Earlier, in the ongoing Daily Kos Elections “Most District” series, we wrote about the congressional district with the highest rate of people born in the same state as where they now live: New York’s 27th district, a district in Upstate New York that’s about as prototypically Rust Belt as they come, and one that swung sharply in the GOP direction in 2016. For counterpoint, let’s look at the opposite, the district with the highest rate of people born in a different state.
You might think that, by some rule of basic mathematics, this district must necessarily be one that was great for the Democrats in 2016, an extravaganza of non-white and/or college-educated voters, whose extensive travels have made them tolerant and inquisitive. Well … no, that’s not the case at all. The district with the highest level of people born in a different state is Arizona’s 4th congressional district, which spans much of the western portion of the state. About 64.4 percent of the district’s population was born in another state, much higher than the national average of 26.5 percent. It’s also Arizona’s reddest district, and one of only two districts in Arizona that moved in the Republican direction from 2012 to 2016, even while the state as a whole moved closer to becoming a swing state.
There are a couple factors that explain that: one is that the districts that have the highest levels of people born in different states tend to be the ones in states where the population has grown dramatically in the last few decades. In other words, it’s found in all parts (both the urban and cosmopolitan parts, and the rural or exurban parts) of states where there simply weren’t a lot of people living there a generation or two ago. Nevada and Florida lead the way, but Arizona’s not far behind on that category. And two, by definition the category “born in a different state” necessarily excludes “born in a different country,” so it’s not going to be a place with a lot of immigrants, either highly educated immigrants (like New York City or the Bay Area) or poorly educated immigrants (like California’s Central Valley or Texas’s Rio Grande Valley). It’s going to be, instead, a place with a lot of people who’ve moved from a different part of the country.
College and the post-collegiate search for work are two main times in people’s lives when they tend to pick up and move, but there’s one other time when people get mobile, and that’s retirement. It can be motivated by better weather, readily available golf, or just the search for cheaper real estate where one can sell a house in a major metro area, buy a replacement with only part of the proceeds, and then live comfortably off the rest of the equity. And Arizona’s 4th has all of those things in spades (at least if you call 120-degree days in the summer “better” weather).
Arizona’s 4th district encompasses many of the Grand Canyon State’s preferred retirement destinations. That includes Bullhead City and Lake Havasu City along the Colorado River on the state’s western border (Lake Havasu City is where a real estate developer purchased the old London Bridge and moved it brick-by-brick across the ocean, reassembling it to draw interest in his desert real estate … and, guess what … it worked!), and much further south, the white portions of Yuma (while the rest of that mostly Hispanic town is in the adjacent 3rd).
It also includes Prescott, a somewhat more upscale and less fiery-hot large town in the mountains that’s also popular with retirees. The 4th also includes the industrial outpost of Kingman, and some of the outermost reaches of Phoenix’s suburbs. (The Arizona retirement destination that might first come to mind for you, though … Sun City, one of the first seniors-only communities of its kind in the nation … has been thoroughly engulfed by Phoenix’s suburbs over the years, and is now in Arizona’s 8th district instead.)
So, on the whole, the main characteristic of the 4th is how elderly it is; it has a median age of 47.9 (compared with a national average of 37.8), and 26.6 percent of its population are 65 or older (compared with 14.9 percent nationally), placing it among the oldest districts in the country (behind only a few districts in Florida). It’s much whiter than the U.S. (or Arizona) as a whole, at 75.6 percent non-Hispanic white.
And it has a much lower rate of college education than the U.S. as a whole (18.6 percent of people 25 or older have a bachelor’s degree, compared with 30.6 percent nationwide). That has to do with the fact that much of the district’s population is blue-collar retirees from the Rust Belt, in many cases the same small towns or rural areas that were the ones that made the difference in the 2016 election.
While Arizona as a whole moved very much in the Democrats’ direction this year (not enough to flip the state, though), only two of its nine CDs didn’t. The 1st went from 47.9 for Obama in 2012 to 46.6 for Clinton in 2016; the 4th had a much bigger shift than that, going 31 for Obama and 67.2 for Romney in 2012, to 27.5 for Clinton and 67.7 for Trump this year. Again, it behaved similarly to the Rust Belt because it has so many white, non-college educated voters who retired from the Rust Belt.
The 4th has been represented since 2012 by Republican Rep. Paul Gosar, a former dentist who’d never held office but was swept into office as part of the 2010 wave, originally in Arizona’s 1st district (defeating Democrat Ann Kirkpatrick, who then reclaimed AZ-01 in 2012 after Gosar vacated it to run in the newly created, and much safer for a GOPer, 4th). Oddly enough, Gosar’s older brother, Pete Gosar, was the former Democratic Party chair in Wyoming and was the Democrats’ Wyoming gubernatorial candidate in 2014.
Gosar (who was backed by Joe Arpaio and Sarah Palin in the 2010 AZ-01 Republican primary) is a House Freedom Caucus member and pretty far to the right even by Arizona Republican standards, and his biggest challenge in 2016 was a primary challenge from the center (or at least from the not quite so nihilistic side). Even that, he won easily enough, though, so Gosar’s not likely to be dislodged from his spot in the 4th. Gosar instead is likely to make news only for his various right-wing pronouncements, most recently his 2015 refusal to attend Pope Francis’s address to Congress on the ground that the Pope is a “leftist politician.”
“The Most District” is an ongoing series devoted to highlighting congressional district superlatives around the nation. Click here for all posts in this series.