Republican Women for Kerry Wants Your Support
Oct. 2, 2004 | PHOENIX, Ariz. -- Judith Allen, longtime Arizonan and lifelong Republican, says her choice is clear. She is voting for John Kerry on Nov. 2 and says there are plenty more where she came from.
Allen is not a lone voice, crying in the wilderness. She currently serves as a volunteer coordinator for the group Republicans for Kerry, which believes in "putting aside partisan politics to do what is right for America." In spite of recent polls to the contrary, Allen says her fellow Republicans, turned off by the Bush administration's sharp turn to the right, are defecting in droves to the other side. If what these Arizonans want is any indication, Bush may well be in trouble. Since Arizona earned statehood in 1912, no Republican has been elected president without carrying the state.
Allen is also part of a brewing revolution of Republican women called the WISH List (Women in the Senate and House), a Washington-based organization committed to electing moderate, pro-choice Republican women to public office. WISH raises about $1 million a year to elect candidates and boasts a 75 percent success rate for the 1,400-plus candidates it has supported since 1992.
In the presidential election, says WISH national board member Deborah Carstens, the group stands firmly behind the Bush-Cheney campaign. Behind the official facade, though, is a different picture. "I've met and talked with numerous Republicans since I've been in this march for John Kerry," says Allen, now a senior adviser to Arizona's Kerry-Edwards campaign. "They have all echoed to me, 'I will vote for Kerry.'"
Allen, who served for 11 years as a clerk in Maricopa County's court system, says she was inspired to work for Kerry because she got tired of yelling at Bush on TV. She says that of the more than 700 cross-over Republicans she's spoken to in Arizona, many remain active in the GOP and reluctant to discuss their support for Kerry. Two WISH women corroborate this with Salon. When asked if they plan to vote, they say yes, then add emphatically, "but not for Bush," who won Arizona by just 6 percent in 2000.
Still, it's going to be an uphill battle for Kerry. Arizona is one of those pesky "purple" states. It has a Republican-leaning, albeit largely independent electorate that has been known to swing toward unpredictable places. Bill Clinton was the first Democrat to win Arizona since Harry S. Truman in 1948, and the GOP has a 120,000-voter advantage in party registration over the Democrats. Yet Arizona has a pool of about 600,000 registered Independents.
Although it is traditionally conservative, Arizona boasts a fiercely independent and occasionally progressive streak. It's the state that produced Barry Goldwater, the far right-winger who morphed into a maverick conservative, as well as the poster child for political independence, John McCain. In 1998, voters elected the "Fabulous Five," the country's first all-female line of succession: governor, secretary of state, attorney general, treasurer and superintendent of public instruction. These days, with its constant influx of new residents and Phoenix's recent designation as the country's fifth-largest city, Arizona's political landscape still is tough to categorize. But the last gubernatorial election signaled what many consider to be a powerful shift.
In 2002, the Republican Party pitted a far-right, pro-life conservative, Matt Salmon, against a moderate, pro-choice Democrat named Janet Napolitano. Napolitano, who was tough on crime and favored the death penalty while serving as the state's attorney general, won by only 1 percent or 11,819 votes to become the state's first elected Democratic governor in 20 years.
Scores of WISH women, it was learned after the election, had voted for Napolitano. In fact, some of them referred to themselves, unofficially, as "Republican Women for Janet," in a show of solidarity against the state's conservative Republican Party leadership. To many on the right, the women were defectors -- they have been both credited and criticized for helping Napolitano win the election, depending on which side of the aisle you're talking to -- but Gov. Napolitano calls them "rational deciders."
Bob Fannin, chairman of the state's Republican Party, doesn't buy it. "I just don't know whether that really happened," Fannin says. "I've heard the same stories. But I don't know how many women belonged to the WISH List." He says he doesn't know who did and who didn't vote for Napolitano.
Still, party hopping might become commonplace if the right wing doesn't start to make a move toward the center. Some WISH women, like Allen, are sparking a revolution, while others are trying to work from within to change their party. This conflict was clear at the group's third anniversary luncheon last summer at the Hilton Scottsdale Resort, when relatively few of the free "W Stands for Women" pins that were handed out were worn.
State Sen. Linda Binder, a Republican from Lake Havasu City and a WISH List member and candidate, sees a clear distinction between Bush and Kerry that's in line with WISH's sensibility. "I think Kerry is much more moderate [than Bush]," she says. "I don't think he's a liberal. I think that he understands about trying to govern from the middle. To me that's what you have to do." |
