AZ-08: April 24 general election (Update: Lesko-R wins by 4.72 points)

[NOVA Green]

Figured I'd make an Atlas-specific map of the result using my highly-sensitive gradient (left). As you can tell, there were quite a number of Lesko precincts that were very close - and might have flipped had Tipirneni won. There were also a lot of Tipirneni precincts that were close as well; we're not used to see such huge swathes of congressional districts be so relatively close and/or competitive.

That's why I like my gradient: for races like this in particular, it does a much better job of illustrating the competitive nature of areas than a 10-point or even 5-point gradient.

On the right is a simple hypothetical Tipirneni victory map assuming uniform swing:

Full-size image

May I just say Fmr Pres Griff, thnks for posting these maps, since it helps provide more of a visual context to the results....

Always been a big fan of your work.

What's really interesting in your hypothetical Tipirneni win map assuming a universal swing, is that it really showcases how Republican the Senior Citizen communities of Sun City and Sun City West are compared to much of the rest of the district....

[NOVA Green]

^^^ In fact, only 10% (14 out of 143) of the precincts were even 60% or more in favor of one candidate.

81 precincts (57%!) were within single-digits, with the remaining third decided by 10-20 points.

Are there any recent examples of a congressional race (special or otherwise) having such a huge portion of the district's population being in such competitive areas? I don't know too much about this district, but it's my impression of skimming the data here that the precincts tend to be fairly equal in population compared to many other areas.

Another impressive piece of work....

Without going into a compare/contrast with other CDs, I would say that in general in CD-08 the average precinct size measured against RVs tends to be larger in the "Cities" of Surprise and Peoria, and lower than average in Glendale and Sun City and Sun City West....

Your fundamental point that here the vast majority of precincts were within a +/- 10% Margin difference is a pretty astounding statistic and helps reinforce the argument that AZ CD-08 might be shifting from a Solid Republican to only a Lean Republican district, and perhaps potentially more plausible a "Toss-Up" district as demographic compositions of the electorate continue to change over the next few years....

Considering that this district has three significant discrete components of the electorate, the fact that we saw swings in all of these places is of particular significance:

1.) Senior Citizen Retirees
2.) Upper-Middle Class Anglo Middle-Aged Professionals
3.) Fast growing Exurban communities

[NOVA Green]

NOVA, do you think Schweikert's vulnerable?

Absolutely.... look at all of the double digit precinct swings between '12 and '16 PRES results in CD-06...

Although I haven't really run the numbers for this CD in any comprehensive fashion, those swings in Scottsdale were crazy between '12 and '16....   (+14% Dem Swing), which was the highest % swing of any city in Maricopa County.

If you look at the individual precinct results from Scottsdale, these numbers stand out even more....

Phoenix accounted for roughly 200k votes in CD-06 in the '16 GE, and Trump barely eked out 50% of the TV, although swings were smaller on average in the Phoenix part of the district than the Scottsdale part of the district....

These are parts of Republican North Phoenix that are less Republican than the portion of LD-15 located within CD-08 where a "Generic Republican" only eked out a +0.5% win in a special election...

I don't pretend to be an expert on Arizona politics when it comes to individual candidates and campaigns, but yes I would imagine if the Democrats were to field a Moderate/Centrist Dem in '18 and or '20 that Schweikert would be extremely vulnerable, despite (Or perhaps because of) his decades in Congress as a Republican that hasn't really done crap at a time where even a large chunk of Registered Republicans and 'Pub leaning Indies want to drain the current swamp of Nepotism and Corruption and get to work to deal with real issues such as Health Care, Education, Immigration Reform (DACA), and Infrastructure (Shots out to all the Metro Phoenix "road warriors" out there) in a true bi-partisan fashion.

My current thoughts are that Arizona Republicans have a massive "Ostrich Complex", and apparently have either neglected to learn the lessons of the past, or just choose to ignore them in fear of being primaried by the most extreme elements of their rabid base....

I consider the collapse of the Republican Party in their historical and ancestral strongholds of Suburban/Exurban SoCal to potentially be an excellent compare/contrast case study and ultimately the direction that Maricopa County is moving....

Although the expanding Latino electorate in Arizona is obviously a demographic problem for Republicans, especially since they have successfully alienated the Middle-Class Latino electorate that is much more competitive and tend to vote much more regularly than the Working-Class Latino electorate, the biggest issue for Republicans in Arizona is that they have an Anglo Voter problem.

Certain Arizona Republicans such as John McCain recognized that when he famously said with my paraphrased quotes in early '16: "This will be my most difficult election ever".

US-SEN Flake recognized this and stood up rhetorically to Trump on multiple issues, knowing that he was on Trump's "hit list"....

As Malcom X famously said: "The chickens are finally coming home to roost"....

We'll see what happens in November '18, where if I were still a betting man from my younger years (Texas Hold 'Em), I would lay an odds bet that Dems pick up the open US-SEN seat, win the AZ-GOV, flip the AZ State Senate, and maybe a few CDs as well, and who knows about SoS, AG, AZ Super of Education, etc....

CD-06 is definitely a strong flip district with the right kind of contender, and obviously CD-08 rematch could well look even better for the Dems in a GE vs Special Election turnout environment.

[Devout Centrist]

Excellent analysis as always, Nova!

Let me add a personal anecdote. My roommate is from the suburb of Gilbert. It's a community of just over 200,000 people, it's overwhelmingly white, it has a Republican mayor, etc. Based on his background and his family's status, my roommate ought to be a standard Republican. He volunteered with John McCain in 2016, he voted for McCain, etc.

However, over the past few years, he's definitely taken a turn to the left. I've noticed that there's a substantial undercurrent of discontent about the Arizona Republican Party. Obviously some of this is fueled by Trump, but I'm also getting the feeling that this dismay will translate to down ballot races. It's interesting to see someone go from standard, center right views over to mainstream Democratic positions in such a short span of time.

Perhaps this can all be chalked up to youth, but I don't think that's the case...

[NOVA Green]

Excellent analysis as always, Nova!

Let me add a personal anecdote. My roommate is from the suburb of Gilbert. It's a community of just over 200,000 people, it's overwhelmingly white, it has a Republican mayor, etc. Based on his background and his family's status, my roommate ought to be a standard Republican. He volunteered with John McCain in 2016, he voted for McCain, etc.

However, over the past few years, he's definitely taken a turn to the left. I've noticed that there's a substantial undercurrent of discontent about the Arizona Republican Party. Obviously some of this is fueled by Trump, but I'm also getting the feeling that this dismay will translate to down ballot races. It's interesting to see someone go from standard, center right views over to mainstream Democratic positions in such a short span of time.

Perhaps this can all be chalked up to youth, but I don't think that's the case...

Haven't really run the Demographic numbers on Gilbert yet in detail, but looks to be a 72% Anglo, 15% Latino, 7% Asian community, where the vast majority of the VAP are Anglo...

MHI of $80.4k/Yr def places it in an "Upper Middle Class" category.

Relative Occupations are trippy, since I would expect looking at the data that Median Household Income should be significantly higher ( Maybe some of it has to do with a relatively younger working aged population in professional occupations?)



Roughly 40% of the pop 25+ yrs has at least a four year degree, which is obviously pretty high compared to most Cities in the United States

Looking at the US PRES numbers for Gilbert:

Roughly 91k total voters in '12 went (34-64 R).... in '16 (36-55 R).

So from +30 R in the '12 PRES GE to +19 R in the '16 GE.

Now the obvious question is to what extent are these types of voters just generally disillusioned with the direction of the Republican Party in the Trump era (HRC '16 numbers only marginally improved here from Obama '12 numbers), and will come back to the flock for Generic 'Pub candidates in a hypothetical Post-Trump era, or to what extent are we starting to see potentially more long-term brand damage to the Republican Party, especially among Millennial Republicans and Republican-Leaning Independents?


Although I can't speak to your anecdotal narrative of your room mate from Gilbert, it is still what historians would consider to be Primary Source Material...

'Pubs in AZ have a massive triage issue involving various elements of their base:

1.) Anglo Senior Citizens are swing hard Dem
2.) Middle/Upper Income Middle Aged Anglos are swinging hard Dem
3.) Millennial Generation becoming an overwhelmingly Democratic "base vote", regardless of race/ethicity

[Badger]

Nova, just for my back-of-the-envelope math, if the various municipalities listed in your one graph where to mirror their share of the districts vote in the presidential election in the recent special election, would lesko have lost? While the heavily Republican far Northern Phoenix exurbs portion dropped some what in its share of the district's vote from 2016, everywhere else it seemed that Democratic areas dropped, a couple split areas basically stayed the same, and the LD 22 share increased for the special election. My very rough back-of-the-envelope Mass says it's still a razor-thin republican win, but was interested in what your numbers show.

I say this because, if theoretically those districts match the presidential election share in 2018, lesko go could lose

[Adam Griffin]

Nova, just for my back-of-the-envelope math, if the various municipalities listed in your one graph where to mirror their share of the districts vote in the presidential election in the recent special election, would lesko have lost? While the heavily Republican far Northern Phoenix exurbs portion dropped some what in its share of the district's vote from 2016, everywhere else it seemed that Democratic areas dropped, a couple split areas basically stayed the same, and the LD 22 share increased for the special election. My very rough back-of-the-envelope Mass says it's still a razor-thin republican win, but was interested in what your numbers show.

I say this because, if theoretically those districts match the presidential election share in 2018, lesko go could lose

Not much difference (around a half-point) assuming I've looked at your question properly (going off of the LD shares NOVA posted here):

Lesko 51.9%
Tipirneni 47.7%

Nor when using 2014's figures, for that matter:

Lesko 52.0%
Tipirneni 47.6%

[NOVA Green]

Time to take a look at the Senior Vote in Cd-08....

We know from official AZ data that the average and median age of EV in CD-08 was close to 65 Years old...

In most congressional districts it starts to get tricky trying to examine the Senior Vote since the population is not distributed in a manner where we can examine the Senior Vote in greater detail.

Fortunately when it comes to data analysis, we do have some real data from Arizona, since the district not only reports EV by Age, but additionally we have massive clusters of Senior Only Communities, so at least we can look at the numbers in much more extensive detail than normal, without having to rely solely on Statewide exit polls, etc....

This is not exhaustive of the Senior Vote in CD-08, and essentially is only representative of the heavily Anglo Senior only planned communities, which generally tend to be from more Upper Middle-Class backgrounds, than the Senior electorate at large within the district.

Let's start by looking at the vote share for these Senior Only communities in recent Elections in CD-08...



So here we see these communities represented approximately 25% of the total vote in CD-08 in the April special election and a slightly higher share in the 2014 General Election.

If we look at Presidential Election years, these communities comprised roughly 19% of the vote in 2012, and only 17.2% in 2016 where there was overall higher voter turnout in Maricopa County, much likely caused by the combination of Trump and Sheriff Joe being on the ballot.

It will be interesting to observe if these distributions change in November '18, compared to the Special Election in '18 and GE '14...

Let's break down these communities into three categories Sun City, Sun City West, and Misc Other Planned Senior communities with both a chart and graph for each....

Sun City Historical Voting Chart:



Sun City Historical Voting Graph:



What does this data tell us?

Sun City is obviously pretty solidly Republican (Stating the obvious I know).

The +20% Voter REG edge is a killer here, regardless of 'Pub cross-over votes or heavy REG Indy swings towards the Dems.

Although there were marginal swings at the Presidential Election level between '12 and '16, most of this was a defection from the Pubs towards 3rd Party Voters, and there was only a 0.4% gain for the Dem '16 nominee.

Even in the '16 Sheriff election Sun City voted +16% for "Joe", despite the legal clouds and corruption charges racking up against him.

I posited a few pages back on this thread before the election, that if a Dem were going to make CD-08 a horse-race election, they would need to approach the '14 levels of support for a Democrat achieved by the candidate running for the Arizona Superintendent of Education race...

We saw that happen last week where the 'Pub only won Sun City by slightly less than 10%....

Sun City West Chart:



Sun City West Graph:



What does this data tell us?

Sun City West is even more Republican than Sun City, which kinda makes sense since Sun City first originated in 1960 and Sun City West sometime in the late '70s....

Over 50% of the EV here was cast by REG 'Pubs, and Dems only hit 40% of the Vote once here, during the '14 AZ Sup of Ed race.

We saw a lower increase in the DEM EV Vote Share than in Sun City, and higher IND EV vote share, and 'Pubs still only won by +14% and well outperformed their record 40.3% number from '14, achieving a remarkable 42.9% of the vote here.

Republicans are used to winning Sun City West by roughly 2:1 margins every election....

Let's look at results from the other planned retirement communities in CD-08:

This gets a bit trickier without delving extensively into Census Data, but fortunately for the purpose of this exercise, it's really easy to pinpoint those precincts that are exclusively "Senior Only" communities simply by looking at Turnout levels in off-year elections, and then pulling up the Census Data and finding out whoah  95% of the population is 55+ (etc....).

So here are the precincts that I included in the list of Senior Planned Retirement Communities...

Now a couple of these are obvious, such as Saddle Ridge which is split between Sun City and Peoria, although I didn't code it as "Sun City" and Kodiak split between Sun City West and Surprise.



Here is the chart for the "Other Planned Senior Retirement Precincts"



Here is a graph for the "Other Planned Senior Retirement Precincts:



So what does any of this tell us here?

The "Other" Senior Precincts category shows many similarities with Sun City West, except it has even a lower % of Registered Democrats (21.3%), slightly lower % of Registered Republicans, and a higher % of Registered Indies....

Again, we see a record level of support for a Democratic Candidate, even compared against the 2016 AZ-Sheriff race, and 2014 AZ-Sup of Ed Race....

Final thoughts:

1.) Anglo Senior Citizens in CD-08 swung hard Democrat in a national election, as opposed to relatively more localized elections (Maricopa County Sheriff '16, and AZ-Sup of Ed '14).

2.) Not only did AZ Anglo Seniors swing hard DEM on 4/24/18, but Democrats exceeded the highest benchmarks to date of a Democratic candidate among this population, with '16 Sheriff being a potential outlier because of Sheriff Joe's baggage and '14 AZ Sup of Ed being much more localized affair.

3.) The level of elasticity among the Anglo Senior population of the district exhibited by the Special Election is a bit mind boggling looking at historical election results, and part of the reason why I was generally skeptical about this being anything like PA-18.

4.) The thing that really has Senior 'Pub strategists, AZ 'Pub political leaders, crapping bricks is that this collapse of support happened among what was supposed to be one of their three core legs of the Arizona Republican Party.

In Non-Presidential Election Years (Where most of the Statewide races occur), turnout tends to be much lower among potentially Democratic leaning base voters....

Anglo Seniors account for a disproportionate share of the electorate during those off-year elections and they vote regularly....

Although there appears to be a "Crisis of Confidence" among these Anglo Seniors with the overall direction the Republican Party is taking, it still remains to be seen to what extent this will manifest in the upcoming Arizona Statewide Election contests.

Still, these numbers do not appear good for the Republican Candidate running for Flake's Senate seat in November, and it's entirely plausible that we will see some interesting numbers from similar type precincts come November '18 for the AZ-GOV race not to mention various AZ-LD SEN seats that Dems need to flip in November to take control of the AZ State Senate...

[NOVA Green]

Nova, just for my back-of-the-envelope math, if the various municipalities listed in your one graph where to mirror their share of the districts vote in the presidential election in the recent special election, would lesko have lost? While the heavily Republican far Northern Phoenix exurbs portion dropped some what in its share of the district's vote from 2016, everywhere else it seemed that Democratic areas dropped, a couple split areas basically stayed the same, and the LD 22 share increased for the special election. My very rough back-of-the-envelope Mass says it's still a razor-thin republican win, but was interested in what your numbers show.

I say this because, if theoretically those districts match the presidential election share in 2018, lesko go could lose

Not much difference (around a half-point) assuming I've looked at your question properly (going off of the LD shares NOVA posted here):

Lesko 51.9%
Tipirneni 47.7%

Nor when using 2014's figures, for that matter:

Lesko 52.0%
Tipirneni 47.6%

Good question Badger and I'll defer to Fmr Pres Griff's math on this hypothetical....

However, the key point is even if we were to use the 2016 GE Voter Share by LD Model, vs the '14 GE or '18 Special Election models, is which precincts within these Arizona Legislative Districts accounted for a disproportionate share of the vote in '18/'14 compared to a '16/'12 scenario...

Anglo Senior Citizens in the 2018 CD-08 Special Election were disproportionately represented, especially in LD-21 and LD-22.... as my Anglo Senior post from an hour ago just demonstrated...

The overall composition of the electorate in a Presidential Election Year appears to be quite different than in an "Off-Year Election"....

Now, lest Democratic Atlas avatars start getting too excitable about what this all might indicate in November 2018, let alone November 2020, we really don't have many data points to indicate that maybe this wasn't just a fluke election, with a Democratic Centrist that showed up and presented an electoral platform that played especially well among the Anglo Upper-Middle-Class Seniors in the district.

What if the 2016 GE numbers were a fluke, and the combination of both Trump and Sheriff Joe being on the ballot skewed the electorate a bit younger and more Latino than is typically the case here?

What if, these same Anglo Seniors that have soured a bit on Trump and the Republicans in Congress, because of the increased support for the Affordable Care Act and Trump's general craziness on a wide variety of political issues, decide to keep heavily supporting Republicans within the Arizona State elected offices?

Personally I suspect that AZ-SEN is most likely definitely lost for the 'Pubs, and quite possibly AZ CD-08 come November....

Key next questions are what do these election results tell us about swings in Upper-Middle Class and Middle Class precincts in Phoenix, Glendale, and Peoria, not to mention the fast growing Exurban areas where acres of desert have been turned into miles of tract housing in less than ten years.....

More data yet to crunch, but obviously Arizona Republicans should be extremely concerned about the collapse of support among Anglo Seniors within this district.

[Adam Griffin]

Good question Badger and I'll defer to Fmr Pres Griff's math on this hypothetical....

However, the key point is even if we were to use the 2016 GE Voter Share by LD Model, vs the '14 GE or '18 Special Election models, is which precincts within these Arizona Legislative Districts accounted for a disproportionate share of the vote in '18/'14 compared to a '16/'12 scenario...

Anglo Senior Citizens in the 2018 CD-08 Special Election were disproportionately represented, especially in LD-21 and LD-22.... as my Anglo Senior post from an hour ago just demonstrated...

The overall composition of the electorate in a Presidential Election Year appears to be quite different than in an "Off-Year Election"....

Now, lest Democratic Atlas avatars start getting too excitable about what this all might indicate in November 2018, let alone November 2020, we really don't have many data points to indicate that maybe this wasn't just a fluke election, with a Democratic Centrist that showed up and presented an electoral platform that played especially well among the Anglo Upper-Middle-Class Seniors in the district.

What if the 2016 GE numbers were a fluke, and the combination of both Trump and Sheriff Joe being on the ballot skewed the electorate a bit younger and more Latino than is typically the case here?

What if, these same Anglo Seniors that have soured a bit on Trump and the Republicans in Congress, because of the increased support for the Affordable Care Act and Trump's general craziness on a wide variety of political issues, decide to keep heavily supporting Republicans within the Arizona State elected offices?

Personally I suspect that AZ-SEN is most likely definitely lost for the 'Pubs, and quite possibly AZ CD-08 come November....

Key next questions are what do these election results tell us about swings in Upper-Middle Class and Middle Class precincts in Phoenix, Glendale, and Peoria, not to mention the fast growing Exurban areas where acres of desert have been turned into miles of tract housing in less than ten years.....

More data yet to crunch, but obviously Arizona Republicans should be extremely concerned about the collapse of support among Anglo Seniors within this district.

I haven't followed all of the posts/data in this thread too extensively, but based on my skimmings, would a good summary here be: "the electorate was basically a normal midterm electorate in terms of composition, but old conservatives ran over the GOP with their golf carts; it could still be a fluke, though"?

[NOVA Green]

Ok--- let's look at the overall 75% of the electorate in the Special Election that doesn't live in Senior Only Precincts, not that there aren't Seniors living throughout these places....

Here the total numbers thus far break down roughly 67k D (48.7%)- 70.2k R (51.0%)....

Let's start with the places where there was roughly a 25% Democratic Swing between the 2016 Presidential Election and the 2018 Special Congressional Election....

These communities represented roughly 11.2% of the CD-08 Vote in 2018 vs 12.9% in the '16 Pres Election, and 11.6% in the '14 GE....

Here is the raw precinct swing chart....



Now we look at how these precincts voted from '12 to '16....



So again, you have places with roughly a 2:1 Registered Republican Voting Edge, that voted +5% for Sheriff Joe, where typically Republicans will usually win by somewhere in the +30% Margin range, that actually voted to elect a Democrat to represent them in the US House....

Even the Early Vote breakdown disproportionately favors Republicans, where the vast majority of the ballots were cast early.

If we look at the 2014 GE numbers the total raw vote from these precincts was roughly equal to that of the 2018 Special Election....

One could perhaps make an argument that there was a bit of Republican and Republican-Leaning Indy disillusionment in these places, and as I mentioned before the election I was starting to notice a slight bit of turnout gap in the Dem's favor in these types of precincts based on EV numbers.....

Now Turnout gap is obviously not an issue when your electorate is looking +20 % R vs D, and Indies aren't really showing up as much in an off-year election....

There were a ton of "flip voters" in these precincts who voted Trump/Romney, and even some who voted for Sheriff Joe....

Now where are these precincts located?



I'm missing a few in the far Northern part of the CD.... Majesty and Westwing, as well as one in the far Southwest part of the District.... Litchfield because I couldn't snip the CD precinct map and still have the vast majority of precinct names present...

First thing that stands out is the geographical diversity of these massive swing precincts stretching from some of the far Northern Exurbs of Phoenix, to a couple precincts in Northwest Glendale, to some more Centrally located precincts in Peoria, down to the fast growing Exurbs of Surprise, and

So what do these precincts look like from a Social-Demographic perspective?

Let's start with a Median Household Income by Census Tract Map...



So here you a strong overlap between Highest Income populations and largest Democratic swings between the Presidential Election of 2016 and the Arizona 2018 Special Election....

Can't see the dark red precinct in the Southwest since it missed the snip is Litchfield Park, Arizona ("Old Money Republican")....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litchfield_Park,_Arizona

Now, let's look at the Ethnic population Map by Census Tract in CD-08...

Anglo-American Population:



Latino-American Population:



Asian-American Population:



So what we see here is that these heavy swing precincts are overwhelmingly Anglo in terms of population, and in many of these precincts have a significant Asian-American population, and with the exception of the SW Exurban around Surprise have a relatively low Latino-American population....

VAP numbers are likely significantly lower for the Latino-American population in most of these precincts....

Now, I can follow-up with the 20-25% swing precincts, and we will see the same pattern, although to a slightly lesser extent....

Arizona Republicans appear to have a major Anglo problem, and not just in the in the collapse of support that they saw among Reliably Republican Senior Citizens, but now among the Second Leg of the Arizona Republican coalition, Upper-Income Anglos....

Although this population votes less frequently than Seniors in off-year elections, they swung much harder Democratic than ever before in precincts that voted almost 2:1 Romney in 2012.....

Phoenix we have a problem....

[NOVA Green]

Good question Badger and I'll defer to Fmr Pres Griff's math on this hypothetical....

However, the key point is even if we were to use the 2016 GE Voter Share by LD Model, vs the '14 GE or '18 Special Election models, is which precincts within these Arizona Legislative Districts accounted for a disproportionate share of the vote in '18/'14 compared to a '16/'12 scenario...

Anglo Senior Citizens in the 2018 CD-08 Special Election were disproportionately represented, especially in LD-21 and LD-22.... as my Anglo Senior post from an hour ago just demonstrated...

The overall composition of the electorate in a Presidential Election Year appears to be quite different than in an "Off-Year Election"....

Now, lest Democratic Atlas avatars start getting too excitable about what this all might indicate in November 2018, let alone November 2020, we really don't have many data points to indicate that maybe this wasn't just a fluke election, with a Democratic Centrist that showed up and presented an electoral platform that played especially well among the Anglo Upper-Middle-Class Seniors in the district.

What if the 2016 GE numbers were a fluke, and the combination of both Trump and Sheriff Joe being on the ballot skewed the electorate a bit younger and more Latino than is typically the case here?

What if, these same Anglo Seniors that have soured a bit on Trump and the Republicans in Congress, because of the increased support for the Affordable Care Act and Trump's general craziness on a wide variety of political issues, decide to keep heavily supporting Republicans within the Arizona State elected offices?

Personally I suspect that AZ-SEN is most likely definitely lost for the 'Pubs, and quite possibly AZ CD-08 come November....

Key next questions are what do these election results tell us about swings in Upper-Middle Class and Middle Class precincts in Phoenix, Glendale, and Peoria, not to mention the fast growing Exurban areas where acres of desert have been turned into miles of tract housing in less than ten years.....

More data yet to crunch, but obviously Arizona Republicans should be extremely concerned about the collapse of support among Anglo Seniors within this district.

I haven't followed all of the posts/data in this thread too extensively, but based on my skimmings, would a good summary here be: "the electorate was basically a normal midterm electorate in terms of composition, but old conservatives ran over the GOP with their golf carts; it could still be a fluke, though"?[/b]

No.... that would not be a completely accurate of my assessment of this election at all although I am still at this time working through the data:

1.) The elasticity of the Senior Vote was not only surprising, but part of the major factor as to why this election was much closer than many (Including myself had expected).

2.) Upper-Income Anglos swung hard against the GOP to an extent that we have never really seen in recent years in this district....

We did see indications of this elsewhere within Metro Phoenix between '12 and '16, but not to any real extent within CD-08.....

Look at how these same precincts swung between '12 and '16:



These are not very impressive swing numbers compared to what we saw in places from the Upper-Income Anglo 'Burbs from Houston to Kansas City to the Metro areas of Tennessee (Just to throw a few examples from another thread that I contributed to off the top of my head), where numbers such as +15-20% Dem Swings between '12 and '16 tended to be closer to the norm than the exception....

These precincts in CD-08 only swung something like +7% D between '12 and '16, with most of that being drop off to 3rd Party Candidates....

3.) You are correct about the "typical midterm election" in terms of general composition (Heavily Anglo, Senior, and Upper Middle-Class), however it appears that among the Anglo voters in some of the fastest growing portions of the County Upper-Income Anglo swung heavily Democratic....

4.) As I posted earlier many pages back, the polling gap between the +10 Lesko Poll based heavily upon typical voter turnout patterns in Midterms vs the Emerson Poll, looked much more like polling models based upon RV vs EV numbers....

Although the final total voted will likely be close to the 2014 GE numbers, the voter turnout will be significantly lower, because of both of population growth within the district, as well as the unprecedented voter registration activities from grassroots Maricopa County activists determined to get rid of Sheriff Joe for good....

5.) The collapse of the Senior Vote is what made this less of a +10% R win, and the dramatic swings among Upper-Income Anglos is what brought this to only a +4.7% R win....

6.) Looking at the swings among Upper-Income Anglos, it really isn't looking like much of a fluke, and more like a major problem for Republicans, especially considering extremely low turnout levels among what little there is of a "Democratic Base" in CD-08....

[NOVA Green]

What about those precincts that swung heavily Democratic between the '16 Presidential Election and '18 CD-08 Special Election?

Here is a list of precincts that swung +20-25% Democratc, and represented roughly 20% of the CD'08 electorate in both 2014 and 2018, and 22% of the CD-08 electorate in 2016.... ( I omitted two "Senior Only" precincts since they were included in that previous breakdown)



Similarly to the +25% Democratic swing precincts, we see a wide geographical dispersion pattern, with Peoria, Glendale, Surprise, and Phoenix/ Uninc North Phoenix all represented.

Let's look at the maps of the District split into the Northern Part of CD- '08 and the numerically larger Central and Southern Part of the district.

Precincts highlighted in RED are +25% D swing '16 GE to '18, those in BLUE are +20-25% D Swing...

Northern CD-08:



Central/Southern CD-08:



Let's go back and look at the Median Household Income (MHI) by Census Tract Map...



So, I outlined three broad areas where MHI runs about $100k/Yr....

This includes broadly (Some Precincts highlighted in BOLD):

1.) Some Unincorporated Areas North of Phoenix (Majesty and Hastings)... Deadman Wash was split into two between '16 and '18, with a new precinct Tramonto created, so although this '16 precinct swung heavily Dem, I did not include on the map.

2.)Northern parts of Glendale/Peoria/Phoenix from Lake Pleasant in the NW going South-by-Southeast through West Wing, Desert Sage, to Creedence and stretching all the way down to Angela and heads back west towards Indian Wells....

3.) A significant cluster of precincts in more of the Central part of Glendale located within the district , and Peoria, essentially crunched between Sun City to the West and Phoenix to the East where you had roughly a dozen precincts that swung 20+% Dem between '16 and '18....

4.) You have that one pocket Litchfield in the SW Portion of CD-08 that I mentioned in my previous post regarding +25% D swing precincts....

5.) Now you have one major cluster of +20/+25 D Swing precincts that is not represented on the MHI Map with high concentrations of +100k/Yr Median Household Income....

These are in the rapidly growing Exurban city of Surprise, Arizona (+220% pop growth 2010 to 2018)...

MHI runs roughly more in the $67k/Yr range, the population tends to skew much younger than CD-08 in general somewhere in the early '40s, still tends to be heavily Anglo.

These types of areas will be especially interesting to watch in the General Election this November and in the 2020 GE as the Exurban share of CD- '08 continues to grow as first time home buyers move further and further out into newer housing developments in the desert and trade more house for lower cost and longer commutes....

Ok---- how what does the voting history of the +20-25% Dem Swing ('16 GE > '18 CD SE) look like?



What do these numbers show from 20-22% of the CD-'08 electorate?

1.) Again we have areas with an overwhelmingly Republican voting history that almost elected a Democrat in a Special Election....

The Registered Voter Numbers (24 D- 44 R- 32 I) tend to be closer to the RV numbers in CD-08 than the Senior Citizen Precincts and the +25% D Swing precincts....

2.) Once again there were gains on the margins for the '18 Dem candidate (48-51 R) compared to the '16 Sheriff numbers (47-53 R)....

3.) If we do a compare/contrast for the +25% Dem swing precincts vs the +20-25% Dem swing precincts, the +20-25% D Swing precincts actually tend to vote slightly more Democratic than the +25% Dem swing precincts, but in the Special Election that was not the case....

The obvious variance between the two is that Independents voted at a lower level in the +20% Swing Precincts in the '18 Special Election, AND the DEMs did slightly worse in reducing the EV DEM/REP voter gap in the former....

Without doing an exhaustive study comparing the +20% vs +25% Dem swing precincts, it appears that the turnout levels in the former was a bit more favorable to the Democrats than the latter, but regardless overall +20% swing precincts accounted for a whopping 30% of the AZ CD-08 SE vote.

Some of this might possibly be related to variations in age and education differentials on the margins, combined with a bit of statistical "noise", but regardless we can see that turnout differentials were slightly less worse for 'Pubs here than in the HUGE swing precincts....

Ok--- before I finish this, there are a few more items to examine....

Here is a chart that shows the precinct level results by Party for the '18 SE and '16 PRES and '16 Sheriff Election, as well as the Early Voting partisan gap compared to the PEVL (Pre-Approved Early Voting List) numbers....

This gives us an idea of to what extent the turnout enthusiasm gap may have played a role in the EV numbers, which were obviously an overwhelming majority of the votes cast in this election....



So on the Left side of the chart I randomly chose Blue for some reason rather than Red (Atlas faux pas) to code DEM/REP EV turnout gaps.... basically which Party was turning out a greater number of their base voters than the other, and essentially leaving the Indy vote to the sidelines....

What do these numbers tell us?

1.) Democrats overall were much better than Republicans in getting their Early Voters to turnout, despite the last minute RNC GOTV drive....

2.) Although generally the Democratic candidate in the Special Election outperformed the Democratic Candidate running for Maricopa County Sheriff against "Sheriff Joe", it is notable that there were a relatively small number of precincts where the Dem CD-08 candidate under-performed....

Earlier in the thread I had posited that since we didn't have any real example of a potential Democratic precinct level win model in this district, the best we could do for precinct modeling would be look that the '16 Sheriff Election, and to a lesser extent the '14 Arizona Superintendent of Education Election as potential narrow routes towards a Democratic WIN in this district.

3.) Interestingly enough we don't really see the PEVL gap being the major correlation between election results in CD-08 4/24....

It looks more like a mixture of improvement on Sheriff Joe election numbers for the DEM in certain precincts, combined with a larger collapse among Trump levels of support in many of these precincts even where the Lesko out-performed Sheriff Joe....

4.) The more I look at the data, it really is starting to look like the Democratic candidate won some 65% of Registered Independents that voted, as opposed to my "High-Dem" Model of 60-40 D....

I am still extremely skeptical about any polling numbers and discussions about how 15-17% of Registered Republicans voted Democrat in this election, since we really don't have any precinct data to indicate that by Party Registration....

What I *suspect* might be the case is that these polling questions asked about Party Identification and not Party Registration.

As all of us regular Atlas Election Geeks well know Registered Independents frequently tend to lean heavily one way or the other when it comes to their voting history....

*IF* Dem's are winning 2:1 among Registered Indies in a CD where typically Dems barely break 50-50 or 53-47, 'Pub Phoenix has a massive Anglo problem....

Gotta take a break from the project, but will need to check '12 > '16 GE PRES swings for these precincts at some point....

[NOVA Green]

Now let's shift gears and move towards the other side of the deck.... precincts where there was a '16 to '18 Dem Swing of less than 10%, and in a couple cases a reverse swing towards the Republican CD-08 candidate....

These precincts accounted for the vote share in CD-08:

Registered Voters: 9.9%
2018 Special Election: 7.1% of Total Vote
2016 General Election: 8.7% of CD-08 Total Vote
2014 General Election: 7.5% of Total Vote

Here's the list of precincts in CD '08 that had the lowest Democratic Swing between '16 PRES GE and '18 CD Special Election:



Here is how they voted in recent years (Filtered out Deadmanwash for reasons cited in my previous post)....



In theory these should be overwhelmingly Democratic Precincts compared to the RV numbers, Trump only narrowly won here (45-47 R), Sheriff Joe went down hard (56-44 D), the Dem Candidate for US SEN won in '12 (49-45 D), etc....

Reality is that in non-Presidential Year elections, these precincts start to become much more Republican as a result of turnout numbers among Registered Democrats and Indies....

Ok... here is the map of low Dem swing precincts in '18 compared to the '16 GE...



There a couple "Senior Only" precincts accidentally included in the final vote tally chart, Happy Trails, St Christopher and Lakeview (Sun City), that will move the numbers around a bit on the margins, but my fundamental point below still stands...

Let's look at the Latino Population of the District by US Census Tract...



So here we see the two precincts that swung Republican between '16 and '18 (Goodyear and San Miguel) both have fairly large Latino populations....

We also observe areas around the "Latino Belt" of CD-08 that runs South from Old Town Surprise down through El Mirage, and sweeps around to the SE portions of the district into "South Peoria" and into adjacent portions of Glendale....

El Mirage was featured in the seminal book: "The Patchwork Nation" published about eight years back as a key example of the "Immigration Nation" segment of Americana and voting habits...

http://www.patchworknation.org/Immigration-Nation



Although this district is not significantly Latino in terms of overall population, it is even much less so in terms of VAP and RVs, and Working-Class Latinos tend to vote less frequently in this part of the US in Non-Presidential Year elections....

Flake lost these precincts by + 1k Dem Total Votes in '12. the AZ Sup of Ed narrowly won by 100 Votes in 2014, Trump narrowly won these precincts by 450 votes in '16 (Inclusive of Senior Precincts), and Sheriff Joe lost by a huge 3.5k Votes in '16....

Hiral narrowly won these precincts by 500 votes in the Special Election, although voter turnout was only about 50% of 2016 numbers (Electorate much more Anglo and Middle-Class Latino and very few Working-Class Latino voters)...

Still, there are tons of places like this in Maricopa County, and with so many key elections on the line in Arizona in November 2018, the Special Election results from CD-08 thus far don't appear to indicate a massive Latino surge come November in Arizona...

This could easily change with extremely competitive US-SEN, AZ-GOV, races on the line not to mention pretty much all Statewide elections, and various Congressional Elections....

Still, despite the Republican Party's Maricopa County Anglo problem, the Democratic Party is facing an off-year election "Latino Problem" thus far when it comes to voter turnout and enthusiasm...

If Sheriff Joe is on the ballot as the Republican running in a GE to capture Flake's seat, this obviously won't be a problem, considering the massive Voter Registration Drives and grassroots organizing that happened in '16 against the racist a**hole.

Democrats can obviously win Arizona Statewide elections regardless of massive Latino turnout as results from CD-08 demonstrated in an off-year special election gig, but still votes are earned and not granted, AND without a significantly higher Latino turnout in the '18 AZ GE, numbers start to become much more complicated for Dems, regardless of whatever happens in the Nov '18 CD-08 rematch....

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

This reminds me a lot of the Duke Cunningham special election in 2006. Cunningham was forced to resign over some scandal. Brian Bilbray, a former Republican Congressman, ran for the seat but only won by 5%.

Of course this seat went for Trump by 21% compared to Bush having won CA-50 (its number at the time) 55%-43%.

[Holy Unifying Centrist]

This reminds me a lot of the Duke Cunningham special election in 2006. Cunningham was forced to resign over some scandal. Brian Bilbray, a former Republican Congressman, ran for the seat but only won by 5%.

Of course this seat went for Trump by 21% compared to Bush having won CA-50 (its number at the time) 55%-43%.

It's also worth noting that there are different baselines here.

Bush won the PV by 2.5%, Trump lost the PV by 2%.

So that special election, assuming there would be an even swing come 2006 in every district, would suggest democrats doing 7 points better than Bush 2004, for a PV win of only... 5.5%. With Trump, that would be a 9% win.

And given that AZ-08 was +21 Trump, this is actually a 16 point swing from that.

Democrats doing 5% better than Bush's 2004 performance would hardly be something to brag about, whereas dems doing 5% better than Hillary would most likely give them the house.

IMO this AZ-08 result is consistent with a D+10 to D+12% result in the house (8-10% swing from the 2016 result). There really wasn't any excuse for this race to be so close. The democrat was definitely better than the republican here, but they got outspent and there wasn't a particularly huge gap anyways. The environment may get better for Republicans come November, and I think it will... until late October, when all of the premium increases start being announced.

[Badger]

Excellent and thorough analysis as always, Nova. So my next, and perhaps most important question, is the following. What is the Democrats most realistic road to flipping the seat in 2008? Include whatever factors, demographic, Precinct analysis, whatever, necessary.

[GeorgiaModerate]

Excellent and thorough analysis as always, Nova. So my next, and perhaps most important question, is the following. What is the Democrats most realistic road to flipping the seat in 2008? Include whatever factors, demographic, Precinct analysis, whatever, necessary.

A time machine?

[NOVA Green]

Ok--- time to look at the precincts that only swung 10-15 % Democratic between the '16 PRES GE numbers vs the '18 SE CD-08 numbers....

These precincts (Excluding Senior Only) accounted for 9.1% of the RV in 4/18, 7.9% of the Votes on 4.24.18, 9.0% of the Votes on 11/16, and 8.3% of the Votes on 11/14.



Note that the vast majority of these precincts are located in the "Senior Only" communities of Sun City and Sun City West, as well as a few other precincts that I already called out a "Senior Only" communities, and hence were already included in my previous posts when it comes to the AZ CD-'08 Vote Share....

Let's look at the chart excluding the Senior Only precincts and we see the Chart looking more like this:



Now what does the map look like?



So we see a heavy concentration in the Southern Part of CD-08 around Goodyear, throw in a bit of the "Southeast Portions of Glendale located within the district", throw in a few random precincts in Surprise on the edge of Sun City West, and then a few random precincts such as Youngtown and Apache Park....

Are there any commonalities whatsoever between these communities???

A.) Southern Precincts in CD-08 around Goodyear

1.) The Latino population is only around 35%....

2.) If we look at the age, 35% of the Population is <17 Yrs....

3.) Now, we start to see precincts within CD-08 that tend to have a much larger African-American population than CD-08 at large....

.

Goodyear has the 3rd highest percentage of Blacks of any City within Arizona (9.4%)...

https://www.roadsnacks.net/most-african-american-cities-in-arizona/

https://www.phxsoul.com/black-people-live-phoenix-area/

4.) Earlier on in the thread I believe I posted the lyrics to one of my favorite "late" Public Enemy Songs: "By the Time I get to Arizona", that was a protest song against AZ being the only state in the US not to create a MLK public holiday....

The reality is that that as opposed to the rhetorical music of Public Enemy and their statement that that Blacks in Arizona all come from California, that there are some significant African-American cities in Arizona that go way back to the 1950s, albeit with all the racist "Sunset Law" crap, combined with "Red-Lining" institutional discrimination when it came to being able to buy a home etc in Arizona even as recently as the 1970s...

B.) Although I haven't previously commented on it, the "Black Belt" of CD-08 basically runs through the same Working-Class corridors between Sun City to the East and El Mirage to the North...

Shifts a bit West to some of the faster growing Exurbs of Surprise....

Something I need to take a deeper look at especially if we start looking at precincts such as Marley Park

1.) If we look at the Southeast portions of Glendale within CD-08, we see both a significant Latino population (~20%) AND some major pockets of African-Americans...

C.) Despite the large Minority Population in the four precincts of SE Glendale, it is still much more heavily Anglo than other parts of the neighboring precincts in this part of the City....

It does appear that the bulk of the swing between '16 and '18 likely came from Anglo Voters here, considering the VAP heavily favors Anglos here, despite a significant "Minority" presence....

There are a few other places in the +10-15% Dem Swing Category, but Goodyear and "SE Glendale" account for the bulk of the vote once we filter out the Senior Only Communities...

Let's look at the historical election results...



Now let's look at the Early Voter Turnout War by Party Registration...



So as opposed to heavily Anglo Upper-Income precincts, here we see the Republicans completely dominating the "Early Vote" numbers based upon Party Registration....

In the Multi-Ethnic Working-Class precincts of CD-08, where RVs are only (28 D- 38 R- 34 I) the EVs were (30 D- 47 R- 23 I) and the final tally was only (51-49 D)....

Sheriff Joe lost these same precincts (53-47 D) although Trump won (42-51 R) mainly because of defection among Millennial Voters to 3rd Party candidates....

Although Hiral way out performed anyone's expectations in the overwhelmingly Anglo Senior Citizen precincts, and Upper-Income Anglo precincts, as well as the fast growing Exurban Precincts, there were tons of democratic base voters left on the table because the 'Pubs did a last minute GOTV effort with robocalls from Trump, while the DNC didn't do squat....

Looking forward to the boxing match in this district come November, where both Political Parties are going to flooding Arizona with dollars for the US-SEN, AZ-GOV races, not to mention all sorts of unexpected CD races and down-ballot statewide races in the Sunshine State....

[NOVA Green]

Excellent and thorough analysis as always, Nova. So my next, and perhaps most important question, is the following. What is the Democrats most realistic road to flipping the seat in 2008? Include whatever factors, demographic, Precinct analysis, whatever, necessary.

That's a very good question Badger, and something I have been mulling over this past week since the surprisingly close Special Election....

Although your question deserves a much more comprehensive response than I can deliver tonight, here are a few brief initial thoughts I have on the matter:

1.) We can likely assume that both Lesko and Hiral voters will stick by their respective choices for US-REP in the November General Election....

2.) What will the overall composition and size of the electorate look like in November '18?

This was an extremely favorable Republican Electorate, even by the standards of CD-08 in 4/24, and yet it was only a +4.7% Rep win.

*IF* we see the composition of the electorate shoot up 30-40k *AND* Dems win these voters 2:1, we are looking at a likely flip.

3.) There are tons of competitive races going on in Arizona this November, from US-SEN, AZ-GOV, AZ-SoS, AZ-AG, and anyone living in Maricopa County will be bombarded with Election Ads to the point they will want to throw their remote controls at the TV screens just so they can chill and watch their favorite shows without interruption...

4.) Cliche, but true to some extent... "All Politics are local"....

To what extent will the dynamics of the AZ-SEN race and AZ-GOV race impact not only voter turnout, but also differences in the margins between Registered Republicans, Democrats, and Independents?

Maricopa County has apparently already buried "Sheriff Joe", but if he's on the ballot running for US SEN from AZ, this obviously has massive implications even in CD-08....

How will the dynamics of the Teachers Strike in AZ play out in Upper-Middle Class Anglo precincts?

It appears that this was resolved with both funding for Education and raises for Teachers, but Arizona Republicans are still handcuffed by their Tax slashes and Grover Norquist style rules that limit the ability of even Suburban Republican State House and Senate Legislators to raise funding for education....

5.) The share of the Independent Vote in the Arizona Special Election was extremely low, but this will likely increase significantly come November....

How will these voters vote? My initial opinion is that they currently aren't too crazy about the Republican National and Statewide brand....