If you want to hit all the candidates’ election-night parties in Congressional District 1, you’d better start driving now — or better yet, fly.
It would take a Tucsonan between 10 and 11 hours to drive from Jonathan Paton’s party in a Marana pizzeria, to Patrick Gatti’s home in Show Low, to Gaither Martin’s barbecue at his home in Eagar, to Wenona Benally Baldenegro’s get-together in Window Rock and finish up at Ann Kirkpatrick’s party in a Flagstaff microbrewery.
Approximate driving distance, according to Google Maps: 555 miles. And of course, you'd have to leave before the first party starts and arrive in Flagstaff as the staff sweeps up.
Congressional District 1 contains a huge swath of eastern and northern Arizona, occupying almost half the state.
It reaches from Cochise County’s northern border, across far northwestern reaches of the Tucson area in Pima County, through much of Pinal County, and takes in all of eastern Arizona, across the Apache and Navajo reservations to the Utah border, as well as northern Arizona almost to Kingman and Colorado City.
The candidates hail from much of this broad geography, although no candidate lives in Pinal County, which has the largest number of registered voters of any of the district’s 11 counties. (See more on the breakdown of registered voters in this Pueblo Politics item.)
The primary-election party circuit would even go 30 miles further, had Sedona resident Doug Wade not decided to suspend his campaign for the Republican nomination earlier this month.
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