The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Stephen Wolf, Daniel Donner, and Cara Zelaya, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar.
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Leading Off
● Maricopa County, AZ: Joe Biden's victory in Arizona's giant Maricopa County—the fourth-largest in the nation—brought a 72-year streak to an end by making him the first Democratic candidate for president to carry the county since Harry Truman. But rather than figure out why their stronghold collapsed and try to fix it, Republicans in the legislature have responded with a plan to crack Maricopa into four separate counties, packing voters of color into a safely blue rump county less than two-fifths the size of the current one and creating three red counties with white majorities.
- Republicans rightly fear losing their grip on Maricopa's county government. In 2020, the GOP only narrowly retained its 4-1 advantage on county's Board of Supervisors. Given intense Republican infighting and the country's leftward trend, Democrats have a strong shot at flipping the board next year.
- Bigger is actually better. Republicans claim they're driven by good-government motivations, but Maricopa makes sense as-is, since it includes all of Phoenix and the vast majority of its suburbs. Contrast the nightmare in the similarly sized Atlanta metro area, which is spread across 29 counties and suffers brutal traffic congestion as a direct result of its extreme balkanization.
- The plan is a mess—literally. The text of the legislation describes the boundaries of the proposed new counties, but it's replete with errors. (Sample weirdness: "South on the northwestern point where Gila County to the point where such line intersects"—say what?) Our map of the proposal, therefore, reflects our best guesses, but any errors, well, belong to the bill's sponsors.
Republicans have a plan for enacting their proposal despite near-certain opposition from Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs. Read more about the proposal's prospects, and check out our map.
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