How GOP Overreach Put Arizona Back in Play

The debate promises to be good – if at times disturbing – theater, especially in light of what social media wags swiftly dubbed "Papigate." Expect Romney and Santorum to pander to their party’s powerful right-wing fringe via thinly veiled immigrant bashing.

Arizona is also home to "America’s Toughest Sheriff," Maricopa County’s ever-popular Joe Arpaio, who brought back voluntary chain gangs, made racial profiling a key law-enforcement tool, and forced inmates to wear pink underwear.

Progressives are buoyed by a cascade of recent political events. Redrawn congressional and state district maps give Arizona Democrats a fighting chance to win five out of nine congressional seats, a U.S. Senate seat, and perhaps five more seats in the GOP-dominated Arizona Senate. The Latino electorate, deeply angered by the state’s draconian immigration laws, is galvanized. And the most powerful Republican in Arizona just lost a recall election.

many Arizona voters polled by her firm report being "sick of ideological fights" and misguided Republican politics that focus on immigration instead of jobs and education. If they turn away from the GOP in large enough numbers, Arizona could go blue. And if that happens, says David Berman, a senior research fellow at the Morrison Institute for Public Policy at Arizona State University, "Democrats will have it good just about everywhere."

Then there’s Sylvia Allen. A state senator, Allen believes, among other things, that the poor booted off Arizona’s Medicaid rolls need to "save up for their colonoscopy"; that trees steal water from people; and that the earth is 6,000 years old. Her improbable ascent to power was greased by like-minded Tea Party Republicans. Recently, she sponsored a law to create and bankroll a militia of untrained, gun-toting volunteers empowered to stop, detain and arrest "cross-border criminals" who are in cahoots with Hezbollah and have invaded Arizona’s "heartland." The state Senate Appropriations Committee advanced Allen’s $1.4 million-per-year militia measure to the Senate for an upcoming full vote. The committee approved the militia without credible evidence backing Allen’s contentions, without stakeholders supporting it, and after listening to only one witness, a former Border Patrol agent who said terrorists (and Chinese people) had invaded Arizona.

Note: The topic of this thread is NOT for bashing undocumented workers, it is about the possibility of Arizona going blue. Comments bashing undocumented workers will be deleted for being off topic.