn, who represents the high-growth precincts at the northern tip of the county, believes it tellingly reflects on who is moving into the district.
He explains that in the booming San Tan Valley south of Queen Creek, the average age is 28. These young adults “are not tied to any political affiliation, they’re not tied to their parent’s political traditions. They’re concerned about their children, about their own futures. They look at Washington, look at the state Legislature, and they don’t like what they see,” he said.
Although he doesn’t call it such, the groundswell he describes might amount to a quiet rebellion. Martyn predicts “if Congress keeps it up, there will be more and more of this.”
More Not To Like
The unaffiliated voters are critical of the stalemated state of the legislative process, he said, wanting instead for “the two sides to come together to figure out what needs to be done.” And they don’t identify with the figureheads on either side.
“People feel they don’t have a home,” Martyn said. “If the Tea Parties represent Republicans, then many [voters] would prefer to be independents. The Democrats include the ultra liberals and they don’t want to be associated with that either. They say: ‘I don’t have to be a Republican or Democrat, I’m just going to vote for the guy or the gal.’”
That concept troubles Dean-Lytle, the county recorder who herself is a Democrat.
“They say I just want to vote for the person,” she said. “Great idea but how do you make it work? How does a candidate get out there on his own? The wheels don’t turn without institutional support. It takes organization, money and people. Democrats or Republicans, they help you get your name out there.”
Democrat Snider, who represents Casa Grande and the fast-growing area around it on the county’s northwest side, agrees with Martyn that there is rising frustration with the polarization of the political process. But he is wary of generalizations.
Many of the newcomers to his district, he says, are a different demographic than those in the San Tan Valley. And they’re a little surprised when they first brush up against Arizona politics.
Snider says that while there is also a younger set in the city of Maricopa, many of the transplants to the area are a little more mature and established. He describes them as 40’s, 50’s, and older, attracted by a bigger house or a bigger lot than they had elsewhere. Some make the long commute into Phoenix, but others work in and around Casa Grande, or have retired.
Different Than Back Home
The political delineations they knew for instance in the Midwest are not what they find in Arizona. Snider says newcomers find Pinal County Democrats to be more conservative than those they associated with in Ohio or Michigan. Likewise, he says, they find Republicans here to be more conservative than those back East.
Rather than shifting their thinking a little to the right, some apparently feel the better option is to go generic.
Although many of the newcomers disavow political affiliation, Martyn believes the influx into the county bodes well for the GOP. Those he calls “no parties” are in his assessment “moderate conservatives.”
GOP Could Grab Control
What could have an even bigger impact are the new district boundaries to be put in place for next fall’s election. To preserve the voting power of Hispanics under the dictates of the U.S. Voting Rights Act, the county has been advised by its redistricting consultant that two of the five districts must have a majority of minorities. Concentrating a high percentage of minorities, who mostly vote Democrat, in two districts likely will leave the other three to be decided by Republicans and the unaffiliateds.
Snider downplays the importance, saying that partisan politics don’t much factor into the “blading of county roads.”
That said, the road grader has arrived at a crossroads. Voters could soon steer the former Democratic stronghold into more unfamiliar territory. With the coming district alignment, Martyn contends, the county’s first five-member board of supervisors will have a Republican majority.
– Richard Gilman
