In the past few years, Arizona has been in the national spotlight for all the wrong reasons. The Grand Canyon State first came under scrutiny when it passed a heavily criticized law in 2011, allowing police to request immigration documents of anyone they suspected to have entered the country illegally. Earlier this year, another controversial bill was crafted by Arizona legislature, calling for protection of religious storeowners right to deny service to gay and lesbian customers.

These laws were protested as legal excuses to discriminate, motivated by a deeply racist and homophobic society. Yet, although Arizona has been traditionally conservative, findings suggest that these laws may be an attempt to resist the state's impending progression from red to blue. 

Due to an ever-growing Latino population, as well as an increase of independent voters, pollsters believe that the state will become majority Democratic will the next few presidential cycles.

Jim Haynes, president and CEO of the Behavior Research Center in Phoenix, weighed in during the Society of American Business Editors and Writers' spring conference.

"It's just all the population dynamics point to sooner or later -- and I'm going to say later, which is to say maybe a couple of presidential election cycles from now - before Arizona becomes a blue state," said Haynes, as quoted in an article at Latina Lista.

Haynes points out that, although the shift is "inevitable", it's happening at a slow pace due to a lack of people coming out to vote come election day.

"If more Latinos aren't voting, if independents keep abdicating, then it's hard to see Arizona going blue any time soon," he said.

In particular, the Independents, who have surpassed Republicans as Arizona's largest voting bloc, have failed to show up at the polls, particularly during primaries.

"They leave them to the true believers on the Republican side and the Democrat side," he said. "What you get is more hardening of the arteries, more gridlock, more 'I'm not going to deal with the clowns on that side of the aisle.'"

In terms of the Latino population, most tend to side with Democrats, if only because the Republican Party has been so historically hostile toward supporting that demographic. Just last year, House Republican Speaker John Boehner vowed to continue blocking attempts at immigration reform, claiming "he has no intention of angering conservative voters and jeopardizing the House Republican majority in 2014 in the interest of courting Hispanic voters on behalf of a 2016 Republican presidential nominee who does not yet exist."

"They're not doing a thing to reach out to them," Haynes said of Republicans. "We know that in terms of basic values, including family values, that there are a lot of areas of logical connectivity between some of the Republican points of view and Latino attitudes." He called the Republicans dismissal of Latinos as one of the "one of the most disgusting political spectacles" he has seen.