A Democrat and a Republican Just Decided Their State Mattered More Than Their Parties

In Arizona, Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs picked a former Republican as her running mate. Great news for the pro-democracy coalition.

Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs and her Lt. Governor running mate John Giles.

Hey everyone, happy Sunday. Are you ready for some good news?

For a lot of years now, we’ve been told that the lines between us are permanent. That you are a Republican or a Democrat, red or blue, one tribe or the other, and that the space in the middle where people used to actually solve problems has been paved over for good. Most days, the news gives you every reason to believe it.

But then, this week something happened in Arizona, and you remember it doesn’t have to be that way.

Governor Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, named her running mate for November. She picked John Giles, who spent eleven years as the Republican mayor of Mesa, the third-largest city in the state. A lifelong Republican who left the party because, in his words, extremists shouldn’t stand in the way of getting things done. For the first time in Arizona’s history, voters will elect a governor and lieutenant governor on the same ticket, and Hobbs decided the first thing she wanted in a partner was somebody who put the state ahead of the party. So she reached across the aisle and found one.

To be perfectly honest, Hobbs’ decision really hit home for me.

I spent my whole life as a Republican. Twelve years in Congress with an R next to my name. Walking away from it was the hardest professional decision of my life. It cost me friendships, a career, and a place in a movement I’d given years to. I did it because I couldn’t look my son in the eye someday and tell him I stayed silent when it counted.

So when I see a guy like John Giles do a version of the same thing, I feel it in my gut. He didn’t leave the Republican Party because he suddenly became a liberal. He left because the party left people like him. And instead of going quiet, instead of just fading into retirement and letting someone else carry the weight, he’s putting his name on a ballot next to a Democrat and saying that his state matters more than his tribe. That takes something. I know exactly what it takes, because I’ve stood roughly where he’s standing.

Here’s why this is bigger than one race in one state.

The fight we’re in right now is not, at its heart, a fight between the left and the right. It never was. It’s a fight between people who believe in democracy and people who have decided democracy is only good when they win. And the only way you win a fight like that is with a coalition broad enough to hold people who disagree about plenty but agree on the thing that matters most. You need the progressive and the moderate. You need the lifelong Democrat and the disillusioned Republican. You need the independent who’s tired of all of it. You need people willing to stand next to someone they’d have argued with a decade ago, because the alternative is worse than any argument.

Katie Hobbs understands that. Alongside the Giles announcement, she rolled out something she’s calling the Arizona Over Party coalition, more than fifty Republicans and independents backing her over the Trump-aligned nominee. And Giles agreeing to be the face of it, a Mormon Republican in a state where that means something real, is her telling conservative-leaning Arizonans a simple thing. There’s room for you here. You don’t have to agree with everything to agree on this.

I don’t know how the Arizona race turns out. It’s going to be a fight. Hobbs is considered one of the most vulnerable governors in the country, and her opponent is a hard-line ally of the president. But the outcome in November is almost separate from the point I’m making today. Whether or not this specific ticket wins, the model it represents is the one that beats Trumpism. Not a narrow, angry, us-versus-them politics that mirrors what we’re fighting against. A generous one. One that assumes the best of people and gives them a door to walk through instead of a wall to run into.

That’s the thing the loudest voices in our politics have forgotten. You do not build a majority by telling half the country they’re the enemy. You build it by making room. By recognizing that the retired Republican mayor and the Democratic governor and the independent who can’t stand either party all have a stake in the same country, and all deserve a place at the same table.

John Giles and I stopped marching in lockstep with our party. But neither of us stopped loving the country those parties are supposed to serve. If anything, our actions made that love clearer, because it stripped away everything except the thing underneath. And what I’ve found, over and over, is that there are a lot more of us out here than the cable shows would have you believe. People who are tired of the fighting for its own sake. People who would take a competent, decent, boring government over a thrilling and cruel one any day of the week.

Two people in Arizona just decided their state mattered more than their parties. It may seem like a small thing. But small things, when enough of them happen at once, are how a country finds its way back. That’s good news. And on a week that gave us plenty of the other kind, I’ll take it.