GOVERNMENT
Tell it to me straight — how weird are we?
meant to carefully choose between, and it’s more information than he can digest. “I have mail sitting on my bed right now about the general election,” he said from his Glennwilde bedroom Sept. 3. “You don’t see that with the local guys. And I, personally, won’t vote unless I have enough information to go into that voting booth and know exactly what I’m voting for.” Armstrong’s Maricopa Wells precinct, where the median age is 36, saw a 24% turnout in July. In the adjacent Province precinct, just across Honeycutt Road, the median age is over 65 and turnout was highest in the city at 33%, according to a Pinal County canvass. Precincts in 55-plus communities saw the highest turnouts in the county — Saddlebrooke Ranch (59%), Superior West (57%), Saddlebrooke West (55%), Saddlebrooke East (53%) and Mountainbrooke Village in Gold Canyon (51%). Elections experts agree older voters are more likely to vote with low information. Younger voters, not so much. A tale of two cities Fountain Hills, like Maricopa, is a bedroom community about 35 miles from downtown Phoenix. Unlike Maricopa, it’s just a town, not a city. Fewer than 24,000 people live there, compared to more than 75,000 here. Both municipalities held mayor and council elections on July 30. In Maricopa, turnout was 22%. In Fountain Hills, it was two-and-a-half times higher, 56%. Candidates in Fountain Hills’ mayoral election spent a combined $170,000. Scottsdale’s three candidates spent more than $1 million. Dollars spent in Maricopa’s mayoral election? Zero. Why? “The average Fountain Hills voter is 10 years older than Maricopa voters,” Coughlin said. “Older voters tend to vote at a higher proportion.” But there’s a lot more to it — insipid candidates, poor messaging and voter apathy. Oh, and this annoying little thing called being broke. It’s the same annoying little thing that tanked Sheriff Mark Lamb’s Senate bid against Kari Lake. Seven citywide candidates in Maricopa raised a collective $17,356, according to Arizona Secretary of State documents. Sure, that’s enough to buy a golden Apple Watch, so, nothing to sneeze at. But the vast majority of those dollars came from the candidates’ own pockets, not from motivated members of the public.
There were still photons of sunlight bouncing around the summer sky when InMaricopa projected the winners on election night. With half of precincts still left to report, it was already an obvious landslide. None of the races were close. Practically speaking, they may as well have gone uncontested. Clearly, Maricopa voters are laissez-faire when it comes to guiding this young city through its belle époque. Political experts studying voter behavior in the Phoenix metro pointed to six reasons for this: • Hardly anyone is from here. • The city is young. • The people are young. • A negative feedback loop of fundraising. • Discontent with candidates. • Apathy. In Maricopa, turnout for the July 30 primary election was 22% — down from more than 27% in the 2020 primary election. On the Ak-Chin Indian Community, it was less than 15%.
Chuck Coughlin, President and CEO of HighGround in Phoenix and a five-time winner of Arizona’s Best Political Operative, said a reason for languishing turnout is because Maricopa “is more of a commuter community.” This so-called “bedroom phenomenon” detaches voters from local politics in a city where 4 in 5 adults work and therefore spend most of their waking hours in a county other than the one where they live. That, on top of the fact that one-third of the city’s population has moved here during the last two election cycles, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. An NPR analysis of U.S. registered voter data in 2018 found “transient” people — those who have moved recently between states or countries — are less likely to vote and “often feel less invested in local elections.” In more than a dozen interviews, nonvoters expressed they don’t feel like their vote matters, especially when setting the weight of their vote against the population growth they observe in Kale Armstrong didn’t vote in the primary election. But he is going to vote in “the big one.” The Glennwilde 21-year-old is part of the Generation Z voter bloc Coughlin says is less likely to vote. Election canvassing in Pinal County strongly backs this trend with the most active precincts centered in retirement communities. “My parents were trying to get me to vote,” Armstrong said. “I didn’t know enough. You have to dig deep and look into some articles about who the [candidates] are and what they stand for. There isn’t enough information out there to figure out who to vote for, at least for the younger generation.” their daily lives in the city. Stuck in our salad days Now preparing to cast his ballot in the Nov. 5 general election, Armstrong has quickly started feeling the opposite — he’s inundated with information about the candidates he’s People don’t move to Maricopa to run for the city council. They move for some other reason and say, ‘Sh*t, this is a big town, maybe I should be involved.’ A lot of people do this these days, for their own popularity’s sake, like high school.” CHUCK COUGHLIN, HIGHGROUND PRESIDENT & CEO
PRIMARY ELECTION VOTER TURNOUT IN MARICOPA
The unpopular vote Low turnout, high burnout in county’s most civically disengaged city BY ELIAS WEISS
27%
24%
22% 22%
0.27
0.203
0.135
0.068
I
0
it turns out, has 40,000 people on its voter rolls who never proved they were American citizens. And there’s our first reason why so many more Maricopans voted for Kevin Durant than Kevin Cavanaugh. At an Arizonans for Secure Elections roundtable the day after the primary, former Gov. Jan Brewer said “some voters choose to stay home because they have been told not to trust the elections.” But that is, in its narrowest scope, a statewide issue — so, why is Maricopa’s turnout still so much worse than the rest of Arizona? Because elections are weird here. Sure, primary participation came up short of expectations across the nation. But Maricopa, with its worst turnout in the last eight elections, ranked lowest among all Pinal County cities. And not for no reason.
among more than 45,000 registered voters living inside Maricopa city limits who decided to sit this one out. “I didn’t even know where to go vote,” Sandoval said. He cared enough to think about voting, but not enough to find out where his polling place was. And he’s no church of one in that regard. You know, finding a reason to care. This isn’t Australia, where you can go to jail for being too ballot-shy. Here in the U.S. of A., you’re more likely to go to jail for casting a vote than playing electoral hooky — Adrian Fontes’ Election Integrity Unit is fielding more than 2,000 complaints and referrals related to election crimes among people who voted in the 2020 election alone. That, compared to zero complaints against people who didn’t. Former President Donald Trump lost Arizona by 10,000 votes that year, in a state that,
N MARICOPA, LIKE ANYWHERE else, candidates pine after voters. Does the electorate reciprocate that courtship?
2018 2020 2022 2024
Source: Pinal County Recorder’s Office
Table 1
Nope. It’s a more one-sided love story than 500 Days of Summer . And, gosh, that was a depressing flick. If every Maricopa city voter who blew off the primary election packed into the Footprint Center for a Suns game, they’d fill the arena twice — with 900 fans left standing outside. Those folks would miss watching Ryan Dunn go boom or bust, but that’s just what you get in a city where, in 2024, it feels like more people participated in NBA All-Star voting than in the election that decisively set up the next four years of leadership in Maricopa. Brayan Sandoval, a 38-year-old Los Angeles transplant living in Cobblestone Farms, was
2023
2018
24%
Incumbents all won their seats back at City Hall by double-digit margins. Mayor Nancy Smith outperformed challenger Leon Potter by nearly 30 points; Vice Mayor Amber Liermann and Councilmembers Eric Goettl and Bob Marsh combined for 75% with challengers Chrystal O’Jon and Le’On Willis garnering 14 and 11% support, respectively. Sounds like a landslide, alright. But if turnout was a smidge higher — let’s say 26%, still lower than four years ago — O’Jon could have statistically defeated the incumbent Goettl. Maybe if she knocked on a few more doors? 2020 27% 2022 22% 2024 22% 1
InMaricopa.com | October 2024
October 2024 | InMaricopa.com
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