Joe Arpaio could've ridden into the sunset; instead he's taking a pummeling in Arizona

“They seem to have forgotten me,” Arpaio said as he gazed at all the portraits of President Donald Trump hanging on the walls of his suburban strip-mall office outside Phoenix.

There was a time not long ago when many in Arizona thought Arpaio, an immigration hard-liner who began his law enforcement career in 1954, would remain sheriff of Maricopa County for the rest of his life. Now the 86-year-old is waging one of his final battles, against irrelevance.

Some are writing off the pummeling Arpaio is taking in his Senate campaign as the sad bookend in a career of a man who could have ridden into the sunset after being pardoned by Trump a year ago. (Arpaio had been convicted of criminal contempt for refusing to stop detaining suspected unauthorized immigrants.) Sen. John S. McCain, D-Ariz., who died at age 81 over the weekend, had blasted Trump over the pardon, contending that Arpaio “has shown no remorse for his actions.”

For others here, Arpaio’s ebbing political fortunes, already made clear by his defeat in 2016 in his bid for a seventh term as sheriff, point to colossal changes in the political landscape of Arizona, a longtime Republican bastion.

Prominent conservatives around Arizona are now backing Arpaio’s rivals in the Republican Party, viewing him as far too divisive to win against Democrats in the contest for the seat being vacated by Sen. Jeff Flake, a Republican who clashed with Trump.

At the same time, many independents and newly registered Latino voters are rallying around Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, the moderate Democrat who has emerged as the front-runner in what will be a hotly contested general election. The last time Democrats won the seat in Arizona was 36 years ago.

“The powerlessness Arpaio’s feeling — well, now the shoe’s on the other foot, isn’t it?” said Alejandra Gomez, executive director of the Arizona Center for Empowerment, a group that supports immigrant rights and public education. “Latinos suffered for a long time at his hand, but it turned out to be a call to action.”

Gomez said Arpaio’s marginalization came about after years of activism, beginning when he was still sheriff of Maricopa County, which encompasses Phoenix. Arpaio was first elected in 1992 and enacted policies like reviving chain gangs, erecting a tent city for inmates and introducing tactics that amounted to illegal racial profiling of Latinos.

Arpaio reacted heatedly in a two-hour interview Thursday to some Arizonans’ view that he and Trump, his professed hero, were racists.

“Me? I’m not a racist,” Arpaio said. “Just yesterday I must have had 20 pictures taken with Hispanics from here to Yuma,” he added, referring to stops on the campaign trail.

Still, Arpaio said that he emphatically agreed with Trump’s assertion in 2015 that Mexico sends “rapists” to the United States. “Yeah, we got a lot of rapists from Mexico. When you look up the jails I ran in those days, 18 percent are Hispanic murderers and everything else.”

Some forecasters have long argued that such positioning would provoke mobilization among Latinos who are eligible to vote in Arizona. Still, Republicans have continued to dominate much of the state’s political system, reflecting the headwinds Democrats still face here.

Joseph Garcia, director of the Latino Public Policy Center at Arizona State University, said Latino voter turnout remains relatively low because Latinos often fall into categories that are not likely to vote, including people who are young, poor or who have limited educational attainment.

Meanwhile, only 48 percent of Latinos in Arizona are eligible to vote, compared with 81 percent of the state’s white population, according to the Pew Research Center.

But with 2.1 million Latinos living in Arizona — about a third of the state’s population — voter registration drives are starting to produce results. Trump carried the state in 2016 by only about 91,000 votes, compared with Mitt Romney’s margin of 208,000 votes in 2012.

“In other words, Arpaio doesn’t stand a chance in hell in today’s Arizona,” said Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez, a scholar of border studies. “The guy also has to deal with the same Republicans who voted him out of office in 2016,” he added, referring to the sheriff’s election won by Peter Penzone, a Democrat.

Venomous insults have been lobbed between the Republican campaigns this primary season. Kelli Ward, a hard-right former state senator known for promoting conspiracy theories, is vying with Arpaio for the support of Trump loyalists, while Martha McSally, a former Air Force fighter pilot, remains in the lead.

Some conservatives here were already critical of the controversies around Arpaio, if only because Maricopa County has spent tens of millions of dollars for his legal defense in various lawsuits. Others say his aggressive conservative positioning is out of step at a time when appealing to relatively moderate independents is viewed as important in challenging Democrats, who are growing more forceful in Arizona.

Signaling their own assessment of Arpaio’s chances, Democratic and independent campaign committees have spent more than $2 million opposing McSally, the perceived Republican front-runner in the race, according to The Arizona Republic.

Sinema, running against lawyer and consultant Deedra Abboud on the Democratic side, is well ahead in the polls and already is focusing her attention on the fall campaign.

To appeal to voters in the Republican base who often cast ballots in primaries, all three candidates have sought to promote their support of Trump. McSally has shifted to the right, becoming more hard-line on immigration, but not as hard-line as Arpaio, who has said he wants to deploy the Army to Mexico to combat drug smuggling.

“I think he peaked long ago,” Dan Eberhart, a prominent Republican donor in Arizona, said of Arpaio. “Ward and Arpaio have been in a wrestling match for the far-right vote,” calling the campaigning “unfortunate.” “But their battle clears a path for McSally. At the end of the day, she’s our best chance for keeping the seat.”

Rejecting such assessments, Arpaio steadfastly insisted that he would sail to victory in the primary, dismissing the polls showing him in last place as “stupid.”

“Who cares about polls?” he asked.

While Trump has refrained from endorsing any of the three Republicans in the primary, Arpaio said he remained loyal to the president despite the scandals engulfing the White House. The former sheriff said he would remain by Trump’s side even if the president were forced from office and convicted of crimes.

“You can’t support people just because they’re convicted?” Arpaio asked, while insisting that he still viewed Trump as innocent of any crimes involving his former lawyer, Michael D. Cohen. “No matter what he’s convicted of I’m still going to call it a witch hunt, so of course I’ll stand by him.”

Shifting to a more familiar theme, immigration, Arpaio said he had come up with a solution for the so-called Dreamers, the 700,000 unauthorized immigrants brought to the United States as children: Deport them to their home countries and let them serve as “ambassadors” for the American way of life.

But Gomez, the immigrant-rights activist whose organization is part of a coalition seeking to register 200,000 new voters in Arizona this year, said that Dreamers, and the Arizonans who support them, may have other ideas.

“We’re getting closer to flipping Arizona,” she said. “And we have Joe Arpaio to thank for much of this momentum.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Joe Arpaio could've ridden into the sunset; instead he's taking a pummeling in Arizona

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