Evolving Identity Of Southwest States Affects Election

Timothy Egan, The New York Times, 30 Oct. 2004

DATELINE: ACOMA, N.M., Oct. 29
As the sun sets over the land on Election Day, the American West could become the landscape of victory for the man who will be president in the next four years.

For all the attention that the parties are paying to Sioux City, Iowa, or Dayton, Ohio, the election may well be decided in places like Lake Havasu City, Ariz., where the London Bridge was transplanted to the sands of the Mojave Desert, or here at Acoma, an Indian pueblo that claims to be the oldest continuously inhabited city in the nation.

Heavily urban despite its open spaces, and soon to be more Hispanic, the West is also an unpredictable region in search of a new political identity. The war, terror, climbing health insurance premiums all matter here as elsewhere, but people are more likely to be independents.

As the electoral map dried up in the South for Democrats, they turned to the long-forgotten interior West. But both campaigns have discovered that political brand loyalty is a hard thing to find here.

''I'm a Democrat who voted for George Bush last time, and I'm voting John Kerry this time just because things don't feel right and maybe change is the only way out,'' said Amanda Mordem, a nurse's assistant in Bullhead City, Ariz., a sprawling town at the edge of a county that takes in part of the Grand Canyon and Indian reservations.

Five states -- Oregon, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico, with a total of 36 electoral votes -- are still within reach of either candidate, according to most recent polls.

A tour through these five states this week, when millions of people were well into the thick of early voting, found a big land pulsing with the harsh intimacy of battle in the campaign's closing days.

''You can't keep it down this year -- people are just off the charts for this election,'' said Elizabeth Boyd, who works at the Face to Face Spa in Bend, Ore., where politics has elbowed aside talk of wonder exfoliants and earth-friendly facials.

Former President Bill Clinton plans to be in New Mexico Saturday and Sunday, pitching for its five electoral votes as President Bush's father did on Thursday.

''I've never seen the kind of churning we're seeing right now in the West,'' said Ron Judd, the Western region director for the A.F.L.-C.I.O. ''There is this undercurrent like we had in 1994 when the Congress changed hands, like we're on the verge of something big.''

Oregon's Culture Clash

In Oregon, a state where doctors can prescribe drugs for the terminally ill to kill themselves but drivers cannot pump their own gas, people have been voting for more than a week in the all-mail-in ballot.

Oregon looked like a tossup for much of this year, with an island of Democrats in the Portland metropolitan area surrounded by Republican counties. Some Oregonians believe the state is trending more like Colorado did in the 1990's, full of Republican California exiles. But Democrats are still optimistic. Al Gore eked out a 7,000-vote victory in 2000, but he was hurt by Ralph Nader, who drew 5 percent of the vote. This year Mr. Nader is not on the ballot.

The red and the blue clash in Deschutes County, on the other side of the mountains from Portland. It grew by 54 percent in the 1990's, drawing people who live for cutthroat trout that rise in streams that dance through the high desert.

Clay and Julia Johnston, a pilot and his wife, formerly of Portland, were sipping coffee while filling out their mail-in ballot on a chilly morning. They predicted a victory for President Bush -- at least in this county where the two political cultures of the state collide.

''Wherever there is money, there are Republicans,'' said Mr. Johnston. ''And there is a lot of money here.''

Nevada's Wild Cards


South, in Nevada, money was on the air nonstop, and on the ground, as the campaigns bused people to mobile voting centers.

''Who wants to vote -- this way to the bus,'' said a Bush campaign operative on Tuesday outside the giant Victory Christian Center in a strip mall in Henderson, for much of the last decade the nation's fastest-growing city.

Nevada has only five electoral votes, but they have been fought over as if they were the last undeveloped real estate on the Las Vegas Strip.

A few blocks away, union supporters were getting their talking points and neighborhood maps for a day of ground-pounding. They were told to remind stay-at-home moms of the nuclear waste site planned at Yucca Mountain -- an issue Senator Kerry has been raising.

Paul Sanchez, one of many out-of-state union leaders doing political work in the desert, had a telephone number scrawled on the back of his hand. ''I go into the poor neighborhoods, knock on doors and just tell people to call this number -- someone will come get them and take them to the polls,'' said Mr. Sanchez.

Though Republicans are thought to have a slight edge in Nevada, the wild cards are state ballot measures, in particular a popular one that would raise the minimum wage.

Pocketbook issues are the big concern for Debra Pinkerton, an undecided voter who lives in Searchlight, a wind-raked town at the southern tip of Clark County.

''One of my children works in Vegas, and he makes $11 an hour but has to pay $70 a week for health insurance, which he needs because he and his wife just had a baby,'' said Ms. Pinkerton, who qualifies as pioneer stock in Nevada, with grandparents who moved to the state in the 1930's, when Nevada had barely 90,000 people.

With a booming economy, jobs are not an issue in Nevada. The bare bones of new homes stretch to the desert's edge.

Democrats are counting on a live-and-let-live cultural attitude to counter Republicans like Mary Bolinger, who has already voted, and was walking around Henderson with a button that read: ''I'm a Republican and a Christian. You got a problem with that?''

The problem for Republicans may be that Nevada, like Oregon, is near the bottom in the ranking of states by percentage of churchgoers.

Colorado's Democratic Fling

By contrast, in Colorado the big churches may give Republicans enough of an edge to hold the state after a surprising fling with indecision. The center for Christian conservatives is Colorado Springs, a metropolitan area of nearly a half-million people that exudes a youthful, prosperous, Rocky Mountain optimism. The New Life Church, whose impressive glass-and-concrete compound can be seen for miles, rises at the edge of town.

The electoral math, for Republicans, comes from the big new homes along the Front Range.

''We call them the California middle class,'' said Rob Brendle, associate pastor at New Life, pointing to an expanse of McMansions. ''These neighborhoods are full of evangelicals who came here for a new life.''

Inside the New Life compound, workers were finishing a new church that will seat 7,500 people and people wore buttons that said, ''I voted.'' The headquarters office features pictures of the head pastor, Ted Haggard, with President Bush and Mel Gibson.

Mr. Haggard -- or Pastor Ted, as everyone in the church calls him -- is president of the National Association of Evangelicals, which says it represents 30 million people. He has been to the Oval Office twice since Mr. Bush has been president.

''We've been in regular contact with Karl Rove,'' said Mr. Brendle, referring to the president's chief political adviser. Though the church is officially nonpartisan, opposition to gay marriage and abortion have put it strongly in the Republican camp. To win this election, Mr. Rove has said, Republicans will need to turn out roughly four million evangelicals who did not vote in 2000. Mr. Brendle predicted an enormous Christian right turnout -- at least 75 percent among the 11,000 members of the New Life Church.

''Our people don't need to be bused to the polls and given a sandwich,'' he said.

Democrats say Colorado is changing as the number of Republican-leaning California exiles levels off and Hispanics, who make up 17 percent of the population, gain ground. Also, the older suburbs around Denver have been promising new ground for Democrats.

The burgeoning Hispanic population may be why Mr. Kerry chose Pueblo, in a county in southern Colorado that is nearly 40 percent Hispanic, as the site of his last visit a few days ago. He appeared with the state's Hispanic superstar, Attorney General Ken Salazar, who is in a close race with the Republican candidate, Pete Coors, for the open Senate seat.

Arizona's Hispanic Force

Hispanics could also hold the key to what happens in Arizona, another formerly safe Republican state, which was rated close enough to be competitive in a recent poll by The Arizona Republic; other surveys give Mr. Bush a slight edge. The state is 25 percent Hispanic and has gained 470,000 new registered voters -- and two electoral votes -- since the 2000 campaign.

Though Republicans have a margin of about 100,000 votes in party registration, more than one in five voters in Arizona are independent, a political position where many in the New West park themselves.

The Latino vote is complicated: more conservative on social issues, not prone to high turnout. But no one denies its growing influence. There are 3.6 million Hispanics, or nearly one in four residents, in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada.

The other big vote in Arizona is the elderly, and they are more reliable voters than any other group. In Bullhead City, a fast-growing retirement and recreation community in the middle of the Mojave Desert on the banks of the Colorado River, older people were angry this week over the lack of sufficient flu shots. But they were not holding Mr. Bush responsible.

''I wasn't able to get my flu shot, and I really need it because I've got the emphysema,'' said Barbara Martinez, a retiree in Bullhead City, eating lunch in a medical facility cafeteria. ''But I don't see how you can blame President Bush for that.''

New Mexico's Indian Issues

New Mexico, where Spanish-surnamed families trace their roots back centuries and Indians in Acoma have a direct link to the ancient Anasazi, may be the hardest state for the campaigns to figure out.

Hispanics make up 42 percent of the population -- the highest of any state in the 2000 census -- while non-Hispanic whites are 48 percent. Compared with the national average, New Mexico is poor, and young, and it is growing -- by 20 percent in the last census.

American Indians, who make up 9 percent of the population, are only now being courted. Over the last week, John Kerry's sister was here at Acoma, as was Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton.

Atop the Sky City of Acoma, where people live without electricity on a stone summit nearly 7,000 feet above sea level, some natives said they would not vote, that it meant nothing to them who ran the government in Washington.

But tribal leaders said they wished the campaigns would pay as much attention to their issues as they do to interest groups like dairy farmers in Wisconsin. Marva Toya said she was worried about the possible closing of an Indian hospital an hour away, in Albuquerque.

Darrell Felipe, the Acoma tribal operations manager, said: ''If one candidate would just bring up a single Native American issue, they could get the native vote. But they don't talk about us.''

This year, in the closing hours of the race, the people who live in a town that most historians agree is twice as old as Boston may actually get their wish.