In 2020, Alejandra Gomez saw years of activism in Arizona make national headlines.
Once a Republican stronghold, the state elected a Democrat to the presidency for the first time in decades – in large part due to a grassroots movement started by young, progressive Latinx organizers like Gomez.
“It was an inflection point – a big exclamation point”, said Gomez, who is the co-director of the advocacy group Lucha.
But almost immediately after, she said, she saw the backlash.
This year, ahead of midterm elections that could sway control of Congress from Democrat to Republican, the movement that started as a response to Arizona’s rightwing, anti-immigrant politics is facing daunting obstacles.
With early voting already under way, organizers in the state are rushing to rally voters against a surge of election disinformation and a slate of far-right candidates threatening to irreversibly erode civil rights, voting rights and reproductive rights.
At stake this year is the governorship, which has pitted the state’s Democratic top election official, Katie Hobbs, against Kari Lake, an ultra-conservative election denier who wants to further militarize the southern border as well as ban abortions and “woke” curriculums in schools. A crucial Senate seat is also on the ballot – incumbent Democrat Mark Kelly has held a slight lead over hardline nationalist Blake Masters. Down ballot, voters will decide who should control the secretary of state office and oversee future elections: a Democratic former election official, or a self-proclaimed member of the Oath Keepers, a far-right extremist group.
But as hundreds of canvassers crisscross the searing desert sprawl of Phoenix and Tucson, they’re also fighting a wave of disillusionment among Latino and working-class voters who feel as if they’ve been forsaken by politicians..
“We’re in a very, very scary moment,” said Blanca Collazo, a 21-year-old organizer with Lucha. “Now, more than ever, we need to fight.”
‘You can no longer win without the Latino vote’
Weeks before election day, canvassers for Latino-led community organizations like Lucha, Mi Familia Vota and Chispa braved 110F (43C) heat and freak sandstorms, snaking through the largely Latino neighborhoods in downtown and south Phoenix, Maryvale and the East Village.
“We usually start really early before the sun gets too strong,” said Alex Prieto, a volunteer with Chispa Arizona, an environmental group focused on building Latino political power. “Hats are helpful,” he added, shrugging toward the heat mirage radiating off the road.
Especially during the oppressive autumn afternoons, the streets can be eerily empty – belying the region’s explosive political significance.
Arizona’s Maricopa county, which encompasses Phoenix, is one of the fastest-growing counties in the US. A third of its 4.5 million residents and a fifth of its voters are Latino – and in recent years, they have turned out to vote in historic numbers, helping to transform the deep-red Copper State into a purple political battleground.
Their influence is only expected to grow. An estimated 553,500 Latino voters in Arizona participated in the 2020 elections, and the NALEO Educational Fund projects that more than 644,000 will cast ballots in November. About 38,000 young Latino residents become eligible to vote in Arizona each year, according to the voter engagement group Mi Familia Vota.
Many of these new voters in Arizona – including immigrants as well as young second-, third- and fourth-generation Mexican Americans – lack strong ties to either big party. The research firm Equis found that Democrats will need to continue building support among Latino voters if they are to fend off Republican challengers, especially in Arizona and Nevada.
“We’re getting to a point now where you’re no longer going to be able to win an election without the Latino vote,” said Joseph Garcia, the executive director of Chicanos Por La Causa Action Fund, a nonpartisan group that invested $10m in voter outreach before the primaries and midterms this year.
But campaigns aren’t doing enough to recognize that, he said. “We have one party that takes the Latino vote for granted and another that is either assuming that the Latino vote won’t materialize at the ballot box, or is doing everything it can through voter suppression measures to make sure that it won’t.”
‘We need real reasons to vote for candidates’
In an implicit acknowledgment of their need to appeal to young and Latinx voters, Arizona Democrats last year appointed Raquel Téran, a progressive state senator who spoke out against Arizona’s draconian anti-immigrant policies, to lead the state party.
“This job hasn’t been too different from what I’ve been doing as an organizer and as a movement building person,” she said. “Because at the end of the day, people come out to vote when you ask them to.”
The party has been running ads and canvassing in Spanish and English. And even with polls showing that the governor’s race is in a virtual tie, organizers say it’s not nearly enough. They’ve particularly been disappointed by Hobbs’s campaign. The candidate declined to participate in a televised debate with her opponent and had a shaky performance during a gubernatorial town hall arranged by the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.
Asked by the moderator, “What have you learned – specifically learned – from the Latino community?,” Hobbs froze, before saying that she enjoys “practicing my español” with her Latina sister-in-law.
Hobbs has also hosted fewer rallies and public events than Lake, focusing instead on smaller meetings with supporters and door-to-door canvassing.
Progressive organizers have questioned the strategy, worrying that despite her tireless efforts as secretary of state to defend Arizona’s election system against disinformation and conspiracy theories, and her ardent support for reproductive freedoms, her message isn’t energizing voters.
“We need real reasons to vote for candidates, not just reasons to vote against the other side,” said Arianna Alicia Reyes, a 21-year-old Phoenix resident who works in food service and has spent her off hours volunteering to register voters.
The fact that Democrats aren’t campaigning harder baffles her, especially when the stakes in this year’s elections are so high. “It’s scary,” she said.
As in other states, inflation and the rising cost of living are the biggest worries for Latino voters in Arizona, according to a recent poll conducted by UnidosUS and Mi Familia Vota. In Phoenix, which has the highest inflation rate among big US cities, voters said they had seen their rents increase by $200 to $700 a month. Concerns about financial survival loomed over issues like education, the climate crisis, immigration reform and abortion access, which, according to the poll, 80% of Latino voters in the state support.
But it’s the rise of reactionary, hardline politics in the state that has progressive organizers deeply worried, with political experts speculating that even fiscally conservative Latino voters could lean Democratic this time around.
‘The very nature of our democracy is on the line’
Hardline anti-immigrant policies and the 2010 “show me your papers law”, which encouraged police to stop anyone they thought looked like an undocumented immigrant, spurred Latino activists into action more than a decade ago in Arizona.
In many ways, this year feels very similar to that era, said Gomez, the Lucha co-director. “The Trump effect of violence on communities of color and voter suppression didn’t start in 2020. In Arizona, we’ve been experiencing it for over a decade,” she said.
This year, Arizona’s Republican governor, Doug Ducey, along with the governors of Texas and Florida, bussed migrants from southern states to Washington DC to complain about the Biden administration’s immigration policies.
The stunt, said Angela Rocio, a 46-year-old voter based in north Phoenix, was inhumane and “humiliating”.
Rocio sees these governors’ positions echoed by Lake, who has said she would declare an “invasion” at the southern border, and Republican Senate candidate Masters, who evoked the white supremacist “great replacement theory” when accusing Democrats of trying to flood the nation with immigrants to “change the demographics of our country”.
“Whenever something goes wrong, or the economy is bad, they blame people like me – they blame us,” said Rocio, who immigrated to the US from Peru. “That’s why as a Hispanic person, I really want to vote – I have a right and I want to be heard.”
But amid growing Latinx voting power has come a barrage of election disinformation and voting restrictions. Arizona Republicans have introduced at least 81 bills seeking to restrict voting access in 2021 and 2022, according to the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice. Among them is a measure requiring voters to provide proof of US citizenship, which voting rights advocates say would disproportionately affect immigrants, students, older people, lower-income voters, Latinos and Native Americans. Another law eliminates the state’s permanent early voting list of residents who are automatically sent a mail-in ballot. The measure will not affect this year’s election, but the Brennan Center estimates that it would disproportionately affect Native American voters and voters of color, including more than a fifth of registered Latino voters.
“The very nature of our democracy is on the line,” said Adrian Fontes, the Democratic candidate for secretary of state.
Fontes was the Maricopa county recorder who oversaw the 2020 elections, when armed Trump supporters gathered outside the building on election night. State Republicans contested the results for months, hiring a firm called Cyber Ninjas to conduct an unprecedented partisan review. Since then, threats against election workers, officials and activists have escalated. Grassroots groups no longer list their addresses or contact information online.
A sixth-generation Mexican American and former Marine, Fontes said his pitch to Arizonans is that voter suppression will affect everyone.
His opponent, Mark Finchem, is a member of the anti-government Oath Keepers, who marched at the Capitol on January 6 and denies the presidential election results. If he wins, Finchem has indicated that he wants to end early voting and voting by mail, with only narrow exemptions. This could mean that voters – including elderly and disabled voters – would have to stand in line to cast their ballots during searing summer and autumn days.
“This is about fascism and authoritarianism,” Fontes said. “We’re at the precipice, we’re standing on the edge of the cliff.”
Reyes, the 21-year-old canvasser in Phoenix, feels it too. “Sometimes I start to feel numb to it all. It is very scary,” she said. “But then again, people like me, we’re also realizing our power. We’re utilizing our vote.”
• This article was amended on 21 October 2022. An earlier version mistakenly referred to Kari Lake as “Katie Lake”.
