PHOENIX — If any place fits the unorthodox political style of John McCain, it is Arizona--the cactus-studded desert frontier where independent-minded voters turn partisan politics upside down and many winning candidates have cross-over appeal.
The demographic mosaic of veterans, retirees, developers and ranchers who have settled here since World War II has made Arizona a sagebrush hybrid that elects governors as diverse as liberal Bruce Babbitt and conservative Evan Mecham. It's a state that was shamed into establishing a Martin Luther King holiday and now has women in the top five elective state offices.
It is here that the veteran Republican senator forged his trademark maverick style and learned to prevail in a place where politics, like the temperature, can run to extremes.
"This is a state of rugged individualists," said Bruce Merrill, an Arizona pollster who has worked for McCain. "They admire what he's done."
Now that McCain is emerging as a major GOP contender for the White House, Merrill believes he is winning support in New Hampshire for some of the same qualities that resonate in Arizona: Voters find him engaging and he campaigns tirelessly, his shoot-from-the-hip independence suits those who view Washington from a distance and his history as a Vietnam prisoner of war is a dramatic tale.
Arizonans have elected McCain five times in the last 17 years--twice to the U.S. House of Representatives and three times to the Senate, including a 1998 landslide that drew nearly 70% of the vote. His political support stretches from the Republican right to a remarkably loyal following in the state's traditionally Democratic Latino community.
So some find it strange that McCain, who has become a potent threat to Republican presidential front-runner George W. Bush in New Hampshire, is in a dead heat with his rival in Arizona just three months before his state's Feb. 22 GOP primary.
In New Hampshire, McCain is a novel upstart. But though he is better known in Arizona, experts say his support from his home state's typically transient voters is actually broad and shallow. About 40% of the state's 4.9 million people lived elsewhere 10 years ago. And since Texas Gov. Bush is treated as the GOP's presumptive nominee, Merrill said, even some of the voters who like McCain choose Bush because he appears more electable.
McCain also loses some votes in Arizona because his well-known temper and independent politics have ruffled Republican leaders in his home state just as they have in Washington.
