Arizona hasn’t produced many competitive elections lately, but it retains a knack for crystallizing the most volatile fault lines in American politics.
In 2010, Republican Gov. Jan Brewer’s signing of the stringent anti-immigration measure known as SB 1070 dramatized the colliding worldviews of a Democratic coalition centered on younger minorities and a GOP coalition revolving around older whites—what I’ve called the clash between the brown and the gray.
Now the firestorm over SB 1062, the legislation that would have made it easier to deny service to gays, has highlighted the strain within the Republican coalition between managers and populists: economically focused business interests, and religious conservatives and tea-party activists most energized by social issues and immigration. CONT.
Ron Brownstein, National Journal