>Federal law allows a state to exempt itself from observing daylight saving time, upon action by the state legislature, but does not allow the permanent observance of DST.
Maybe? Yes? I'm not opposed to the idea of more, narrower time zones, though I think that in practice anything less than one-hour differences would be more complicated than it's worth.
Chicago has the opposite problem, where it's dark at 4:30pm in the winter.
At the expense of standing at the school bus stop in complete darkness for most mornings of the school year.
13 years of rising hours before dawn and walking and waiting in darkness is enough.
I would suggest that the government of any state or nation not be allowed to ever say what [civil] time it is, and require that they take technical timekeeping information--for TAI, UTC, UT1, and the like--from non-political scientific bodies.
I don't really remember waiting for the bus in the dark until I was in high school, when they started earlier and due to the need to use the same bus for later runs to elementary schools, we arrived at school 30 minutes before class started. I'm thinking my elementary school started at 8:30 or 9:00am? But I can't really remember.
In the case of Arizona, an early sunset actually makes sense because that means you get to enjoy the evenings outdoors at 30-ish ˚C (around 90 ˚F) instead of the >40˚C (>100˚F) you would have if the sun was still up.
https://www.ncsl.org/research/transportation/daylight-saving...