Not the person you were responding to, but - uh - hello? This is tucson.social and last I checked Arizona is one of the aforementioned swing states.
I can tell you that his campaign is more effective here for this move. It might not be completely convincing for those center and center-right, but it will be a point in a "for" column - hopefully for enough people to matter.
Arizona is primarily made up of registered Republicans, then Independents, then Democrats source. It's the Republicans who only need to "turn out the base".
There is something to note, however. Looking only at recent registration data, it's Independents leading and by a staggeringly wide margin.
- 350,768 new registrations in just April. For no party in particular.
- Democrats got 219,182, a distant but respectable second.
- Republicans were right behind that fetching 214,957 registrations.
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Appealing to the left isn't the winning strategy. Appealing to the independent vote in Arizona is - and hopefully picking up just a couple %'s of the moderate Republican votes in the process. Sure, some of those independents might be disaffected democrats who want to distance themselves from Biden, but I'd bet that's a pretty small portion of independents. Generally speaking, those that would pass on the Biden vote would likely register as green party, or "no labels", or something equally communicative of part of their identity. True independents would be the ambivalent, the "both siders", the "enlightened centrists", and many others - usually far more persuadable than the ideological hard-liners. Compared to Trump, who would likely still get most of his voters from the Republican base who, in their pride, would be emboldened to register as Republican over "no party"/Independent. Sure, he might bring over some libertarians, "no-labels" folks, but I think he's largely burned the bridge with the electorate in a much more visceral way - and wouldn't garner much of the Independent vote outside of that.
Further, I'll add that we're different here at tucson.social - we strive to be a reflection of our local community, and I make a point of going out and talking to real people, in real places about all sorts of things as well as tucson.social itself. And wouldn't ya know it? There's a lot of people who have weird combinations of beliefs that don't fit what the internet would have you believe. Even here in bright blue Tucson/Pima County.
Here's the changes:
My thoughts: Largely performative and only slightly moves the needle right all things considered. You'd think with all the shrieking that this was back to family separations and putting people in cages or something.