by Selwyn Duke, The New American:
Call it The Tale of Two Purple States. In the 2022 midterms, Florida experienced precisely what pundits and prognosticators said the whole country would: A historic, perhaps unprecedented “red” wave. In contrast, Arizona had a bit of a “blue” wave — but only in the high-profile, upper-echelon races. This raises a few questions, the first being:
Are Florida’s and Arizona’s voters really that much different?
A recent analysis of Arizona’s down-ballot races indicates that, well, maybe they’re not.
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Before getting to that, note here that the two states share many commonalities. They’re both sun-belt states whose populations have grown in the last decade by similar rates. They’re also both diverse places with similar demographics, which is significant because group identity is an excellent proxy for voting patterns.
Florida and Arizona are, respectively, 52.7 percent and 53.2 percent non-Hispanic white, with Latinos comprising more than a quarter of each state’s population. Yes, Hispanics, who traditionally lean Democratic, comprise a larger share (32.3 percent) of Arizona’s population than they do of the Sunshine State’s (26.8). On the other hand, black Americans have for decades been more solidly Democratic (90-plus percent) than any group, and they comprise 15.5 percent of Florida’s population but only 4.7 percent of Arizona’s.
In other words, you’d expect these states to be precisely what they had been regarded as for years prior to the midterms: “purple” states whose politics might shift a bit more toward one major party or the other in a given election, but remain very divided. But that’s not at all how it turned out November 8.
The Republicans ran the table in Florida, with Governor Ron DeSantis and Senator Marco Rubio winning by wide margins and even flipping Miami-Dade County, which should seem only a bit more likely than the GOP suddenly capturing New York City. What’s more, Republicans are set to control 85 seats in the state’s 120-member House — a historical record. The sweep is so profound that some observers have declared that Florida is now a red state.
Yet the sweep was different in Arizona: Democrats won every high-profile, up-ballot race — the governorship, Senate, secretary of state, and attorney general (though the last hasn’t been officially called). This seems a bit anomalous. After all, an election tends to have a certain character, with one major party or the other gaining ground nationwide within the context of each state’s particular character (e.g., a purple state becoming a bit more red or blue and a red state becoming somewhat more or less so). This raises the next question:
Can you remember an election in which two swing states registered such profoundly schizophrenic results, as if they’re suddenly operating in alternate universes?
Trying to explain this, earlier this month I pointed out an anomaly within the above anomaly: DeSantis and Rubio out-performed the polls, which is typical for Republicans (in 2020, it turned out that the GOP had under-polled by 3.3 points on average). Yet in most of the rest of our nation, including Arizona, the Republicans had apparently under-performed relative to the polls. This is odd because the polling “systems” are the same in Florida as elsewhere.
But then here’s what’s different: the voting system.
DeSantis and Florida’s legislators had taken steps to eliminate vote fraud in their state — in particular, the mail-in ballot variety, the kind most prone to fraud (more information here).
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