The latest House special election on April 24, between Democrat Hiral Tipirneni and Republican Debbie Lesko, is in Arizona’s 8th congressional district, located in the western suburbs of Phoenix; polls close at 7 pm local time (or 10 pm Eastern). A satellite photo (as seen above) is maybe the best way to get a feel for the district; it’s not so much a city that evolved organically over the centuries as it's a collection of residential subdivisions quickly dropped in an orderly yet indecipherable fashion on an inhospitable landscape that, geologically and meteorologically, really shouldn’t have anything on it at all. In fact, it might make sense if you thought aliens rather than suburban developers were responsible for its existence; the stark relief of the golf courses snaking through the odd geometric shapes on a parched landscape are more than a little reminiscent of the Nazca Lines in Peru.
While Arizona’s 8th is a very conservative district (it went 37 percent for Hillary Clinton and 58 percent for Donald Trump in 2016, little changed from 37 percent for Barack Obama and 62 percent for Mitt Romney in 2012), it isn’t what you’d think of as a district that’s “ancestrally Republican”—or “ancestrally Democratic,” like we saw in the recent pickup in Pennsylvania’s 18th district. It’s more like it’s ancestrally nothing, with almost no one being here at all, say, 40 years ago. (One of the main municipalities in AZ-08, the city of Surprise, Arizona, is a case in point. It currently has an estimated population of 133,000. In 2010, the population was 118,000. In 2000, the population was 31,000. And in 1990, the population was 7,000!)
Like some similar districts in Florida’s suburbs that were empty a generation ago and are now filled with retirees from other parts of the country, it’s conservative partly by default, in that there was no already-existing political culture for the new arrivals to assimilate into. What we’ll be looking for tonight is how much new political currents—running in very much the opposite direction of what we saw during the Obama years, as we’ve seen in the last year’s worth of special elections in red territory—can overcome this district’s dark-red—but not particularly baked-in—baseline. With polls showing either a nearly tied race or a Lesko lead in the single digits, we’re seeing signs of a clear swing toward the Democrats here too, though it still seems like a long shot as to whether it’s large enough to get Tipirneni over the top.
Usually, in one of my previews of a special election, one of the prominent parts of the story would be county-level benchmarks. Unfortunately, there’s no basis for that kind of analysis in Arizona’s 8th district; it’s found entirely within Maricopa County, which is not only Arizona’s most populous county (3.7 million people live here, more than half of Arizona’s total population) but one of the most populous counties in the nation; four other congressional districts fit entirely within its borders. This means that, if you’re following along with results that are conventionally presented by, say, the Associated Press or Politico, there won’t be any geographic differentiation of the results at all, and there will be no way to know whether the precincts that have reported so far are representative of the district as a whole.
What I can do is break the district down into smaller pieces—using legislative districts as boundaries—in order to talk about the different political leans of different parts of the district. Even then, though, you’ll find that there’s a certain uniformity from one part of the district to another that you don’t see in most other parts of the country. There isn’t, for instance, a mix of older towns, newer suburbs and rural areas, each with their own political tradition; the only real variation tends to be between areas that are more marketed toward white retirees, which tend to be the most conservative, versus areas that are more oriented toward younger families, which also tend to have a somewhat higher Latino percentage. (Overall, though, this is one of Arizona’s oldest (and thus one of the nation’s oldest as well) and whitest congressional districts — there’s a median age of 42.6 in AZ-08, surpassed only in Arizona by AZ-04 at 47.9.)
To help you better situate these parts of the district on a map, I’m also including what municipalities they overlap with. Baseball fans will no doubt recognize a lot of these names; many of the stadiums where Cactus League teams practice during spring training are found in AZ-08.
LEG. DISTRICT |
CITY COMPONENTS |
TOTAL No. OF VOTES IN ‘16 |
2016 RESULTS (D/R) |
1 |
Anthem, New River |
25,473 |
29/67 |
4 |
S. Goodyear |
9,164 |
48/46 |
13 |
N. Goodyear, Citrus Park |
28,241 |
38/57 |
15 |
Part of NW Phoenix |
20,389 |
35/60 |
20 |
N. Glendale |
30,333 |
40/53 |
21 |
Sun City, N. Peoria, Youngtown |
88,939 |
40/55 |
22 |
Surprise, Sun City West |
114,314 |
34/62 |
29 |
S. Peoria, W. Glendale |
5,003 |
47/47 |
30 |
Bit of central Glendale |
5,469 |
51/43 |
As you can see from the table, most parts of the district settle in around 35 to 40 percent for Hillary Clinton in 2016, not much different from the 37 percent in AZ-08 overall. You can see some bits and pieces around the periphery of the district where Clinton eked out a narrow win, but those make up only a small percentage of the district. However, the core of the district is the 21st and 22nd legislative districts (the 21st is the only one that’s entirely in the 8th; the others all cross the 8th’s boundaries)—centered on the Sun City-branded retirement communities and Surprise (an incorporated city, but where much of the population lives in Sun City Grand, another retirement development from the same company)—and together they make up more than half of the 8th’s total votes.
The most conservative part of the district, though, is an appendage that sticks up far to the north of Phoenix (while most of the district is to Phoenix’s west), which grabs the large new subdivision of Anthem. Unlike Sun City, Anthem is mostly oriented toward families, with a low percentage of seniors—but it’s developed by the same company as Sun City (Del Webb Construction) and seems to attract a similarly right-wing clientele, just at an earlier phase in their lives.
Unfortunately, conventional reporters like the Associated Press won’t break the results down by legislative district either; as I mentioned above, the results will just show up in an agglomerated form showing the topline result for all of AZ-08. However, you can visually match the data that I provided above with the New York Times interactive map of the results to get a better sense of whether the geographically specific precincts are coming in at a rate that might show Tipirneni overperforming.
To that end, I’m going to get a little fancy here; I’ve isolated the 2016 precinct-level results for all the precincts that are in AZ-08 and put them into a Google Doc; if you can find a source (the NYT — which will have precinct level results here — or perhaps somewhere on the Maricopa County website) that reports at the precinct level, you’ll be much better able to follow along. To make that easier to do, I’ve also pulled out the largest precincts in the district (none of them rise to my usual level for “benchmark” status with counties, which is at least 2 percent of the district—and, frankly, I don’t know enough about Maricopa County at that level of detail to know whether these are good bellwethers for the district as a whole), and calculated benchmark data for them, modeling to a 48-47 Tipirneni victory.
PRECINCT |
# OF 2016 VOTES |
2016 RESULTS (D/R) |
WHAT TIPIRNENI NEEDS TO WIN |
DISTRICTWIDE |
-- |
37/58 |
48/47 |
0165 DEADMAN WASH |
7,202 |
30/66 |
41/55 |
0661 PEBBLE CREEK |
5,915 |
36/62 |
47/51 |
0506 PYRAMID PEAK |
5,797 |
35/60 |
46/49 |
0138 WADDELL |
5,655 |
27/69 |
38/58 |
0203 DUSTY TRAIL |
5,499 |
29/67 |
40/56 |
0706 WIGWAM |
5,335 |
42/53 |
53/42 |
0691 WEST WING |
5,294 |
31/65 |
42/54 |