Just divide blue and red neighborhoods in 1/2 and republicans win. Democrats would do the same if they had the power, but they don't, so it's sad on em'.
INVESTIGATION
Will Arizona's relentless Republican gerrymander decide the 2024 presidential election?
Republicans have worked long and hard to lock down a majority — and seize power over the state's electors
By David Daley Published December 4, 2021 12:00PM (EST)
 Supporters of President Donald Trump demonstrate at a ‘Stop the Steal’ rally in front of the State Capitol on November 7, 2020 in Phoenix, Arizona. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)
The intersection of South Gilbert and East Warner roads in Gilbert, Arizona, looks like many other places in suburban America. A Shell station, a Jersey Mike's franchise and a car wash that has seen better days stand to the east. Loews and Buffalo Wild Wings hold down the western edge. You'd never guess that this could-be-anywhere crossing is not just crucial to the redistricting wars that will remap America's political landscape heading into the 2022 midterm elections, but that it might determine the future of American democracy.
Gilbert Road straddles the American divide. In Phoenix's East Valley, it's the demarcation between rapidly diversifying blue Arizona and the similarly booming conservative exurbs. On one side, young professionals, tech workers and new brew pubs are rushing into faux-urban townhouses in newly bustling and gentrifying Chandler. Across the way in Gilbert sit megachurches the size of several city blocks, Black Rifle coffee shops and $700,000 Spanish-style homes in glimmering gated developments invariably named some variety of Estate, Ranch or Vineyard.
On election night, journalist Garrett Archer — the Twitter-famous data analyst for the NBC affiliate in Phoenix, who knows these precincts as intimately as Steve Kornacki knows counties across swing states — marveled at the way Gilbert Road marked the place where Maricopa County transitioned from red to blue. He almost couldn't believe how precisely it divided Biden supporters and Trump backers in this rapidly evolving state where 10,457 votes gave Biden the nation's narrowest margin of victory anywhere in the nation.
Perhaps no one should have been surprised. Every Thursday evening from July 2020 through the election, flag-waving Trump supporters in MAGA wear and Back the Blue garb took over the eastern corners for massive rallies. Black Lives Matter protesters soon claimed the opposite sides. Proud Boys roamed and chants of "Free Kyle" went up from the Trump side, referring of course to Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager who was recently acquitted on murder charges after shooting three protesters at a Wisconsin rally against police violence. When violence broke out at a Gilbert Road rally in August, and the threat of something more serious than hurled bottles escalated, wary police officers installed traffic barriers between the two sides — both of whom often came armed, sometimes with AR-15s.
Yet this intersection represents even more than Arizona's cultural and political divide. It marks the actual boundary between Arizona's 12th and 17th state legislative districts. The 17th, solidly Republican a decade ago, has rapidly shifted blue, and may now be the state's most competitive district, represented by one Democrat and one Republican in the state House of Representatives. The top three candidates for two House seats were separated by just 1,700 votes. Republicans narrowly held the state Senate seat here in November, a costly battle that attracted nearly $2 million in outside spending alone. The 12th, meanwhile, is so red that Democrats tend not to bother even fielding candidates.
RELATED: GOP already has enough safe seats — through redistricting alone — to win back House in '22
Now this line is about to move. The consequences could be tectonic and will reverberate far beyond this intersection. Manipulate red neighborhoods in district 12 an avenue or two east, attach pieces of rural southeastern districts to pick up population, carefully slice and dice Chandler's creative-class newcomers, and the GOP could build a wall that holds back changing demographics. Biden's margin here was slim, but Arizona's state legislature is even closer. Republicans hold a 31-29 edge in Arizona's state House and a 16-14 advantage in the state Senate. That legislature, meanwhile, has been among the nation's most aggressive on new voting restrictions. It has pioneered the partisan "audits" of the 2020 election, inspired by the Big Lie of election fraud. It includes Republican lawmakers who have introduced legislation that would give the state legislature the power to award presidential electors.
If one seat here in LD 17 shifted from red to blue, those efforts would likely end. If Republicans hang on, they could enact even more advantageous laws before the 2024 election, perhaps helping tip the state red again, or if it remains blue, launching a constitutional crisis by replacing electors or sending a competing slate to the Capitol for Jan. 6, 2025.
A single line, shifted by just an avenue, would change political power nationwide. Arizona Republicans have worked tirelessly, sneakily and quite effectively to ensure that they will have the power to determine where this line goes.
* * *
"We are in Trumpland now. We are not winning here," says Ajlan Kurdoglu, as we wind down South Val Vista Road in Gilbert and pass yet another Black Rifle Coffee on the way back toward Gilbert Road and the district line. My tour guide knows these streets better than almost anyone. As the Democratic candidate for state senate in LD 17, he's spent hundreds of hours doorknocking and barnstorming nearby neighborhoods.
"Throw these Republicans into my district and you would make it impossible to win. When you're right on the edge of competitiveness," he explains, "and you move just these couple precincts? This district would be unwinnable."
Kurdoglu is spending this steamy Saturday in late July giving me a tour of these lines and all the adjacent avenues, narrating how the politics and demographics change block to block. If you need an example of how a single election matters, the Republican who defeated him, Sen. J.D. Mesnard, has spent his day at Donald Trump's rally 35 minutes away in Phoenix, being praised by name by the former president. Trump thanked GOP lawmakers for their "great job" and "tremendous courage" in questioning the state's presidential election results with a sham audit, despite the state's results having been certified by Arizona's election officials as accurate.
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