The Organizing Institute for Democracy is an outgrowth of the groundbreaking work initiated in 2011 by Citizens for a Better Arizona to recall and remove one of the most anti-immigrant and extreme politicians in the country — Senate President Russell Pearce.
In 2010, Pearce authored one of the most draconian anti-immigrant bills in the country, SB 1070, designed to provide law enforcement the ability to harass, stop and deport all those who looked “reasonably suspicious”—primarily Latinos and immigrants.
In an unprecedented move, a small bipartisan group of citizens launched a movement to recall Pearce. This citizens’ sparked movement gathered enough signatures to recall Pearce, forced the governor to call a special recall election, and then spearheaded the field campaign which resulted in a double-digit loss for Pearce—the first of his career. When Pearce attempted to reclaim his senate seat nine months later in the Republican primary, Citizens for A Better Arizona rallied to defeat Pearce again by double-digits. Since Pearce’s election defeats in 2011 and 2012, there has not been one single piece of anti-immigrant legislation that has been passed and signed into law.
Building off the success of the Pearce recall, Citizens for A Better Arizona launched the “Joe’s Gotta Go” campaign in 2012 to defeat the infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Arpaio’s worksite raids, racial profiling of Latinos and immigrants, and abuse of power needed to be stopped. Although the anti-Arpaio vote fell just short of 50 percent, the campaign resulted in a record-setting collection of vote-by-mail ballots and the largest paid Latino-focused canvassing operation in the state.
In 2013, Citizens for a Better Arizona launched another recall, Respect Arizona, against Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
Although the effort failed to gather enough signatures, the campaign resulted in over 25,000 newly registered voters, primarily Latinos. And during the final week of the recall, a U.S. Federal Judge found Arpaio guilty of racially profiling Latinos and assigned an outside monitor to oversee Arpaio’s compliance with the court’s final decision.
The work of the Organizing Institute for Democracy continues to be inspired and influenced by the approach to politics exemplified by Citizens for a Better Arizona—where ordinary people came together and stopped the assault on immigrants and their families.
