This article appears as part of a special PSOnline e-Symposium organized by guest editors J. Quin Monson and David B. Magleby of Brigham Young University. Printed abstracts appear in the July 2003 issue of PS: Political Science & Politics and complete articles and appendixes are available as part of PSOnline at www.apsanet.org/PS/. The 2002 Arizona First Congressional District Race Frederic I. Solop and James I. Bowie, Northern Arizona University 1 Both Republicans and Democrats held great hope to take the open House seat in the newly- created Arizona First Congressional District. The primary election featured fifteen candidates running in three primary elections: Democratic, Republican, and Libertarian. Three newcomers to politics emerged from the primary. The general election was an uphill battle between two major party candidates who moved into the newly created election district to run for the open House seat. In the end, Rick Renzi, the Republican candidate, beat George Cordova, the Democratic candidate, by just 6,000 votes (3.6 percent), despite outspending Cordova three to one. Edwin Porr, the Libertarian candidate, received a surprising 5.1 percent of the vote even though he raised little money and was virtually absent from the public stage during the entire election. The story of the 2002 Arizona First Congressional District election is driven largely by primary election dynamics. Inside the First Congressional District Arizona’s First Congressional District was newly created by an Independent Redistricting Commission following the 2000 Census. 2 The district sprawls over more than 58,000 square miles, including most of the northern and eastern portions of the state. The district is larger than the states of Illinois and Pennsylvania. In fact, it is the largest congressional district in the nation that does not encompass an entire state. It includes six complete counties and a significant portion of two others. By design, it is an all-rural district. 3 The largest city within the district is Flagstaff, with a population of almost 54,000, according to the revised 2000 Census. The district encompasses a wide variety of interests, including a large service sector, mining and ranching interests, a large university and several robust community colleges, a sizeable science community, and a large number of retirees. Almost a third of the district’s population (34 percent) is Native American or Hispanic American. 4 The district was designed to be competitive, and both parties placed great hope in capturing this new House seat. 5 While Democrats have an eight-point registration advantage within the district, 6 Republicans typically turn out a larger number of voters, and conservative Democrats do not hesitate to vote for Republican candidates. According to an analysis by Cook Political Report, voters within the district supported George Bush over Al Gore in the 2000 election by approximately 11,000 votes. 7 On the other hand, district voters supported Bill Clinton over Bob Dole in 1996, 47 percent to 38 percent. Running in a large rural district, candidates had to pay attention to multiple media markets. The Phoenix market, while outside the congressional district, bleeds into the district, often through cable TV. Phoenix media was expensive for the candidates and time was hard to come by as the 1