06 Election Results

[colin]

One of the issues more relevant to this forum was in the Benson area, where voters were asked to approve re-zoning to allow a new large community there geared toward Tucson commuters.

Cochise voters nix Benson rezoning

And it was rejected.

Also, the land conservation/smart development measure 106 failed, which sucks because it did quite a bit for land use, although 105 also resoundingly failed, which means that another version of 106 will certainly be back next time.

Janet won in a landslide. No surprise.

Kyl won. Not really a surprise.

In District 4, Pastor (D) absolutely slaughtered the challenger.

District 5 went to Mitchell (D), thus further eroding the Phoenix area's Republican control.

District 7 was another landslide to the incumbent Democrat Grijalva.

District 8 went to Gabriel Giffords (D) over Randy Graf . Not really a surprise because he was such an idiot.

107 also failed, which I thought was great. This is one that I actually worked quite a bit on and was hoping it would fail in order to buck the national trend on general anti-gay bigotry and prove that Arizona isn't hateful like other states. The Star still refuses to call it this morning, but they also referred to Arizona Together as "Together Arizona" in the same article.

201 passed, so say good bye to smoking in bars.

And, English is now our official language. I personally saw this as pretty superficial and don't think that it will really change the way things are so much, despite what the hardcore Nativists would prefer.

[MJLO]

Im pretty happy with the election results. I would have liked to see Pederson unseat Kyl. But nonetheless. I am very suprised about the gay marriage amendment going down. I thought Arizona was more conservative than Michigan and two years ago when they put that out it passed by a small margin I would have thought all the mormons and conservatives I see in AZ would have done whatever they could to pass it.

If you all want I can put county by county results up here for AZ. I'll prolly end up doing it for all the western states.

[colin]

Yeah, it even passed in Colorado. I'm not sure how the others were written, but this one wasn't written well and went a little too far in denying all domestic partner benefits (straight or gay) and I think that we were able to get the word out about that. Polls have consistently shown that although a majority of Americans do not support allowing gay marriage, a majority do support allowing civil unions or a similar designation. But people I talked to on the phone (mostly independents) were generally very surprised when they realized that it would ban benefits for unmarried partners and said they wouldn't vote for it. Plus, Len Munsil's Center for Arizona Policy people were too busy supporting his hopeless campaign and didn't concentrate much on this until the end when they received a little extra firepower from out of state, which is obviously too little too late. I think if he had lost the nomination initially, Prop 107 would have passed.

I don't know that this is a Bush backlash so much as the state just going slightly more to the left. I mean, Southern Arizona is now completely blue in the Congress and the state's House delegation is now split between the parties. But since Rumsfeld has now resigned, it's obvious that things are crumbling for that sect. Kinda wild.

Per counties, Pima, Coconino and Santa Cruz all voted for Pederson, Jason Williams (state superintendent) and pro-Prop 106. But this is nothing new as Pima County also went for Kerry in '04.

[MJLO]

What suprised me is that even the traditionally more conservative Maricopa county, voted down the gay marriage ban