Republican politics in Arizona are not doing well.
After the state voted for President Joe Biden over Donald Trump and Senator Martha McSally handed over her seat to Democrat Mark Kelly in the 2020 election, the infighting began. The Phoenix New Times broke down ‘dysfunction’ and ‘bloodlust’ within the party last month.
One way to make the state red again, through the appearance of a bizarre statement that Rev. Doug Ducey published in the Orange County Register Tuesday is to target the fleeing Golden State Republicans and bring them to the desert. The decision to publish the opinion in a Republican stronghold in California does not seem coincidental.
To begin with, the governor’s entire case is based on a lie – that there is currently an unprecedented exodus of people from California.
“Last year, Arizona gained nearly 130,000 new residents – the second fastest growing rate in the country. California, on the other hand, lost nearly 70,000 people. Why do people choose to pick up and leave one of America’s most beautiful states?” he asks.
Ducey’s ‘nearly 70,000’ claim is confusing: California lost nearly 700,000 residents in 2019 (a lower number than the previous year). This figure, which is typical of the most populous state in the country, is ten times higher than Ducey’s and would actually have helped his argument.
He may have just made a typing mistake, or he may be referring to a report that 70,000 Californians moved to Arizona in 2019. However, this number has shown that Arizona is the largest deterioration in the upcoming Californians compared to previous years. The Orange County Register needs to know: They wrote the story.
And although during the pandemic there was an increase in people moving, and a record number of San Franciscans leaving the city, these people are largely not leaving the state; the majority moved to other parts of California.
Mathematics aside, the root that Ducey is waving to draw the important Republican votes to Arizona is also rotten.
“I made it my mission to make and maintain our state the best place in the country,” Ducey boasts.
This mission is apparently a failure, as Arizona is shrinking in 46th place in the state-by-state education rankings, as Twitter users wanted to remind the governor of it.
Ducey continues to attack political correctness in California, and especially San Francisco.
“Perhaps this is nowhere clearer than the fact that one of California’s largest school districts, instead of getting kids back in the classroom, is focusing on erasing historical figures like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln,” he writes. he (skips over the fact that Ducey himself was open to renaming the Jefferson Davis Highway in his state).
And while the San Francisco Unified School District’s recent move to rename its schools has indeed been a mess, Ducey himself knows a thing or two about spending misleading attempts to rename things. The governor recently spent a lot of time and money inexplicably changing the “Arizona Department of Corrections” to the “Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry”, rather than addressing the real reason why Arizona has the fourth highest inclusion rates in the country has.
Democratic state senator Tony Navarrete described the move as “lipstick on a pig”.
Ducey’s dismay over political correctness seems particularly shocking in a week when his Republican counterpart, Rep. Paul Gosar, in Arizona tweet shameful misogyny memes – on International Women’s Day, no less.
Whether the legal residents of Orange County will accept Ducey with his offer to leave the coast and help Arizona red again remains to be seen. But they may need a more convincing argument than trying this incoherent attempt.