Sun City Dot
| 🌵 | |
| Era | The Seventies |
|---|---|
| Age | 64-69 |
| Home | Sun City, AZ |
| Demographic | Sunbelt retiree, white, activist conservative |
| Lean | Strong Republican |
| Race | white |
A retired woman who moved from Illinois to Sun City, Arizona, and joined the conservative movement built around Barry Goldwater's Republican Party. She is not devout, but she is strongly ideological, and her group shows the direction the party was heading.
Who they stand for
Del Webb opened Sun City in 1960 as a retirement community for Midwesterners. Its retirees shaped their politics through Phoenix's newspapers, Goldwater's 1964 campaign, and the John Birch Society, becoming anti-communist, opposed to taxes, and hostile to the Eastern establishment of the Republican Party. Dot represents these movement conservatives of the Sunbelt, older and wealthier than the Southern voters moving to the Republican Party in the same years, organised through mailing lists, newsletters and precinct meetings rather than through a church.
This group felt betrayed by Republican decisions during the 1970s. Nixon's 1971 announcement that he would visit China led movement leaders to withdraw support and back John Ashbrook against him in the 1972 primaries. Ford's détente with the Soviet Union and his choice of Rockefeller as vice president led Reagan to challenge him in the 1976 primaries. Carter's Panama Canal treaties of 1977 and 1978 became the movement's biggest cause and built its direct-mail fundraising lists. The decade ended with two results the group wanted, Proposition 13 in California and the Kemp-Roth tax cut bill. Muncie Merle's conservatism is mainly about costs and household finances, while Dot's is ideological, and she treats politics as a cause to fight for.
Playing to them
Dot supports a president who names communism as the enemy and acts against it. She opposes détente, foreign aid, and any treaty with the Soviet Union or with Panama, and she supports a tax cut at home. She wants a president to confront the United Nations and to reverse the legacy of the Warren Court. She rewards a president who attacks the moderates in his own party. She does not forgive a president who opens relations with China or the Soviet Union, who chooses a moderate such as Rockefeller as his running mate, who sends federal money into the schools, or who raises taxes. She remembers such decisions for a long time. Her support is difficult to win, because her main issues are foreign policy and taxes, and a president cannot move on either issue without real political consequences elsewhere.
The hawkish foreign policy she demands loses Sheboygan Walt, who opposes foreign entanglements, and it also loses Berkeley Bruce and Upper West Side Ruth. Right-to-work laws and the tax cut she wants lose Hamtramck Stan, Coalfield Roy and Farmer-Labor Lars. Main Line Margaret is her opposite within the Republican Party, and any decision that pleases Dot loses Margaret.
Where they live
The five states where Sun City Dot makes up the largest share of the electorate in the seventies:
- Nevada
- Arizona
- Alaska
- Idaho
- Florida