An irrigation system waters alfalfa at the Saudi-owned Fondomonte farm in Butler Valley.Caitlin O'Hara/Washington Post/Getty

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The morning temperature is nearing 100 degrees Fahrenheit as Keith Seaman sweats beneath his bucket hat, walking door to door through the cookie-cutter blocks of a subdivision in Casa Grande, Arizona. Seaman, a Democrat who represents this Republican-leaning area in the state’s House of Representatives, is trying to retain a seat he won by a margin of around 600 votes just two years ago. He wants to know what issues matter most to his constituents, but most of them don’t answer the door, or they say they’re too busy to talk. Those that do answer tend to mention standard campaign issues like rising prices and education—which Seaman, a former public school teacher, is only too happy to discuss.

“We’ll do our best to get more public money into education,” he tells one man in the neighborhood, before turning to the constituent’s kindergarten-age daughter to pat her on the head. “What grade are you in?”

“Why are you at our house?” the girl asks in return.

Seaman has knocked on thousands of doors as he seeks reelection this year. While his voters are fired up about everything from inflation to abortion, one issue doesn’t come up much on Seaman’s scorching tour through suburbia—even though it’s plainly visible in the parched cotton and alfalfa fields that surround the subdivision where he’s stumping for votes.

That issue is water. In Pinal County, which Seaman represents, water shortages mean that farmers no longer have access to the Colorado River, formerly the lifeblood of their cotton and alfalfa empires. The booming population of the area’s subdivisions face a water reckoning as well: The state has placed a moratorium on new housing development in parts of the county, as part of an effort to protect dwindling groundwater resources.

Over the past four years, Arizona has become a poster child for water scarcity in the United States. Between decades of unsustainable groundwater pumping and a once-in-a-millenium drought, fueled by climate change, water sources in every region of the state are under threat. As groundwater aquifers dry up near some of the most populous areas, officials have blocked thousands of new homes from being built in and around the booming Phoenix metropolitan area.

“They keep saying, ‘Well, water is nonpartisan.’ That’s not true anymore. It’s really not true.”

In more remote parts of the state, water-guzzling dairy farms have caused local residents’ wells to run dry. The drought on the Colorado River, long a lifeline for both agriculture and suburbia across the US West, has forced further water cuts to both farms and neighborhoods in the heart of the state.

Arizona voters know that they’re deciding the country’s future—the state is one of just a half-dozen likely to determine the next president—but it’s unclear if they know that they’re voting on an existential threat in their own backyards. The outcome of state legislative races in swing districts like Seaman’s will determine who controls the divided state legislature, where Democrats are promoting new water restrictions and Republicans are fighting to protect thirsty industries like real estate and agriculture, regardless of what that means for future water availability.

“Everybody’s running for reelection,” said Kathleen Ferris, who crafted some of the state’s landmark water legislation and now teaches water policy at Arizona State University. “Nobody wants to sit around the table and try to deal with these issues.”

For these lawmakers’ voters, topics like abortion, the economy, and public safety are drawing far more attention than the water in their taps, and it will be these issues that drive the most people to the polls. But for the state officials who win on election day, their most consequential legacy may well be what they decide to do about the future of water in Arizona.

“They keep saying, ‘Well, water is nonpartisan,’” Ferris added. “That’s not true anymore. It’s really not true.”

It’s not hard to see why hot-button issues like immigration and the cost of living are on the minds of Arizona voters: The state sits on the US-Mexico border and has experienced some of the highest rates of inflation in the country over the past few years. Meanwhile, its Republican-controlled state legislature has cut public education funding and allowed a 19th-century abortion ban to remain in effect after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. The state is at the center of almost every major political debate—“the........

© Mother Jones