President-elect Donald Trump has won Arizona and its 11 electoral votes, The Associated Press said, flipping yet another battleground state and adding to his Electoral College tally.
Trump’s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris is a reversion to Arizona’s traditionally conservative status: It has voted for a Democrat only twice since the 1940s, including in 2020, when Joe Biden eked out a win over Trump by just over 10,000 votes.
But this year, Democrats appeared to be fighting an uphill battle from the start in Arizona, a border state where voters expressed fury over the migrant crisis and deep economic concerns over the cost of housing and the high prices of everyday goods, like groceries and gasoline.
Republicans outnumber Democrats in the state, so Harris needed to persuade the significant number of Arizona independents and moderate Republicans to vote for her. And there were signs she might have been able to do so: Independents, especially white women in the Phoenix suburbs, had been drifting left, and Democrats hoped they would be motivated by protecting reproductive rights and denying Trump another term.
Instead, it was Trump who put together a winning coalition, keeping enough of the state’s Republicans in line while also securing the votes of enough independents. Polls had also long suggested he was cutting into the Latino vote, a fast-growing and crucial voting bloc in Arizona that Democrats had been relying on as part of their coalition.
Harris appeared to have the superior ground game in Arizona, with her campaign and allied groups, like unions, working efficiently to knock on doors and turn out voters. Trump’s operation, meanwhile, relied heavily on outside committees to do that work, an untested strategy for Republicans.
Still, conservative groups like Turning Point seemed well-prepared, knocking on doors throughout the summer and fall and urging lower-propensity conservative voters to return their ballots early — a shift from 2020, when Trump was more adamant in maligning early voting. Republicans were encouraged by the early vote numbers in Arizona this year, hoping they would be enough to forestall a late surge from Democrats.
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