Saban faces uphill battle against Arpaio
by JJ Hensley - Sept. 27, 2008 12:00 AM
The Arizona Republic
Ousting a long-standing incumbent is a daunting, though not impossible, task.

Such is the challenge facing Dan Saban, a former Buckeye police chief who is taking on Joe Arpaio in the election for sheriff of Maricopa County.

In his four terms, Arpaio has become a political icon, crafting and refining his self-proclaimed role as "America's Toughest Sheriff."
Saban, on the other hand, is a relative unknown. The Democratic challenger spends his days running from luncheons to afternoon speeches to small fundraising parties. In between, he is working the phones, drumming up dollars and support.

He is angling for an upset.

But toppling a popular incumbent often requires a lot of money, hard work and even some luck. The underdog needs a message that redefines the issues, a campaign fueled by big advertising dollars and big-time endorsements, and occasionally a scandal that can embroil the competition, recent election history suggests.

Still, even that might not be enough.

"These campaigns heavily favor incumbents - heavily," said Larry Landry, a longtime Valley lobbyist and consultant.


Arpaio's image

In the history of Arizona politics, few have served as long or cultivated careers as colorful as Arpaio's.

The Republican sheriff has enjoyed broad public support in his 16 years in office. He trounces challengers each time he comes up for re-election and draws notoriety and public support for policies such as housing jail inmates in tents and forcing them to work on chain gangs.

Defeating Arpaio will require a mammoth effort from Saban, in part because the sheriff deftly uses the media and his incumbency to political advantage.

He long ago mastered the art of using local and national media to get his message and face before the public, said Kelly McDonald, a political-communication scholar and an assistant professor of communication at Arizona State University.

Such media exposure furthers his image as a lawman willing to take on causes, however unpopular, McDonald said.

Arpaio makes no bones about his office's pursuit of media coverage. "How else can I tell the public what I'm doing?" he said.

McDonald said some of the sheriff's news conferences in recent months have had the air of political ads.

"It's hard to think of them not as political, but he has the prima facie defense that 'I'm just enforcing the laws on the books,' " McDonald said. "There's very little evidence of him actually campaigning."

To overcome Arpaio's well-crafted image, Saban may need to redefine it.


Shaping the debate

Redefining the issue can give an underdog an edge. Look to a recent Arizona ballot-initiative campaign as an example.

When the issue of constitutionally banning same-sex marriage in Arizona first came up in 2006, supporters saw the measure as a shoo-in.

Twenty states had approved similar amendments, and seven other states would go on to join them on Election Day.

Arizona stood alone in defeating the measure.

Proposition 107 opponents reframed the debate, moving the initiative from one that was about protecting heterosexual marriage to one that was about protecting the rights of all Arizonans to have access to health-insurance benefits.

For Saban to win on Nov. 4, his campaign can't only be about Saban's time as Buckeye police chief or immigration or response times in rural areas, McDonald said.

It's got to touch on all those things and point back to the man who is now in charge.

"The incumbency factor is such a strong, strong benefit, and Joe's got that in spades," McDonald said.

"If (Saban is) successful, it's going to be in kind of reshaping the debate and making a referendum on Joe front and center."

The Saban campaign is making an effort. To Saban, the incumbent is no longer "America's Toughest Sheriff" and is among the most cowardly for refusing to debate his challenger. To Saban, Arpaio's office isn't just being media-friendly, it's a media-hungry hype machine that uses the press to keep issues such as immigration in the forefront of voters' minds at the expense of other crime-fighting measures.

"Joe has the strength, the power of incumbency and his record," McDonald said.

"It's a strong asset for him, and Saban has to use that against him."

Saban has focused the debate on topics such as whether the Sheriff's Office provides adequate service to rural communities.

But the challenger has got to find issues that appeal to a broader cross section of voters, McDonald said.

"I think the biggest challenge for him is to be able to make the case that what Joe is doing is bad for Maricopa County, bad management, bad policy," McDonald said. Some Democratic observers say Saban has failed to articulate a message that goes beyond "I'm not Arpaio."

That theme certainly appeals to the 40 percent of voters who cast a ballot for someone other than Arpaio in the 2004 primary, and those were GOP voters.

But in order to win the sheriff's seat, Saban has to find a way to reach out to independents and libertarian-leaning Republicans who care more about fiscal accountability than prisoners in Arpaio's signature pink underwear, experts say.

Saban has released a plan to deploy deputies with the specific goal of serving more warrants in Maricopa County and has discussed another initiative that would dismantle some of the sheriff's executive staff to create more patrol positions.

If Saban wants his message to resonate, he's going to have to appeal to voters on a much larger scale, experts say. And to do that, a candidate needs money. Lots of it.


Money matters

Cash is the catalyst of any successful campaign.

Arpaio has a significant advantage in this race. With about $375,000 in cash on hand at last count, he has about a $350,000 edge over Saban, who has about $25,000.

But Saban is undeterred, saying cash alone won't determine the victor.

"We'll win this campaign with votes, not dollars," Saban said as he spent a Saturday morning calling county residents to drum up support. "We know that's true, so I don't get discouraged."

Arpaio enjoyed a similar funding edge in 2004 when Saban, running then as a Republican, won 44 percent of the GOP vote, a result that gives Saban hope going into the general election as a Democrat this year.

Democrats say Saban will have to continue his grass-roots efforts on a larger scale if he wants to draw more votes.

Saban already has logged about 60,000 miles in the past 18 months.

Last week, he went from a group of young Democrats in Paradise Valley to a meeting of Hispanic business leaders at a Phoenix Mexican restaurant to courting a group of Willow Park homeowners.

"We're going at a cross-section, and that's where the energy is because that's what's happening nationally," Saban said.

Indeed, voters at times do resist messages spread by a well-financed campaign.

In 1994, the Committee for Clean and Balanced Transportation raised more than $1 million in contributions to promote a half-cent-per-dollar sales-tax increase to build freeways and add transit in the Valley.

The group printed fliers but couldn't afford to mail them. Twelve hundred signs were put out the weekend before the election, instead.

The measure failed.

The underdogs played to the public's mistrust of government, a tactic that Gov. Fife Symington aided when he came out against the measure leading up to the election, Landry said.

For Saban, fundraising has proved challenging.

He says some donors are discouraged from giving to his campaign because of what he calls an intimidation factor based on Arpaio's reputation for exacting retribution on those who support the sheriff's political enemies.

Several current and former sheriff's employees contacted for this story who were reassigned after the 2004 election support that assertion, as do a handful of prospective donors who say they declined Saban's requests for cash based on a "fear of Arpaio."

"There's an inherent fear in it, even if its not reality," Saban said. "Clearly, there's a perception of fear."

Arpaio said the 2004 reorganization in the Sheriff's Office had nothing to do with the election. The sheriff points to his own fundraising success as proof.

"I'm sure not intimidating thousands of people to give me thousands of dollars," Arpaio said.

"People give you money because they support you, regardless of your opponent."

Saban also is struggling to line up a host of high-profile endorsements, even while some politicians have publicly criticized Arpaio.

"People who have no fear support me," Saban said. "People who support me are in this for the right reasons. . . . This isn't about winning or losing. It's about challenging a bully. Can we engage enough people to make that happen?"

Phoenix City Councilman Michael Nowakowski is in Saban's corner, along with Gilbert Councilman Dave Crozier and at least a dozen law-enforcement groups.

"Having the approbation of all these law-enforcement agencies that have endorsed him, it's really a sign of the professionals saying, 'This is the guy,' " said Mark Manoil, the county's Democratic Party chairman.


Confidence tested

But some Democratic observers say the ineffective campaign Saban has waged so far has failed to give political leaders confidence that their support won't be wasted.

Of course, nothing can derail a potential political dynasty like a good scandal.

Sen. George Allen, while running in 2006 to retain his seat representing Virginia, was seen as a can't-miss candidate with potential presidential aspirations.

Then came "macaca."

Allen uttered the word, an obscure epithet directed at Africans, to a worker from opponent Jim Webb's campaign who was taping an Allen rally. Allen claimed he was unfamiliar with the word's connotations.

Once the clip was spread on YouTube, however, it gave credence to the persistent questions about Allen's background and solidified Webb as a legitimate candidate.

Three months later, Webb was elected to the Senate.

For Saban's campaign, however, negative news tied to Arpaio rarely seems to stick and seems to resonate with voters even less.

The Sheriff's Office has seen claims of civil-rights violations from Mexican-Americans mushroom into lawsuits from the ACLU.

His conflicts with politicians and law-enforcement agencies about immigration enforcement played out publicly in the past year.

Although other politicians might cringe at accusations and shy away from the public disputes, Arpaio welcomes them. His supporters see the lawsuits as the work of liberal lawyers and the spats with politicians and police agencies as the fallout that comes with the sheriff standing up for law and order.

Saban may run short of time and votes before Arpaio trips up - or trips up enough to make his supporters think twice at the polls.

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