All is not well in Arizona’s Republican politics.
After the state voted for President Joe Biden instead of Donald Trump and Senator Martha McSally gave her seat to Democrat Mark Kelly in the 2020 election, the infighting started. The Phoenix New Times described “dysfunction” and “bloodlust” within the fractured part last month.
One way to make the state red again, by the appearance of a bizarre article published by Governor Doug Ducey in the Orange County Register on Tuesday, is to target fleeing Golden State Republicans and bring them into the desert. The decision to publish the opinion in a Republican stronghold in California does not seem like a coincidence.
To begin with, the whole case of the governor is based on a falsehood – that there is an unprecedented exodus of people from California now.
“Last year, Arizona gained almost 130,000 new residents – the second fastest growth rate in the country. California, by contrast, lost almost 70,000 people. Why are people choosing to retake and leave one of the most beautiful states in the world? America?” he asks.
Ducey’s claim of “nearly 70,000” is confusing: in fact, California lost nearly 700,000 residents in 2019 (less than the previous year). That number, which is typical of the most populous state in the country, is ten times greater than Ducey’s and would have helped with his argument.
He may have simply made a typo or may be referring to a report that 70,000 Californians moved to Arizona in 2019. This figure, however, showed that Arizona had the highest decline in the arrival of Californians compared to previous years. The Orange County Register should know: they wrote the story.
And while there has been an increase in the number of people who move during the pandemic and a record number of people from San Francisco leaving the city, these people are largely not leaving the state; most are moving to other parts of California.
Mathematics aside, the carrot Ducey beckons to attract those Republican votes important to Arizona is also rotten.
“I made it my mission to make and maintain our state the best place in the country to get an education,” says Ducey.
This mission is apparently a failure, as Arizona is ranked 46th in the state education ranking, as Twitter users were happy to remind the governor.
Ducey continues to attack the politically correct in California, and in San Francisco in particular.
“Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than the fact that, instead of working to bring children back into the classroom, one of California’s largest school districts is focused on erasing historical figures like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, “he writes (skipping the fact that Ducey himself was open to renaming the Jefferson Davis Highway in his state).
And while the recent move by the San Francisco Unified School District to rename its schools was really a mess, Ducey himself knows a thing or two about expending the wrong efforts to rename things. The governor recently spent a lot of time and money inexplicably changing the “Arizona Department of Corrections” to “Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry”, rather than addressing the real reason why Arizona has the fourth highest incarceration rate in the country.
The measure was described by Democratic state senator Tony Navarrete as “putting lipstick on a pig”.
Ducey’s dismay at the politically correct seems particularly shocking in a week when his Arizona Republican colleague, Rep. Paul Gosar, is tweeting vile misogynist memes – on International Women’s Day, no less.
It remains to be seen whether the right-wing residents of Orange County have accepted Ducey’s offer to get off the coast and help make Arizona red again. But they may need a more convincing argument than anything this incoherent article is trying to do.