With Abortion and the Border, Arizona Becomes a 2024 Political Hothouse
The New York Times
A battle over abortion bans and criminal charges against allies of former President Donald J. Trump continue to raise the state’s election-year profile.
To see the battle lines over Arizona’s political future, head to a patch of dirt along the Carefree Highway on the edge of Phoenix, where the state’s big ambitions and bitter grievances are separated by a wire fence.
On one side, a silvery new microchip factory is sprouting from the desert, part of a $50 billion technology investment by the Biden administration expected to create tens of thousands of jobs and make Arizona a new tech powerhouse. New hires from across the country and abroad are snapping up just-built Spanish-tiled houses nearby, and schools are already adding semiconductor trainings.
But on the other side of the fence, roadside vendors are doing brisk business opposing President Biden. Each morning, they hoist Confederate flags and lay out tables of Trump hats and crude banners deriding Mr. Biden. “I don’t give him credit for anything,” said Mike Conley, 73, a transplant from California who sells ammunition from the bed of his pickup.
Arizona feels like a place where nearly all of 2024’s pivotal political clashes are converging. It is a border state bristling with active fault lines on abortion, inflation, immigration and election conspiracies, where vast demographic changes have shifted Arizona from reliably Republican and seldom contested in national politics to a desert hothouse. Everything is up for grabs.
“The word chaos certainly comes to mind right now — on all fronts,” said former Gov. Fife Symington, a Republican who served in the 1990s. “The in-migration, the unparalleled growth has changed so many dynamics. It’s a totally transformed state.”
At the State Capitol, anti-abortion conservatives and abortion-rights supporters have spent weeks locked in a raw struggle over scrapping an 1864 abortion ban that was upheld and revived by the state’s Supreme Court.
President Trump’s decision not to weigh in before the deadline means both John Cornyn and Ken Paxton remain on the ballot, extending their costly and increasingly personal battle into a May runoff.
The officer, whom police did not identify but who works at Gracie Mansion and City Hall, is now under investigation. The man who was shot, a 30-year-old, is in critical condition.
New York City has been representing former Mayor Eric Adams in a civil lawsuit concerning an alleged sexual assault in the 1990s.
The purported sighting in March 2006, covered by a local TV news station, made a lasting impression on the internet — and on Mobile, Ala.
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On Tuesday, Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi is looking to take a major step toward becoming only the second Indian American elected to the Senate.
Harvard is the White House’s biggest target, but professors all over the country have been censoring themselves, avoiding provocative topics and rewriting grants.
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As the conflict with Iran expands and intensifies, President Trump’s options — to fight on, or to move toward declaring victory and pulling back — both carry deeply problematic consequences.
Where Washington, Idaho and Oregon meet, elk are straying from public to private lands, causing conflict and concern. If the Trump administration opens national forests further, it could get worse.