Arizona has long been an interesting place to write about politics; we should know, most of our best read pieces have been chronicling the ups, downs and sometimes utter insanity of the politics of this state. Considering how important our state has been on the national political scene, we have had relatively few high quality bloggers who cover that beat.
That relatively light number recently decreased by one as the highly popular Seeing Red AZ blog went dark earlier this month. As per their website they said they were stepping away from frequent posting, but since they have not posted once since July 8th, considering it infrequent would likely be a stretch. It looks like they’re down for good.
And what does that mean? For many readers, it means that their favorite website is down. Having started all the way back at the dawn of the social media era in 2007, it began purely focused on local politics. With the insider knowledge of a precinct committeeman/state party committeeman, it had the sort of insight that you will never get by reading the Republic or even the Capitol Times.
As time went on, it expanded its scope to a more national perspective; namely, coming to Trump’s defense and sharing negative stories about national Democrats. It didn’t forget its roots necessarily, but if we’re being honest, the national stories typically get more clicks. But the catch 22 with that strategy is that while readers can find those stories in myriad other places; hyper-local stories are tougher to find.
Local political blogging was an advantage that the Republicans still held over Democrats in a shifting state. Seeing Red had plenty of articles, and the website Republican Briefs has long been a fantastic source of insider baseball in County and State GOP circles. Local Democrats simply don’t have anything of that scope and scale; they have instead focused their efforts on publications like the Copper Courier: part of a national Democrat initiative to create “news source”s around the country that look like legitimate unbiased news sources but are actually purposely designed to elevate Democrats and hurt Republicans.
While most of us here aren’t as hard-right as the author(s) of Seeing Red, they clearly met a need for hyper-local political blogging. We could use more of that type of website, and their presence will be missed by many. And for those who will be missing Seeing Red AZ, feel free to subscribe to us to get your fix of Arizona political news!