For many of you who don't live in the Grand Canyon State, until recently, you probably thought John McCain's chances of claiming the 10 electoral votes in his home state to be a virtual lock.
But since October 23, eight seperate polls have put McCain's once dominant lead here to between just 1 and 8 points, with Kos' most recent Arizona poll showing the one-point lead for McCain over Barack Obama.
What's going on here in Arizona? Let's look at Arizona Secretary of State numbers after the fold to find one probable answer...
According to AZ Secretary of State records, in the 2004 General Election, the registered population broke down like this:
Democrats 914,264 (34.6%)
Republicans 1,055,252 (40%)
Independents 655,554 (24.8%)
(with other making up the remaining .6%)
Now, factor in four more years of the decider (and several hundred thousand more registered voters), and the numbers look much different:
Democrats 1,022,252 (34.2%)
Republicans 1,118,587 (37.4%)
Independents 824,450 (27.6%)
Democrats picked up 23% more registered voters than 2004, basically staying flat as a percentage of the registered voter pool.
Republicans only added 14.6%, but in doing so, lost 260 basis points of the registered voter pool.
Meanwhile, Independents gained 39.7% against 2004 and picked up 280 basis points of the registered voter pool.
So what will the story of Zona be tomorrow? With Democrats closing the gap with Republicans, it looks like Independents - that group of voters that the old John McCain used to claim as his own, could be his undoing here in the Grand Canyon state. If they turn their backs on him en masse, we might join the other Obama-Pac-10 states in the blue column!
Stay tuned, as an estimated 2.4 million Arizonans will make their voices heard tomorrow (although as Kos mentioned a few days ago, our absentee and drop-off voting counts could take a week or more to be counted).