District 6 Debate • Rep. Sam Crump addresses District 6 voters at a recent candidate forum as (from left) Republicans Carl Seel and Tony Bouie and Democrat Jack Doody look on. Crump said he is trying to stay out of the conflict between Seel and Bouie and is working to get reelected “on my record.”

The Republican primary contest in a north-Phoenix district House race is a small-scale manifestation of a larger struggle within the Republican Party.
Factions with differing views on what it means to be a Republican are grappling over control of the Grand Old Party in many districts statewide – but the mêlée is particularly evident in District 6, which includes north Phoenix and Anthem.
The importance of this year’s GOP primary is evidenced by the endorsements that have been given to both Tony Bouie and Carl Seel, each of whom hope to replace Doug Clark, who is not running for reelection.
Bouie has racked up an endorsement from U.S. Rep. John Shadegg, as well as from Clark and Sen. Pamela Gorman, the district’s state senator. Seel, meanwhile, has been endorsed by the Maricopa County Republican Party, which very rarely takes sides in races pitting Republican vs. Republican.
And it’s not hyperbolic to say that the race is one of the battles among the blocs within the party that will determine its future, said Republican political consultant Stan Barnes.
“I’m trying to remain optimistic, but I’m finding it hard to find a silver lining in a fight that is detrimental to the end goal,” said Barnes, who also is a former Republican legislator from Mesa.
The District 6 House race, Barnes said, is a shining example of the civil war raging within the party. The power struggle, he said, has its roots in the long-simmering conservative-vs.-moderate clashes of the past, but it has been compounded by schisms over immigration policy and the notion of “party purity.”
In what is seen by the larger political community as a Democratic year, with control of the state House and Senate in play, Barnes said it is counterproductive for Republicans to abandon the “Big Tent” philosophy espoused by the national Republican Party in the past and instead recruit and endorse only those candidates who support the entirety of the party’s platform.
That has led to the county party throwing its weight behind Seel, whom Barnes termed a “less-than-thoroughbred” candidate, given his poor showing in a 2004 bid for the Arizona Corporation Commission and a fourth-out-of-four finish two years ago for the same House seat he is now seeking.
“The Republican Party, unfortunately, is helping this phenomenon by infighting at a level heretofore unseen in recent politics, and to its own detriment,” Barnes said.
The significance of the north-Phoenix race, in which Rep. Sam Crump also is running for re-election, has sparked a bitter contest between Bouie and Seel and their supporters, especially in the narrow confines of the state’s political blogoshpere, where the vitriol has resulted in personal attacks against each candidate.
Seel, the assistant sergeant-at-arms for the Arizona Republican Party, is anything but bashful when it comes to explaining why Bouie isn’t really a Republican and why the county Republican Party opted to intervene in the race.
“Bouie is ostensibly a Democrat,” he said.
Why≠ Because Bouie’s beliefs “are inconsistent with the platforms of the Republican Party,” Seel said. Those deviations, he said, are primarily embodied by Bouie’s opposition to Proposition 104, the Arizona Civil Rights Initiative, and what Seel called Bouie’s allegiance to the “open-borders crowd” and his opposition to the state’s employer sanctions law.
“He has positions that are clearly aligned with the Democratic platform, not the Republican platform,” Seel said.
And that’s no surprise, he continued, considering Bouie was a lifelong Democrat who switched his registration only five days before he decided to run for the House of Representatives.
Bouie, though, contends that re-registration – which has been a focal point of Seel’s campaign to date – is being misrepresented and said he is anything but a Democrat in Republican clothing.
“The fact is, I’ve been a Republican half of my voting life,” he said.
From 1995 until 2003, Bouie said, he was registered as a Republican. Prior to that he was a Democrat – not unusual for a young black voter from New Orleans – but he said the moment that turned him on to Republican politics came on the day he received his first NFL paycheck as a rookie for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
The check was far less than he was expecting, so he spoke to the team’s accountant, who told him the missing money was taken by taxes.
“That’s when I became a Republican,” he said.
The switch back to Democrat in 2003 coincided with his return to Arizona after his pro football days were over and was based on concerns about how a black man would be received by state Republicans.
Despite the Democratic affiliation, Bouie said he continued to vote for the Republican candidates whose values more matched his own. And, he said, “Once I decided to become active (in politics), I needed to decide which party best matched my values and beliefs, and that’s the Republican Party.”
Concerns about Bouie’s history were a primary reason the county Republicans took the unusual step of endorsing Seel and Crump in the primary, said Maricopa County Republican Committee Chairman Tom Husband. The unanimous vote earlier this month also demonstrates the frustration Republican activists are feeling after the Legislature approved budgets the last two years that many have said don’t represent conservative ideals, despite Republicans holding majorities in both legislative chambers.
“They’re tired of having situations where we have Republicans who are basically left-leaning, open-borders guys, and they wanted to stop it at the beginning, (in) the elections,” Husband said. “If you have folks who are in your party but don’t embrace your principles, that’s a problem.”
Those principles, Husband said, include commitments to lowering taxes, reducing regulation, supporting the Bill of Rights and enforcing the rule of law. Bouie, he said, is an unknown commodity, while Crump and Seel are “proven Republicans.” Supporting them is of the utmost importance because of narrow Republican margins in the Legislature and the tendency of some GOP lawmakers to abandon their support of Republican ideals, he said.
“The last thing you need is to go ahead and elect another Democrat with a Republican name,” Husband said.
That Bouie is more blue than red is easy to deduce just by looking at who is supporting his campaign, Seel said. A fundraiser was thrown for him by fast-food magnate Jason LeVecke, who is a member of a business group that is challenging the sanctions law in federal court and supporting a ballot measure this year that would relax the sanctions law for businesses.
“At that point, it becomes abundantly clear…that his chief supporters want anything but (secure borders),” Seel said.
But Bouie said the idea that he supports “open borders” is patently false.
“It’s a complete lie,” he said. “It’s a blatant and open lie. I’m for securing the
borders.”
He also said he supports the employer sanctions law and wants to see it remain unchanged, even if some of his campaign donors do not.
Bouie’s support for affirmative-action programs, Seel said, is another major deviation from the GOP platform, as the party was founded on the issue of abolishing slavery and treating everyone equally. Government programs that give deference to someone because of race or sex, which would be banned by Proposition 104, run contrary to that, he said.
“He’s in favor of affirmative action – so much so that he is part of a business association that champions government contracts based on ethnicity,” Seel said.
Bouie said he opposes the ballot measure not because his business may be eligible for government contracts under the programs, but because there are still disadvantaged groups of people that need the help.
“If you think about it, it was only 40-some years ago…there was open and blatant discrimination,” he said. “You can’t tell me that, within one generation, everything’s hunky-dory. There will be a time when it should be revisited, but it’s way too soon.”
Endorsements from a number of conservative politicians and organizations, such as the Greater Phoenix Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Business, seem to contradicting the claims that Bouie isn’t really a Republican.
Shadegg’s endorsement was probably the biggest for Bouie’s campaign: Shadegg has a long record as a fiscal and social conservative in Congress and is held in high esteem by both the Republican establishment and the grassroots activists in Arizona. For many people, his stamp of approval will no doubt carry weight.
But it was that endorsement that spurred the Maricopa County Republican Party to jump into the race, Husband said. Shadegg selected Bouie over the “good Republicans” in the race, he said, which angered county GOP leaders.
“He’s just so unproven,” Husband said of Bouie. “There were two other really proved Republicans in the race at that time…and it was, like, what’s going on here≠”
The endorsement from the county party, he said, was intended to rebut Shadegg’s endorsement by drawing a bright line around the two candidates who would hold fast to the Republican platform.
Ensuring that elected officials stick to the party line on the core beliefs is essential, Husband said, in order for the party to be strong.
“What do you have if you don’t have principles≠” he said. “What kind of a party are you if you don’t have principles≠
“To me, it’s not complicated. You have some principles – you either adhere to them or you don’t. If you’re just going to be one-half of a Republican or one-tenth of a Republican, then what are you≠”
But it’s that my-way-or-the-highway attitude that is damaging the party by driving active Republicans and voters away, Barnes said.
“Converting people to Republicanism is what we should be about,” he said. “(Fighting among Republicans) leads to losing elections eventually.”
It’s been 20 years since Barnes was elected to the state Senate. “It was so much fun,” he said, “because we had 16 guys who agreed on pretty much everything, so we spent those years doing great Republican things (like) cutting taxes and reducing regulation.”
Looking back, that was the high point for the GOP in Arizona’s recent past, he said. Since then, it’s been increasingly harder for Republicans to work together effectively because of the skirmishes within the party.
The combination of the current party leadership’s attitude toward inclusion, the immigration debate and uniting behind John McCain, who is reviled by many in party leadership, has brought the entire situation to a head, Barnes said.
But he’s hopeful that it will result in a Republican future that is more like the past he so fondly recalls.
“I think this is the philosophical Waterloo for the philosopher-kings of the party,” he said.≠