Slideshow: Obama/McCain Headquarters
It seems no one told Sen. Barack Obama that Arizona is, and traditionally has been, a red state.
He must have missed the quiz in civics with the question on who has been an Arizona senator for the past 21 years. Clearly no one has told him the Grand Canyon State has voted Democrat in only one presidential election since 1952.
Still, Obama set up a new Arizona campaign headquarters in downtown Phoenix on Sept. 10 — less than two months before voters hit the polls.
And six days before Election Day, three state polls show Obama trailing by as little as two points in McCain’s home state.
A Cronkite/Eight poll released Tuesday night put McCain just 2 percentage points ahead of Obama. A Rasmussen poll released Monday put McCain five points ahead of Obama, and a Project New West poll released Friday had McCain four points ahead.
Welcome home
A month before the election, Dave Cieslak slouched behind a cluttered desk in an otherwise unfurnished house on Sixth Street in downtown Phoenix. His voice echoed off the empty walls as he explained why, as the Arizona communications director for Obama, he’d been working well over 50 hours a week.
“It’s exhausting,” he said, “but inspiring to see this army of volunteers.”
Next door, Obama’s Arizona headquarters buzzed during what Cieslak described as a lull. Half a dozen men and women were making calls from personal cell phones, pitching Obama’s platform to Arizona residents and encouraging them to vote.
It was a lull, Cieslak insisted, because most of the volunteers were gone on community walks, going door-to-door in south Phoenix with Obama literature.
“You should have been here last night during First Friday,” he said. “Thousands of people came through here talking about the election.”
And if the last 12 years are any indication, Arizona has been experiencing a slow, albeit sure, shift to the left.
Between 1952 and 1996, Arizona’s red-state status reflected an influx of Republican voters, the state’s emphasis on high-tech and service industries and its cultural conservatism, ASU history professor Philip VanderMeer said in an e-mail.
“To understand the [recent] trend you need to look at the changing composition of the state’s population — a major increase in the Hispanic vote — and a change in the state’s economy,” he said.
Despite Democrats averaging only 34 percent of the state’s presidential votes between 1972 and 1992, VanderMeer said Arizona has been a highly contentious state in presidential elections since 1996, when Bill Clinton won the state.
Cieslak agreed, pointing no further than the most recent state polls.
The Cronkite/Eight Poll that was released Tuesday showed McCain had a two-point advantage over Obama — 46 to 44 percent.
Nine percent of those polled said they were undecided or not sure which candidate they would support.
The poll surveyed 1,019 registered Arizona voters from Oct. 23–26. The poll is run by ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication and KAET, Channel 8.
The sampling error, plus or minus 3 percentage points, indicates that with only two percentage points separating the candidates in the poll, Arizona’s 10 electoral votes may be up for grabs.
Inasmuch as each of these polls indicate a McCain lead, they also convey a trend when viewed alongside previous months’ poll numbers: Obama has gained headway in Arizona.
Tara Blanc, associate director of the Cronkite/Eight Poll, said part of the reason Obama is tightening the race in Arizona is because he has garnered about 9 percent more independent voters than McCain, a demographic with which the Arizona senator has historically been very successful.
“It’s neck-and-neck,” she said.
A poll released Friday by Project New West, a Democratic organization, showed McCain had a 4-percentage-point lead over Obama.
“Sen. McCain is in true jeopardy of losing his own state,” Project New West consultant David Waid said.
Waid, the former chairman of the Arizona Democratic Party, said McCain is less familiar among this year’s Arizona voters than most might think.
Though McCain has been representing Arizona in the Senate for the past 21 years, Waid said some voters were not registered to vote during his previous Senate race.
He said even more didn’t take part in his most recent election — making a total of more than 50 percent of registered Arizona voters who are not very familiar with the Arizona senator.
Shades of purple
Obama’s Arizona team was still getting used to its new location at 922 N. Sixth St. in Phoenix.
Before the move in early September, the team had been conducting operations from rented office space at the Democratic Party’s Arizona headquarters. Now, however, they operate under their own roof: this house-turned-office in the heart of Phoenix’s art district.
And although the new Obama headquarters is now located a mere 26 blocks from its original office space, many local residents wondered about the implications of a transplant of these proportions so late in the race.
But others argued the logic behind Obama’s Arizona nerve-center relocation made perfect sense.
Obama had plenty of money to spare. As the leader of the most lucrative campaign in American history, why shouldn’t he pump money into the oft-ignored borders of consistently red states?
Tuesday, Cieslak was barely audible as a result of the chatter around him, including a woman who shouted, “We’re going to win!”
Cieslak wouldn’t go quite that far, though.
“I’m not a pollster, so I won’t speculate,” he said. “But the numbers are encouraging, and the volunteers are continuing to work.”
If “army of volunteers” was Cieslak’s mantra 24 days ago, on Tuesday it was “encouraging.”
And there’s uniformity in the recent polls’ indications of a shift in Arizona voters toward the Obama camp.
Though the numbers aren’t exact, they do indicate Obama may have a real chance to win in a state that, until a few days ago, few in politics or the media referred to as anything but “strongly McCain.”
Arizona’s political spectrum has witnessed a slight shift to the left in recent years, and many within the state’s borders have already noticed.
If Cieslak and his team have their way, Nov. 4 may prove to be the day that the rest of America sees this red state showing shades of purple.
Reach the reporter at dkempa@asu.edu.
