I heard the argument today that the AZ legislature is just doing what they were elected to do. "They propose and pass laws they believe to be supported by their voting constituency. If they are re-elected (as frequently happens) then their actions in government are accepted by the voters."
This way of thinking implies that someone who votes for a candidate agrees with everything that candidate is saying. If that were the case, no one would get ANY votes.
Few votes are cast for a politician by people who pretty much agree with all their ideas. most are cast by people who agree with some of what they have said and have prioritized those things above the things on which they disagree.
I mean really; this is how Santorum got so far in the primaries. The christian conservative voters saw him as prioritizing the same issues as they thought were important and therefore voted for him. But few were ratifying everything he said.
The same goes for Romney; now that he is the presumptive candidate, most of those christian conservatives who saw him as insufficiently conservative will vote for him anyway, believing that even a moderate republican is better than any democrat.
But it is a mistake on the part of a politician to assume that winning an election means that the people who voted for you agree with everything you said. Most are voting for the candidate that supports the one or two things they consider most important.
To bring this back to AZ, most of the legislature was elected based on fiscal conservatism, a policy that appeals to both hard-core republicans AND a lot of independents. That was the rallying cry, not the racists policies of SB 1070 (as Russell Pierce learned when we threw the bastard out) or the anti-woman/anti-choice ideas of Debbie Lesko.
The primary system exacerbates this problem. Winning a primary means you are fighting among the centrist and fringe elements of your own party, and more often than I would like the fringe elements come out on top. Then, in the main race, the independents are forced to choose between one fringe and the other.
This is why the Russell Pierce recall was so wonderful (and why they have introduced the sore loser bill SB1449). It allowed the people of Mesa to choose between two republican's rather than just leaving that to the smaller subset of registered republicans. A primary would have resulted in Pierce being re-elected. Without it, the independents got a say and were able to kick him to the curb. Which is why republican's are trying to make sure it never happens again.
And that's where my problem with the presumptive "mandate" that politicians feel comes from. If party primaries were removed and we all got to vote on the slate of candidates, the AZ legislature would look very different. Independents are the 2nd largest group in the state - 1.1M republicans, 1M independent or unaffiliated, and .96M democrats. That is a lot of power and a lot of ability to move the parties away from their fringes.
In the meantime I am on a quest to figure out just how the heck I get the republican primary ballots without changing my registration. I'm registered independent, and as an open primary state I have the right to vote in one of the primaries. I am also, however, a devotee of the permanent early voting list which gets me a ballot in the mail every election and saves me a trip to a polling site. I want to vote in the republican primary as a way of hopefully moderating some of this craziness, but cannot figure out how to communicate that to the recorder so that I can get that ballot. When I find out, I'll post the information (although if you know, PLEASE leave the info in the comments).