Arizona is rapidly joining the legions of American states that basically hold censuses rather than elections. More than 60 percent of white Arizonans vote reliably Republican, and that number is growing. The state’s burgeoning Latino population, meanwhile, votes overwhelmingly Democratic. When it comes to gubernatorial and senatorial elections, Arizona does not so much host cross-party debates as it does cross-party get-out-the-vote contests. Democrats are increasingly bullish on their chances in Arizona not because they are winning a particular argument, but simply because the Latino population there is expanding at a much faster clip than the white population is.
And so it is that Arizona has elected a number of ideologically heterodox Republican officials. While that might seem strange, it’s not: Assured of strong backing from their base no matter what, Republicans feel free to act in unorthodox ways. Senator Jeff Flake, with his strident attacks on the president, is an example of this. (Though this proposition was not tested; Flake declined to seek re-election.) And Arizona, of course, was home to the king of all Mavericks, John McCain. The late senator was often out of step with his party on taxes, campaign finance reform, health care, torture, and climate change legislation, to name just a few.
Republican governor Doug Ducey will appoint someone to fill McCain’s vacated seat until 2021. He may end up appointing a reliable, down-the-line Republican: Former senator Jon Kyl, for instance, or, uh, himself. But there’s another interesting option he is said to be considering: his predecessor in the governor’s mansion.
Jan Brewer, governor from 2009 to 2015, is mostly remembered for wagging her finger at President Obama on an airport tarmac in 2012, and her signing of SB1070, the harsh anti-immigration law (largely gutted by the courts) that sharply polarized racial politics in Arizona. This has led to her caricature as some kind of arch right-winger. But in reality, Brewer cut a much more unorthodox figure. She was, you could say, downright mavericky.
Sure, she came under fire for speaking of “beheadings” along the border, and she’s a social conservative who signed a bill banning public funding of Planned Parenthood. But Brewer also expanded Medicaid, and (temporarily) raised taxes to combat a budget shortfall. (She hiked sales taxes while cutting business taxes.) Whenever there is a horrific mass shooting, Republican officials wave their hands at the need to address “mental health.” Brewer actually did so, boosting funding significantly a state behavioral health program. Now out office, Brewer still refuses to toe the party line: She publicly lambasted the House’s attempt at an Obamacare-repeal bill, which the president championed.
Jan Brewer represents a strain of politics in the ascendant in much of Europe: nationalist, hostile to illegal immigration, but comfortable, even supportive of a limited welfare state. She’d be quite at home in the Sweden Democrats or the Danish People’s Party. Would she be as at home in the GOP caucus in the U.S. Senate? It would be interesting to find out.
