Arizona Illustrates the RINO Revenge
By Henry Olsen| November 13th, 2018
Arizona’s Senate race was perhaps the most surprising, and disturbing, midterm result for Republicans and Trump fans. Many struggle to understand how Barry Goldwater’s home state will send a former pink tutu-wearing antiwar activist to Washington. The answer is instructive regarding what Trump Republicanism must do to build a majority.
The biggest reason Martha McSally lost is the same reason Republicans lost control of the House: RINOs. Across the nation, moderate college-educated independents who had frequently backed Republicans in prior elections switched sides. We can see this trend both in the Arizona exit polls and the results reported to date.
Support for Republicans has collapsed since 2012 among college-educated Arizonans when Mitt Romney cruised to a 54-44 win over Barack Obama, crushing him by a 63-36 percent margin among college graduates. This year, while Republican Governor Doug Ducey even more easily won victory by a 56-42 margin, he barely carried college grads with only a 51-46 margin. McSally ran against a much tougher opponent in Kyrsten Sinema and ended up losing college grads by a 52-47 margin. Since college grads cast nearly one-quarter of the state’s votes, that 10-point swing added nearly 2.5 percent to Sinema’s margin. Since her lead is currently below two percent, this was the difference between victory and defeat.
Support for Republicans has also declined since 2012 among the smaller, and more liberal, groups of voters with graduate degrees. In 2012 Romney won them by a 54-42 margin. Ducey got clobbered among them 59-40, and McSally lost by an even larger 62-37 percent margin. They cast 14 percent of the vote, so that extra six-point difference added nearly another one percent to Sinema’s victory margin.
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