MARICOPA COUNTY, ARIZONA: How the Republicans Are Losing Suburbia

This bellwether is pointing away from the GOP

- Joshua Green

When Sean Bowie first ran for an Arizona state Senate seat in 2016, his odds didn’t look great. The 32-year-old Democrat was running in a suburban Phoenix district that was entirely red: The two state House members and one senator representing the 18th legislative district, in the East Valley suburbs where Bowie grew up, were all Republicans. No Democrat had ever been elected to the state Senate from the district.

Bowie, who worked in the provost’s office at Arizona State University, had an inkling that things were changing. Many of the district’s voters were high-income professionals: professors and scientists at the university, and engineers and executives at Intel Corp. or Honeywell International Inc., the largest employers. An influx of tech workers was arriving at PayPal Inc., which anchors the thriving tech community in Bowie’s hometown of Chandler. A growing number of residents, too, were non-White, especially Asian. While the 18th district had voted Republican for as long as anyone could remember, Bowie sensed his neighbors weren’t entirely comfortable with the party’s drift toward extremism or its new presidential nominee, Donald Trump.

He decided to bet his campaign on it. Powered by Kit Kat bars, Bowie spent long months knocking on the doors of about 15,000 of his neighbors. He didn’t focus on fellow Democrats. Instead, he spent the bulk of his energy trying to persuade longtime Republicans and independents to break with tradition and vote for him. “Nobody gave me a chance to win,” he says. “But I’d grown up here, knocked on a lot of doors for a lot of other candidates over the years, and I knew things were shifting. I’d talk to people at the door who’d just come home from a day of golfing, people who were normally Republicans, and you could just see they were having doubts about who to support.”