Are the Democrats seeing red?
by digby
A new poll shows Hillary Clinton running ahead of Donald Trump in Arizona, where a Democratic presidential candidate has carried the state only once in the last 64 years.
A survey by Phoenix-based OH Predictive Insights found Clinton taking 46.5 percent support over Trump at 42.2 percent.
About 6 percent of respondents said they would vote for an unspecified third-party candidate, while 5.6 percent said they’re undecided.
Former President Bill Clinton is the last Democrat to carry the state, narrowly defeating Bob Dole there in 1996, when Reform Party candidate Ross Perot was also on the ballot. Prior to Clinton, the last Democratic presidential candidate to carry the state was Harry Truman, in 1948.Mitt Romney defeated President Obama in Arizona in 2012 by 9 points.
“It’s shocking to think that a Democratic presidential candidate would carry Arizona if the election were held today, considering that every statewide office in Arizona is held by a Republican as well as significant majorities in the Arizona House and Senate,” Wes Gullett, a partner at OH Predictive Insights, told the Phoenix Business Journal. “Arizona should be a reliable red state.”
There are a handful of states with diverse electorates and growing minority populations that Democrats believe they can compete in with Trump at the top of the ticket.
Trump’s good pal isn’t helping:
Joe Arpaio may be a local sheriff, but his national profile has helped him build a war chest three times the size of Donald Trump’s.
According to Arpaio’s latest campaign finance disclosure (PDF), the combative immigration hardliner has raised nearly $9.9 million for his November bid for a 7th term as Maricopa County sheriff, including $1.94 million since January alone.
But despite the famous sheriff’s enormous fundraising haul, Democrats are convinced that an ongoing federal trial against Arpaio, along with Arizona’s growing Latino voting population, will not only make the sheriff vulnerable, but will also make him as much of a drag on Arizona’s Republican ticket as Trump, especially for Sen. John McCain’s bid for a 5th Senate term.
The 84-year-old sheriff’s national appeal shows up in his massive small-dollar donor list. Of the more than 100,000 people in his active donor file, 26 percent come from Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, while the rest are a hodgepodge of retirees, teachers, cops, cashiers, and electricians from California to North Carolina.Most of those have probably seen Arpaio on Fox News, where he has long been a fixture as a conservative attack dog on everything from President Obama’s “fake” birth certificate to the finer points of Donald Trump’s candidacy. Arpaio endorsed Trump before nearly any other Republican elected official in the country and recently hammered Republican leaders as “gutless” for not getting behind Trump more strongly.
Probably not the smartest thing in the world for the Republicans to nominate an unreconstructed racist for president under these circumstances. But maybe they figure they can sneak in since the Dems are putting a woman for the first time. If they can start deporting a bunch of these immigrants for various reasons and roll this back long enough to end birthright citizenship and force white women to give birth to many more children,they might just have a chance to turn this thing around. That’s Ann Coulter’s advice anyway.
Unfortunately, the man they chose for this important task turns out to be an incompetent scam artist. They just aren’t making authoritarian racists the way they used to …
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