The Arizona primary elections will be interesting, at least for Republicans. Every incumbent on the ballot, including long time favorite John McCain should be concerned. The right is generating a powerful backlash against those in, or who support, the Obama administration. There is also a strong undercurrent of dissatisfaction with Republicans who have been ineffective in Washington, often because they were willing to “reach across the aisle” on issues on which the grass root constituency are not willing to compromise.

On the other hand the general election will likely be very kind to Republicans who survive the primary. Some of the Democrats have wisely chosen to stay in the background on the immigration issue, trying not to raise the ire of their base liberal voters, nor offend the large Independent swing voters, without whom most cannot be elected. There are just under 1 million Democrats, about 1.1 million Republicans, and about 0.8 million Independents in Arizona. Polls are showing that of Hispanic voters (approximately 250,000) only about 20% support the Republican position of getting tough on illegal immigration and securing the border. That means the Democrats will retain 80% of their traditionally Democrat Hispanic votes; but it is still approximately a five or ten percent reduction in support. The real danger to Democrats comes from the much larger change in the critical Independent voters, who are shown in polls as leaning conservative by about 60%. The remaining parties, such as Green, and Libertarian, generally have little effect on the outcome of elections in Arizona because their numbers are few. Greens have around 4,000 votes and lacking a candidate will vote democrat, and Libertarians, around 20,000, and lacking a candidate will likely vote Republican.

Registered Republicans are much more activated than ever so almost all of them will vote for the Republican candidates. In a state-wide election, all they need from Independents, Libertarians, and Democrats is a total of 379, 000 votes. Polls also show that there are many disaffected Democrats, upset with immigration, upset with Democrats like Grijalva, and upset with Obama and the behavior of the current congress, so if the Democrat party runs its slate of incumbents, they may see significant loss of support from within their own party. Even without such defections at the poll, the Democrats must win at least 479,000 votes from other parties; this now seems like an impossible number with the current state of the total voter opinion.

So as John Q. Liberal looks at this, he asks the question, “How did this calamity happen?” It happened because the vast majority of Americans do not support the liberal platform of the Democrats, they didn’t even support it when Obama was elected, but they were so enraged at politics in general. This especially included the Republicans and the Bush administration for behaving like Democrats, for not making the changes in government that could have been made during the first Bush administration, for participating in the social engineering that led up to the subprime collapse, and for dumping billions into bail-outs. Many conservatives stayed away from the polls or voted for third party candidates. Independents, voted for “change”, even if they didn’t put much stock in the “hope” part of the slogan, because they were sick of the status quo and McCain was seen as status quo. On the other hand, the left, and the people who voted by race, overwhelmingly supported Obama. Those who voted by race were primarily three groups, Africa-Americans who voted about 90% for Obama, uninformed students and young adults, and progressives from across the political spectrum, all of whom were thrilled with the idea of electing the first black president, no matter what his qualifications were.

The result has been an administration that has ignored or reversed virtually every campaign promise, repeatedly made blunder upon gaffe, quadrupled the national debt, created and prolonged the deepest and longest period of both unemployment and recession in decades, has grossly mishandled international affairs, embarrassed the nation with lack of protocol, and apologized to tyrants and enemies. The disillusioned are turning against the Democrats, the swing votes are swinging right, and the silent majority has been awakened. This year’s elections will be very interesting.