Even among Arizonans, McCain’s hold loosens

PHOENIX —  Gary Godsey liked all that “Straight Talk Express” stuff from John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign, liked that he seemed to make up his own mind on issues and not bend with the poll-driven winds. But these days, Godsey is less sure.

The same straight-talking, no-nonsense traits that Godsey once admired in the Vietnam War hero have morphed, in his mind, into intransigence. It’s a fine line, Godsey acknowledges, but a line nonetheless, and it is evidence of how McCain’s national political troubles have begun seeping into his support at home in Arizona’s parched landscape.

“I think he’s losing who he really is,” said Godsey, 64, a retiree from San Diego who lives in a new subdivision in Tolleson, Ariz., just outside Phoenix. Godsey said he voted for McCain, the Republican incumbent, in the state’s 2004 Senate race.

“He doesn’t come across like he used to. He’s too much like a control freak: ‘My way is the right way.’ He’s not going to bend,” Godsey said last week as he tucked away groceries in his tract house at the desert’s edge.

No one is ready to declare McCain vulnerable in Arizona -- he won 76.7% of the vote in 2004 and doesn’t face reelection until 2010 -- but, for the first time in a long time, political analysts and watchers say they see signs of weakness.

The cause is the same force weighing down McCain nationally: The war in Iraq is just as unpopular in Arizona as elsewhere, and it has cost McCain support among independents, the state’s fastest-growing block of voters.

At the same time, McCain’s immigration reform proposal has alienated Arizona conservatives, who believe the senator supports amnesty for undocumented immigrants already in the United States -- a top issue here, where every year more than 100 people die trying to cross Arizona’s deserts from Mexico.

“It’s kind of like the dike is broken” for McCain’s support, said Earl de Berg, a Phoenix pollster and analyst. “He was the most well-regarded politician in Arizona for a long time because of his national image. But some people who were not really all that enthusiastic are beginning to cut loose.... Anti-immigration people are going so far as to call him a traitor. That’s pretty tough language to level against a war hero.”

So far, De Berg said, the slippage has been measured only in anecdotes and an increase in critical letters to the editor in local papers.

He plans to poll Arizonans next month on McCain, including hypothetical election matchups with state political figures such as Democratic Gov. Janet Napolitano, whom Democrats and Republicans alike credit with turning around the state’s economy. (She won reelection in 2006 with 62% of the vote over token opposition.)

Local Republicans’ willingness to look elsewhere can also be counted in dollars. McCain’s presidential campaign has raised nearly $1.9 million from Arizonans, more than all the other Republican candidates’ combined. Yet former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has raised just over $1 million here.

A growing ambivalence about McCain emerged in conversations with Arizona voters last week. Loyalists, such as Army veteran Paul Wilson, 43, say that if McCain were forced out of the presidential race, he would still win reelection to the Senate.

“As a senator, he’s not necessarily affected by how he is doing” in the presidential race, Wilson said as he stretched before a 2.4-mile hike up 1,264-foot Camelback Mountain. “I would like to think that he’d win.”

Others who once supported McCain have drifted away.

“I just e-mailed him to tell him how disappointed I am in his immigration policy,” said Tracy Farrell, 48, a Republican who voted for McCain in 2004 but said she could not foresee voting for him again. “Clearly, he’s not listening.... I don’t think he represents his constituency.”

Farrell, a kindergarten teacher, says the rawness of emotions over the war and immigration reform have also brought McCain’s occasionally prickly personality to the fore.

“I admire a person who sticks to principles, but you have an obligation, when you set out ideals, to communicate those,” Farrell said as she ate lunch beneath a water-mister in a vain attempt to escape the 115-degree heat on the patio of Phoenix’s Esplanade shopping complex. “He has never articulated why he is for the immigration reforms. He just says, ‘Because that’s the way it is.’ He’s defensive rather than explaining.”

The break with voters like Farrell illuminates how McCain has cornered himself. His political persona is defined by the perception that he is a man of resolute positions. Yet polls have shown that the electorate -- which initially supported the war in Iraq and now opposes it -- changes its mind on issues. A candidate who changes positions, however, invites accusations of flip-flopping for political gain.

McCain faces the added pressure of being two political figures at once: a local politician holding a Senate seat and a player on the national stage. And in a state whose population has nearly doubled since McCain won his first Senate election in 1986, McCain is becoming known more in Arizona by his national reputation.

As his political star falls nationally, it could further erode confidence in him at home.

Voters, said Phoenix Democratic strategist Rick DeGraw, “carry in with them a national understanding of who he is. He’s going to be the only political name they know, and it’s not like the vast majority of voters do in-depth research on what these folks stand for.”

The growth of Arizona’s voting population is startling, and has been mostly among independents. Since 1986, Republican rolls have increased 40% to 1,019,333, outpacing Democrats’, whose numbers rose 25% to 856,000. But the number of independents has more than tripled, to 712,765 as of April 1 from 182,275 in 1986; they account for 27% of voters, up from 11% of the electorate in 1986.

Even some native Arizona Republicans, like Mike Glenn, a sales and service technician, are drifting away.

Glenn, enjoying a midday beer at Nixon’s, a politics-themed bar at the Esplanade, says McCain would be a good president because of his military background. But he said he became suspicious of McCain’s “straight talk” in 2000, when McCain went from attacking Bush in the presidential primary to defending him in the general election.

“The party swayed him,” said Glenn, 36, who at this point favors Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) for president. “He was fighting Bush for the nomination, then he was suddenly for Bush. It was like, ‘Do you really feel that way, John?’ ”

Nixon’s owner, Phil Miglino, says he has watched the state Republican Party’s conservative sharks circling McCain. The senator lost an internal battle last year for control of the local party committee in the district that includes the Esplanade and McCain’s nearby condo. Miglino, 36, who describes himself as a liberal Republican, is puzzled by the intrasquad fighting.

“When Barry Goldwater was running for president, I bet the whole party was behind him,” Miglino said as he stood behind his bar, which was decorated with vintage Goldwater, Nixon and Reagan political posters. “The chance of having a president from your own state -- how do you not see the value in that?”

But, he said, the erosion extends far beyond conservatives: “The political people I talk to would really like to see John McCain as president of the United States, but the political game of getting there -- maybe it’s just not there.”

McCain would be a sure bet for reelection to the Senate even if his presidential campaign completely collapses, Miglino said.

But what if, he is asked, Napolitano decided to run?

“Ooooh ... Napolitano,” Miglino said, his eyes widening and his confidence in McCain narrowing. “Maybe.”

scott.martelle@latimes.com