Thank you for the full explanation. I want to speak to one point in particular.
2. There is this obsession with Tempe that I find rather odd.
I confess to having a personal interest in Tempe because it's an area I know unusually well, and because it is tech- and academic-heavy so feels like a distant cousin of areas I know in Boston. But I think there are reasons beyond that for treating it as unusual in the Phoenix area.
1. It's a college town. These are often Democratic islands in conservative areas, so like Bloomington, Lawrence, Charlottesville, or Gainesville, or on a different scale, Austin, it's going to stand out demographically and punch above its weight politically.
1a. Not saying you're doing this, but there is consequently a Republican tradition in red states to pack or crack these kinds of communities.
2. The previous Dem representative from this district was the mayor of Tempe.
3. Neighboring municipalities like Chandler, Gilbert, Mesa, even Scottsdale are sprawling and contain political multitudes. Tempe is more compact geographically and has a smaller population.
4. The parts of those communities closer to Tempe—specifically west Mesa, north Chandler, south Scottsdale, and Ahwatukee in Phoenix—are more like Tempe than they are like the strongly Republican and affluent zones in those communities.
As a Democrat, I'm going to see Tempe as a hub of a more liberal, more diverse (but not purely Anglo vs. Latino), and more tech-oriented part of Maricopa that is different from most of the rest of the county.
