A tale of two counties: Part of Arizona, embarrassed by the rest of the state, would like to secede

[The Hitman]

Source: The Economist

OVER his second beer at The Shanty in Tucson, a pub popular among Democrats, Paul Eckerstrom gets to the point. “We don’t like Phoenix,” he says of the state capital in Maricopa County to the north, home to more than half of Arizona’s population. So Mr Eckerstrom, a lawyer and former chairman of the Pima County Democratic Party, has launched the long legal process to secede and form a new state, tentatively called Baja Arizona.

This idea of Baja Arizona is not new. Some trace it back to the Gadsden Purchase of 1854, when America bought from Mexico a strip of land south of the Gila river that was not included in the earlier cession after the Mexican-American war. More recently, the Midwestern snowbirds and others who flooded into Arizona mainly settled in Maricopa, making it politically dominant and distinct.

The differences start with the aesthetic. Middle-class houses in Phoenix tend to have lawns, whereas Tucson’s mostly have desert landscaping, with artful cacti and such. Thomas Volgy, a politics professor at the University of Arizona and former mayor of Tucson, says that Maricopans want “to recreate Michigan”, whereas people in Pima accept that they live in a desert and use water responsibly.

...

In Pima County and neighbouring Santa Cruz, this has led to moderate politics of a slightly Democratic hue, while Maricopa has become a Republican bastion. In the days of the Phoenix-born Barry Goldwater, Maricopa’s conservatism was libertarian. But in recent years, as an ageing white population faces the increasingly brown young, it has turned nativist.

Read more: http://www.economist.com/node/18486323?story_id=18486323&fsrc=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+economist%2Ffull_print_edition+%28The+Economist%3A+Full+print+edition%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

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Can't blame them!

[OffWithTheirHeads]

1. Hey! That's my "drinking liberally" group!

I'll make sure Paul sees this. And hell yeah to Baha Az.

[blindpig]

2. Good luck with the old time ranchers. n/t