In Arizona’s deeply conservative La Paz County, the most pressing issue facing many voters isn’t inflation or illegal immigration. It’s the water being pumped out from under their feet.
A giant farm has turned a remote Arizona desert about 160 miles west of Phoenix as green as a fairway. This is the result of pumping up groundwater to grow alfalfa for dairy cows. Water experts say pumping is sinking poor, rural towns. The ground in parts of La Paz County has dropped more than 5 feet during 30 years of agriculture. There are cracks in the pipes and the foundation of the house. The well is running dry.
“What happens if we take all the water away?” Luis Zabala, 48, who immigrated from Mexico 20 years ago to pick cantaloupe, another water-intensive crop, said: asked, most of which has been replaced by cow hay. He currently works for a water and ice company in Salome, population 700, where he sells gallon jugs of water.
As political battles over abortion take over the Arizona State Capitol, Democrats hope to seize water as a life-or-death election issue, giving them an opportunity to reach out to rural voters who have left the party, however small. There is.
“Water made me attorney general,” said Chris Mays, a first-term Democrat who campaigned for farm crackdowns in western Arizona. “This is exactly the kind of problem that can bring back parts of rural America.”
A summer of record heat and drought has left many Arizonans questioning whether the state has enough water to sustain its farms and booming cities.
A poll conducted last month by Phoenix polling firm Noble Predictive Insights found that 60% of voters believe the state is running out of water.
Still, Democrats face doubt in places like La Paz County, a patchwork of emerald farm valleys and scorched mountains. Mild winters draw retirees and wanderers in their RVs and vanlife.
For years, the populist “Pinto Democrats,” named after a colorful horse breed, survived like a hostile desert cactus in rural Arizona. They supported gun rights, defense and infrastructure projects, and funneled federal money to local communities, said Tom Zellner, author of Rim to River, a chronicle of Arizona history and politics. Stated. In 1996, La Paz narrowly supported Bill Clinton’s re-election, while Maricopa, Arizona’s largest urban county, supported his Republican opponent.
But today, La Paz, population 17,000, reflects much of the transformation of rural America into bedrock MAGAland, accelerated by former President Donald J. Trump’s appeal to disaffected white voters. Snowbirds playing pool at Cactus Bar wear “Let’s Go Brandon” T-shirts mocking President Biden, and Trump flags fly from off-road desert buggies roaring through the mountains. .
According to the Pew Research Center, Trump gained an edge over Democrats in rural areas in 2020, winning 65% of the local vote (up from 59% in 2016). La Paz County turned even redder. Trump won La Paz by 40 points in 2020, despite denying there was a drought in California and proposing deep budget cuts to the federal agency that oversees major water projects in the West. . Some Trump voters scoffed at the idea that Democrats’ water projects were safe. If they are aggressive, they may reconsider their politics.
“That’s not true,” says Jim Downing, an engineer who works on farms in the area. He accused Democrats and the media of fabricating the water crisis for “purely political” reasons, and said large farms were being demonized for exploiting legally available resources.
Nevertheless, one afternoon in April, he joined a crowd of about 150 people gathered at the local library in Wenden, a rural town in La Paz, to hear Mays talk about water. Turnout was much higher than dozens of local officials had expected.
Mr. Mays is Visiting the site of Arizona’s water crisis. She has held packed meetings in rural areas where groundwater pumping by large dairy farms has caused cracks in the ground and where people’s 400-foot-deep wells are drying up.
She and other Democrats are discussing ways to use money from President Biden’s Inflation Control Act and bipartisan infrastructure bill to fund drought relief projects and lay new pipes. “You have been ignored for too long,” she told the crowd. “Consider the fact that I’m here and that I agree with you.”
He noted that shortly after taking office last year, he and first-term Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs pursued a Saudi-owned farm in La Paz County. Critics argued that the Fondomonte farm was pumping almost unlimited amounts of water onto land it rented cheaply from the state to grow alfalfa for export to the Middle East.
Ms. Hobbs terminated the lease on state-owned land in Fondmonte. The company is attractive. Fondomonte said in a statement that it continues to farm other properties and employs “innovative methods to reduce water consumption.” The company said it is the third-largest private employer in the county and generates $145 million annually in economic activity for the state.
Mays told the crowd in Wenden that he was considering filing a lawsuit to stop large-scale farms. She argued that erosion, road damage, lowered water tables and other damage caused by megafarms could violate Arizona’s nuisance abatement laws.
County Supervisor Holly Irwin, who describes herself as a “loyal Republican,” said La Paz received no help under Arizona’s previous Republican-led administration.
“I felt relieved,” she said. “We have a governor who is listening to us and paying attention to the water.”
Several people at the town hall said they hate big farms but reserved their real anger for Phoenix and other fast-growing cities. As drought and climate change threaten Colorado River supplies, cities are looking for new sources of water.
Phoenix once owned land in La Paz, but officials sold it all and said it no longer has water rights in the area. But Buckeye Creek and Queen Creek outside Phoenix each spend millions of dollars buying water from private landowners in rural Arizona to help grow.
Mays said her office has sided with La Paz and other western Arizona counties that have filed lawsuits seeking to block the transfer of water from farms along the Colorado River to Queen Creek.
Rob McDermott, who runs a mobile home park that serves snowbirds, said Arizona’s water crisis has become the biggest problem since a 600-foot well ran dry two years ago. He spent $120,000 to dig even deeper.He said he supports the efforts of Democratic officials. Production on large farms is declining, and Ms. Mayes has suggested a temporary halt to drilling new deep wells.
“We have to slow down,” he said.
But he is also concerned about illegal immigration and fentanyl being smuggled north through Arizona, and said he is likely to vote for Trump this November.
Other residents said pretty much the same thing. Guillermo Palma, 51, a former teacher and school maintenance worker, came to La Paz with his family from Mexico City 40 years ago. He grew up cutting weeds in what was then a cotton field, then bought a house and raised his family. The water crisis threatens everything, he said.
“If they run out of it, this town will dry up,” he said. “We will lose everything.”
He said he agrees with Mayes “100 percent” on groundwater and has made maintaining the county’s infrastructure a top priority, but said he will almost certainly vote for Trump this year. “I’m not a Biden guy,” he said.
The Arizona Democratic Party said it is trying to win back rural voters this year by holding town halls to discuss water, local jobs and other issues. But several left-leaning voters around La Paz County said they were hesitant to even admit they voted Democratic after Trump’s 2016 victory.
Gloria Ramirez, 75, whose parents immigrated to Wenden from the Mexican state of Chihuahua in the 1960s to work in the fields, said she worries about the town’s future because of low groundwater levels.
“My house is lower down,” she said. “The ground is cracking.”
A Democrat, she plans to attend meetings with Mays and her conservative neighbors and vote in November. But like many voters, she said, her political climate has become so toxic that she ignores election news. She even avoids discussing water politics, Trump, and Biden on the street.
Instead, she prefers to make peace sign art by stringing glass and beads, and spends her weekends camping in the mountains where green alfalfa fields end and desert reclaims the land.
