As the New York Times’s Nate Cohn noted recently, the electorate in the state tilted Republican by about nine points, with 75 percent of registered Republicans voting, compared to just 69 percent of registered Democrats — and in what had been up until recently a red state.
That would seem to be a recipe for success, but it wasn’t. So it was easy to surmise what had happened in Arizona was like what happened elsewhere, as Cohn wrote: Republican-leaning voters simply didn’t vote for certain Republican candidates.
There’s now compelling evidence this happened on a large scale in Arizona in precisely the races we thought.
The Arizona Republic this weekend highlighted a study of voting in all-important Maricopa County, which accounts for about 60 percent of the state’s electorate. It’s from a group called the “Audit Guys,” which includes a data analyst for the state Republican Party. The study showed the Lake, Masters and other statewide candidates like secretary of state hopeful Mark Finchem lost a significant number of votes from voters who otherwise backed mostly Republicans.
Those voters didn’t just skip those contests, mind you; they voted in large numbers for Democrats. And in some cases, including Lake’s, that appears to have been decisive.
