Rebekah L. Sanders

The Republic | azcentral.com

U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar%2C R-Ariz.%2C keeps his family home in the 1st District while he runs for the 4th.

Arizona House Speaker Andy Tobin lives in the 4th District while he campaigns for the 1st.

Gosar rented an apartment to deflect criticism. Tobin%2C who previously attacked Gosar for his move%2C didn%27t bother.

PRESCOTT – Two Republican congressional candidates don't own homes in the districts they seek to represent.

U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., keeps his family home in the 1st District while he runs for the 4th.

Arizona House Speaker Andy Tobin lives in the 4th District while he campaigns for the 1st.

Gosar rented an apartment to deflect criticism. Tobin, who previously attacked Gosar for his move, didn't bother.

Their decisions to run despite questions over their residency highlight that for some politicians pursuing political opportunity means running away from home, even when they know some voters will disapprove.

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Though no law requires U.S. House candidates to live in the districts they seek, living elsewhere can open their campaigns up to attack. When it rains in the district, voters often want their representative to get doused, too.

But in sprawling Arizona districts like the 1st and 4th, where driving the length can take a day, living outside the boundaries may not mean as much. Gosar and Tobin say more important is their understanding of rural Arizona's needs.

And the political risk can pay off.

For Gosar, the district switch helped him win one of the safest conservative seats in the state. For Tobin, he'll seek a toss-up seat defended by one of the most vulnerable Democrats in the country, while avoiding a difficult fight with a conservative incumbent like Gosar.

For a quarter-century, Gosar lived with his family full time in a 2,500-square-foot custom cabin tucked into the quiet woods of Flagstaff.

Today he spends two out of three nights alone, on average, when not in Washington, D.C., aides say, in an austere apartment next to a Jack in the Box on a busy street.

Gosar rented the Prescott one-bedroom in a red-trim clapboard house for about $600 a month when he was running in 2012. He listed the address on his voter registration halfway through his campaign.

The smallest apartment in the triplex, it is furnished with mismatched chairs, two aging lamps, a desk and a computer, visible on a recent visit through the glass pane of the front door. Empty paint buckets and cardboard boxes clutter the front room.

A "Gosar for Congress" sign leans against a window.

Gosar declined a request for an interview to discuss his living arrangements.

In a written statement, he said: "The (Arizona) Republic might find it odd that I don't live a lavish lifestyle. While my apartment might be a bit spartan for their tastes, it is just fine by me. I'm less focused on what kind of interior decorating happens at home than what my job is as the representative of the 4th district."

A woman in the neighboring unit says she rarely sees the congressman. A mail carrier can't remember the last time he placed letters in Gosar's box.

Some locals aren't happy Gosar moved to run for the district.

At El Charro, the old Mexican cantina in town, Prescott retirees Jerry and Cindy Curry said members of Congress should live permanently in the districts they serve.

"If the guy's getting paid for this district, he needs to live here," Jerry, 68, said.

"(The apartment), that's basically for show," added Cindy, 66.

But veterans at Prescott's American Legion Rider Post 6 said Gosar represents them well no matter where he calls his permanent home.

"His actions speak for him, not his address," Vietnam veteran and legion leader Dan Tillmans, 72, said, noting he's seen Gosar at town halls and working with the senior center.

Prescott Valley resident Gregory Cook, 67, a retired utility worker, said the congressman's office answered three of his messages.

"I've sent e-mails to other (members of Congress), and I don't get a thing," Cook said. "He's responsive."

Gosar, a former dentist, was first elected to Congress in the 2010 "tea party" wave, defeating U.S. Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, a Democrat, in the 1st District. Rural Republicans, and some conservative Democrats, opposed Kirkpatrick for backing the president's sweeping health-care law.

If Gosar had stayed in that swing seat, he would have faced a serious challenge from a Democrat every two years. But redistricting offered a safer option: the 4th District, where a third of his constituents ended up after lines were redrawn.

Republicans had controlled the conservative stronghold nearly uninterrupted since 1967. Prescott, an area key to Gosar's first election, anchors the 4th District.

A victory would nearly guarantee future re-elections. When Gosar announced he would run there in 2012, the questions about residency began almost immediately.

In a 10-minute video at his campaign launch with Prescott eNews, he repeatedly ducked the question. He finally said his wife would open an antique shop and he would buy a second home in Prescott once his daughter graduated from high school.

He didn't follow through. Instead, Gosar now plans to keep the Flagstaff home to be close to the daughter, campaign spokeswoman Apryl Marie Fogel said, since she enrolled at Northern Arizona University nearly a year ago.

"When he said (he'd buy a house in Prescott), he had every intention of doing that," Fogel said. "I think the voters will understand the circumstances around his daughter going to college in Flagstaff, and other things have changed, which have led to him not buying a house."

"But his promise to (voters in the 4th District) was to be there, and he has fulfilled that promise" by renting the apartment and touring the district, she said.

Gosar is often on the road when not in Washington, making stops from the pine forests of Yavapai County to the dusty deserts in Yuma. The district takes at least six hours to drive end to end..

Gosar often jokes that he actually lives in his car.

Tobin was among Gosar's fiercest critics when the congressman switched districts during the 2012 race.

"You don't just move an hour-and-a-half away and say you've always lived there. People in Prescott understand that," Tobin told the state Capitol political-insider publication, Yellow Sheet Report, at the time.

The highest-ranking member of the Arizona House of Representatives, Tobin was interested in running for the seat. He ultimately chose not to take on a sitting congressman.

Instead, in a strong election year for Republicans, Tobin opted this season to cross boundary lines to the 1st District and go after one-time Democratic loser Kirkpatrick, even if he doesn't own a home.

Up the winding U.S. 89 from Gosar's apartment is Tobin's 3,200-square-foot residence.

The ranch house in the small town of Paulden is surrounded by horse properties. The San Francisco peaks of the 1st District rise in the distance. The boundary line is about a half-hour drive.

Tobin declined interview requests about his residency.

But at the start of his campaign last fall, he told The Republic that he wasn't worried about carpetbagging attacks. He lives so close to the line, Tobin said, "I can see District 1 from my backyard."

Tobin was more blunt when talking to the Yellow Sheet. "Yeah, I would be a carpetbagger," he said.

The district is larger than Gosar's,and a seven-hour drive end-to-end.

Former Tobin campaign manager Craig Handzlik provided a written statement.

"Andy is proud to have represented thousands of rural Arizonans in this district for the last five years as their state representative," Handzlik said. "Now he wants to take their voices to Washington to stand up for them against the increasingly out-of-touch politicians in Congress. Andy's record of fighting for rural Arizona is unmatched."

The same type ofpolitical climate that helped Gosar win the district in 2010 could benefit Tobin this year.

It's a midterm election when Republican turnout is expected to be high. First Tobin must beat two Republicans in the Aug. 26 primary, including rancher Gary Kiehne,whose spokesman, Chris Baker, promised that by the time the campaign is done, voters will knowTobin as a political opportunist and a hypocrite.

"He's out there criticizing Paul Gosar for the very thing two years later Andy Tobin is doing himself," Baker said. "It makes him look like an ambitious politician who is willing to do anything to gain power."

The most recent high-profile case of a politician losing amid residency-related attacks was Republican Sen. Richard Lugar, of Indiana, booted from his seat in 2012.

American politics expert Peri Arnold, who teaches at University of Notre Dame in Lugar's home state, said the longtime senator lost partially because he was viewed as a permanent fixture of Washington.

But when candidates live a few miles over district lines in the same state, it's harder to attack them, Arnold said.

"It's very difficult to ... convincingly make the case that by moving a few miles to be across a district line, a member will be a better representative," he said.

Politicians have survived carpetbagging attacks.

John McCain had recently moved to Arizona after retiring from the Navy in 1982 when he won a seat in Congress. Hillary Clinton sailed into the Senate in 2000 despite having never previously lived in New York.

And while Kirkpatrick's permanent home is in her district, she spends some nights at a second place outside it. She owns a condo in downtown Phoenix, where a Republican operative reported seeing her walking her dog.

"Ann's home is in Flagstaff, but her family's condo is a helpful stop-over point whenever her schedule includes flights out of Sky Harbor or long drives from northern to southern Arizona," campaign spokesman D.B. Mitchell said in a written statement.

Tobin's reversal on carpetbagging could be used against him on the campaign trail, said American politics expert Peri Arnold, who teaches at the University of Notre Dame.

"What he's done is given his opponent words to use against him in television ads," Arnold said. "The story here is ... he's perfectly willing to look a fool to run in the district he wants to run in."

Any criticism can be detrimental, said American University professor Jennifer Lawless, which is probably why Gosar went as far as renting an apartment to establish residency.

"When you have a limited amount of time to campaign, you don't want to talk about carpetbagging," she said.