TUCSON — Representative Gabrielle Giffords was distressed when the glass front door of her district office here was shattered by a kick or a pellet gun last March, an act of vandalism that took place hours after she joined Democrats in passing President Obama’s health care bill. “Things have really gotten spun up,” she told a television interviewer the next day.But tensions have long run high in the Eighth Congressional District of Arizona, a classic swing district that shares a 114-mile border with Mexico. Protesters chained themselves to the desks of Ms. Giffords’s Republican predecessor, Jim Kolbe, 12 years ago. And over the past year, Ms. Giffords struggled in a brutal re-election campaign during which her opponent appeared in a Web advertisement holding an assault weapon. The district has become a caldron of divisions over government spending, immigration, health care and Barack Obama.
Today, the Eighth District stands apart as one of the most emotionally and politically polarized in the nation.
The rampage on Saturday that left six dead and Ms. Giffords gravely wounded may prove to be an isolated act of violence by a mentally disturbed man. The suspect attended at least one of Ms. Giffords’s town meetings before the event Saturday.
Still, the shootings came after a disconcerting run of episodes in this district of mountains and desert, raising temperatures here in a way that some that some of Ms. Giffords’s friends argue fed an atmosphere that might encourage violence.
Several of them pointed back to the smashed door of her district headquarters at 1661 North Swan Street last March as a turning point; a time when a cloud of unease settled over Ms. Giffords and her staff.
She and aides began expressing worry about what they saw as an escalation of threats after a year of brutal town hall meetings over health care. They began to take precautions. “When we did a swing through the district, we began telling the police what we are doing: We let them know where we were going to be,” said Rodd McLeod, her campaign manager.
And Ms. Giffords made no secret at that time of saying she owned a handgun.
“She was extremely concerned about it,” said Thomas Warne, a friend and fund-raiser. “She was concerned about various threats that the office had received: they were general threats on the office itself, on her life.”
There have been no arrests related to the attack on her district office, said Sgt. Diana Lopez of the Tucson Police Department. It came after months in which Ms. Giffords, like other Democrats, found herself being battered at loud town hall meetings on health care. At one of her public meetings on health care, a man with a gun showed up. “There was a sense, even in ’09, that there was a real anger in the district,” Mr. McLeod said.
And in an interview with MSNBC the day after the attack, Ms. Giffords said: “We’ve had hundreds and hundreds of protesters over the last several months. Our office corner has become a place where the Tea Party movement congregates and the rhetoric is incredibly heated, not just the calls but the e-mails, the slurs.”
Last summer, Ms. Giffords found herself challenged by Jesse Kelly, a Republican candidate with Tea Party backing, who assailed Ms. Giffords on health care and immigration. He held a “targeting victory” fund-raiser in which he invited contributors to shoot an M-16 with him. This was playing out against a backdrop of a souring national economy and rising unhappiness with Democrats everywhere.
Mr. Kelly, who won the nomination after defeating a moderate Republican, offered tough-worded attacks on the establishment and Ms. Giffords. “These people who think they are better than us, they look down on us every single day and tell us what kind of health care to buy,” he said at a rally in October. “And if you dare to stand up to the government they call us a mob. We’re about to show them what a mob looks like.”
Despite all the vitriol, advisers to Ms. Giffords concluded in a post-election review of the race that one of the main reasons she won was likely a steady series of positive biographical advertisements she ran over the summer; for the most part she avoided attacking her opponent. “People want their representatives to work together in a bipartisan way to get things done,” she said at one event.
Mr. Kelly received no financial support from the National Republican Congressional Committee. But outside groups focused on the race and invested more than $450,000 in television commercials against Ms. Giffords. The Republican primary did not take place until Aug. 24, giving her several months to command the airwaves in Tucson before her opponent was known.
The $3.4 million that Ms. Giffords raised was more than any other Congressional candidate in Arizona. In the heat of the campaign last fall, Republican officials expressed exasperation at the strength of her candidacy, often referring to Ms. Giffords as one of the smartest and strongest Democratic incumbents in the country.
The race — one of the most dramatic in the country — was so close it took three days to call it.
Ms. Giffords won a third term, but with just 49 percent of the vote, compared with 55 percent last time.
Representative Raúl Grijalva, a Democrat from the neighboring Seventh District, said he was taken aback by the level of animosity in her district.
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