Morning. In today’s opinions newsletter : Why Democrats lost, plus GCU’s protracted beef with the feds and that marijuana smell near Interstate 10.
Many Democrats had convinced themselves before the election that this was their year.
It’s telling that while Republicans didn’t even plan election results parties, Democrats in Phoenix and Tucson soldiered on with the same old bashes that they always do.
But this wasn’t their year. At all.
Democratic strategist Matt Grodsky offers a frank post-mortem on what went wrong and what Democrats must do to fix it.
“2024’s results were not an aberration,” he writes. “This was years in the making. People left us, and too few who stayed were motivated enough to vote.”
No kidding. Turnout in red Yavapai County, for example, was a whopping 87% — roughly the same as it was in 2020. But in far bluer Yuma County, it was a paltry 48% — down from 68% four years ago.
You can’t win with numbers like that.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Time for a Democratic reset