The Arizona Republican Party will either adapt to political reality or die in agony

In the 2008 presidential debates, U.S. Sen. John McCain teed up one of the most memorable expressions in American politics for his opponent Barack Obama to drive into history.

“Elections have consequences.”

McCain used the expression to emphasize that presidents should, within reason, get to choose who they seat on the Supreme Court.

Obama borrowed it three days into his presidency to remind then-House Republican majority leader Eric Cantor that his team lost.

Whether Arizona Republicans understand the expression or not – and they clearly do not – they are operating under the hard fact that the 2022 election rocked their world.

They lost and they seem the last to know it.

Republicans are in a state of deep denial

Despite holding a roughly 4-point voter registration advantage over Democrats, Arizona Republicans lost the governor, secretary of state and attorney general seats. They also lost a U.S. Senate seat. Their governing margins in the state House and Senate have eroded to virtually nothing in the past several elections.

A single dissenter in their own caucus just steered the GOP budget off the tracks.

Plans undone:New GOP lawmaker crashes party's budget plan

And still Republicans operate as if nothing has changed.

They are proposing a slew of bills that will be gleefully stamped and scrapped by veto-eager Gov. Katie Hobbs.

They’ve mostly dragged their feet on lifting the cap on education spending before the March deadline, forcing fellow Republican and schools chief Tom Horn to warn disaster looms if they fail to act.

Trump is losing, but the GOP can't quit him

Further, the party continues its slavish devotion to Donald Trump, the once fired and twice impeached president who ended America’s two centuries-old tradition of peaceful transfer of power.

More than any other Republican, Trump is most responsible for the party’s losses in the last three national cycles. Rich donors and faith-based donors have begun to abandon him. New polls show that he would lose to Joe Biden in a rematch of their 2020 election.

And still the Arizona Republicans can’t quit him. They’ve elected as party chair Jeff DeWit, one of the MAGA guys who first brought Trump to Arizona during the 2016 election and who used his time as treasurer to declare war on Republican Gov. Doug Ducey.

Party leaders have enabled Kari Lake to bark at the moon and insist the governor’s election was rigged, even as she diminishes the party’s own brand and raises questions about her sanity.

Extremists lose elections. By a lot

It doesn’t take much to understand the party’s essential problem. It suffers from terrible leadership. Following Trump’s lead, the Arizona Party promoted candidates too extreme for the general electorate.

It could not adapt to the changing facts, and now the Arizona Republican Party may have set itself back for many years to come.

In 2015, Andrew B. Hall, now a Stanford political scientist, studied what happens when Republicans and Democrats elect extremists to represent their parties in general elections.

When they face tough competition from a moderate in the primary, they on average lose roughly 9-13 points of their party’s general-election vote-share.

The long-term consequences of losing

Of greater concern for Arizona Republicans is that when either party does this they create an echo effect that can last for years, in which the opposing party takes control of an elected seat for cycles to come.

“Incumbency status conveys a roughly 40 percentage-point increase in the probability the party retains the seat in the next election cycle,” wrote Hall, then a doctoral candidate at Harvard. “Once a party controls a seat, it is unlikely to give it up for a long time.”

When Democrat Janet Napolitano won the Arizona governorship in a redder Arizona in 2002, she barely squeaked past Republican centrist Matt Salmon. She won by a point.

In four years she had so consolidated power, she won reelection by nearly 30 points over Republican Len Munsil.

Thus is the power of incumbency that Kelli Ward and company at Arizona GOP handed over to Mark Kelly, Katie Hobbs, Adrian Fontes and Kris Mayes.

What Florida knows that Arizona doesn't

The upshot is that the conservative revolution will take place in Florida under the better and more strategic leadership of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. DeSantis steered clear of Trump’s strange galaxy of stolen elections. He has all but cut his ties to Mar-a-Lago.

And in the process he got more Republicans elected to both chambers of the Florida Legislature and to school boards. He won reelection by a stunning 19 points, turning Florida from a battleground state to a deep-red Republican state.

The Arizona Republican Party can remain in denial and pretend MAGA is still the viable path to the future. But if they do, Katie Hobbs – who even Democrats tell you is not the swiftest politician – will continue to feast on their incompetence.

Phil Boas is an editorial columnist for The Arizona Republic. He can be reached at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Arizona Republicans are turning the state over to Democrats