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Mark Kelly removed his sport coat and leveled with a crowd of Democrats gathered at an Indigenous-owned art collaborative in downtown Phoenix on a sweltering afternoon, days before early voting opened.
In 2020, Joe Biden had won the state by just more than 10,000 votes – his narrowest margin of victory – “way less than 1%,” the Arizona senator stressed for emphasis.
“This entire election could come down to Arizona,” he said. “I am not overstating this: it could come down to your friends, your neighbors, your community, your tribal members.”
As the clock ticked down to yet another exceedingly close presidential contest, Kelly urged everyone in the room to redouble their efforts – to knock on one more door, attend one more phone bank, register one more voter. This, he said, was how Democrats prevail in once ruby red Arizona.
A former astronaut who flipped and defended his Senate seat in back-to-back statewide races, Kelly added wryly: “It’s not rocket science. If it was, I could help.”
The senator’s call to action underlined a message both parties have been stressing for months, and especially in the final weeks before election day, on 5 November: even if Republicans hold the advantage on paper, Arizona could tip in either direction.
Arizona is one of seven swing states that will probably determine who wins what White House in November. While Donald Trump has a narrow edge over Kamala Harris in the state, the Cook Political Report, the nonpartisan election handicapper, has rated the presidential race a “toss up”.
“Arizona is not a blue state,” said Samara Klar, a professor of political science at the University of Arizona. “A Republican candidate should be cleaning up in Arizona. So the question is – why isn’t Trump doing a little better here?”
The Trump era has seen a remarkable winning streak for Arizona Democrats. They claimed the state’s open Senate seat in the 2018 midterm cycle. Two years later, they won the state’s other open Senate seat and its 11 electoral college votes, when Biden became the first Democratic presidential nominee since Bill Clinton to win the state in 1996. (Before that it was Truman, in 1948.) In 2022, Democrats narrowly swept the top three statewide offices.
Their success in the birthplace of Barry Goldwater’s conservative movement is something of a political paradox. Republicans hold a solid advantage in voter registration, with about 35% of voters registering as Republican, 34% as unaffiliated and 29% as Democrats, according to data from the Arizona secretary of state. Arizona was hard hit by inflation and rising housing costs, while immigration is top of mind in the border state – both issues that favor Republicans.
Yet Ruben Gallego, a Democratic congressman, has maintained a stable lead over his opponent, Trump ally Kari Lake, in the US Senate contest to replace the Democrat turned independent Kyrsten Sinema. Two congressional races are seen as coin-flips. And Democrats could turn the state legislature, a long-sought prize after Republican dominance in the modern era.
Underling the sometimes-conflicting impulses of the purple state, Arizona voters are poised to approve a ballot initiative that would empower local and state officials to enforce immigration law, while choosing to enshrine abortion rights into the state’s constitution, months after a ban that would have outlawed the procedure from the moment of conception.
Klar, the political scientist, says long-term demographic changes – rapid urbanization around Phoenix, an economic boom that’s brought an influx of tech jobs and college-educated transplants, and the rising political clout of a relatively young Latino electorate – have made the once Republican stronghold more competitive over time. Even if Trump prevails in Arizona, there is a growing sense that Trumpism will have cost his party.
Trump’s rise electrified a segment of Arizona’s conservative base that has long had an appetite for his brand of anti-immigrant populism. But he also shattered old GOP alliances – disparaging the venerated Arizona senator, John McCain, even after his 2018 death from brain cancer, and feuding with the state’s then governor, Doug Ducey, over his refusal to overturn Trump’s 2020 defeat in the state.
That tension has exploded in the party primaries, where Republican voters keep nominating candidates in Trump’s image – far-right extremists like Lake who parrot his election denialism. But these Republicans have struggled to broaden their appeal to the state’s moderate and independent voters.
“Arizonans view themselves as free-spirited, nonpartisan, independent – that kind of Goldwater-McCain thing,” Klar said, adding that voters here like “centrist, moderate candidates”. In the Trump years, it has been Democrats, not Republicans, reaching for McCain’s “maverick” mantle.
Among those disillusioned by their party’s turn are Lynn and Roger Seeley, self-described “McCain Republicans” who recently attended a Gallego event in a suburb east of Phoenix last month.
“The Arizona Republican party is not the same Republican party,” said Lynn Seeley, who plans to vote for Gallego and Harris in November. “It just doesn’t represent me any more.”
Yolanda Bejarano, the chair of the Arizona Democratic party, said Democrats have steadily chipped away at Republicans’ dominance in the state by building a coalition that, she predicts, will achieve their perennial dream of winning control of the state legislature.
“I’m confident that we’re going to see a bluer Arizona come November,” she said.
With voting under way, there is an edge of violence. The final weeks before election day saw a man arrested for planning an “act of mass casualty” and shooting at a Democratic office on multiple occasions, while a mailbox with ballots inside was lit on fire and threats were made against Republicans visiting the state.
Arizonans get the pitch
Across the sprawling Phoenix region, one of the fastest-growing in America, rival Trump and Harris campaign signs dot xeriscaped yards – a mark of Arizona’s true battleground status.
In the final months, a who’s who of presidential candidates and high-profile surrogates have blanketed the state. Both Harris and Trump and their running mates have made multiple swings through the state in the contest’s final weeks.
With the state on a razor’s edge, the search for votes has reached new heights – and descended to new depths. Kelly, the US senator, piloted his own plane to visit rural parts of the state, while Gallego hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon as part of his outreach to Native voters.
Harris is courting traditionally Republican Mormon voters who believe Trump’s conduct and rhetoric are at odds with the church’s values. She has racked up a collection of endorsements from some high-profile members of the church, including Jeff Flake, the conservative Arizona senator who was driven from office over his criticism of Trump and recently served as Biden’s ambassador to Turkey.
Trump, meanwhile, has sought to peel away support from Native voters, who have tended to favor Democrats in Arizona elections.
“We’ve had historic Native vote turnout for the last two years, for the last four years, and the Native vote has been literally the margin in some of these past races,” Stephen Roe Lewis, governor of the Gila River Indian Community, said.
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When asked about the outreach to Native voters, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, said at a rally in Peoria this month that many of these voters haven’t ever voted Republican, but issues like border security and unaffordability hit Indigenous nations hard, too.
Republicans have also made inroads with Latinos, who make up about one-quarter of the state’s electorate and were a critical part of Biden’s winning coalition in 2020.
But since then, one in three voters who switched their party affiliation from Democrat to Republican were Hispanic, according to an Arizona Republic analysis of the state’s voter registration data. Only 40% of Arizona’s Hispanic voters are currently registered Democrats, compared with 47% four years ago.
Lea Marquez Peterson, a Republican and member of the Arizona Corporation Commission, has been a part of that effort. Through the Hispanic Leadership Pac, which she launched to help elect more conservative Latino politicians to office, Marquez Peterson has been hosting cafecitos with voters across southern Arizona.
They keep telling her the same thing: Arizonans are fed up with the high cost of housing and food.
“You hear a lot about inflation numbers dropping and that things are easing, but I think among the community, among my own family, we still see the high price of grocery store items and, as a business person, certainly the high cost of steel and lumber,” she said. “I don’t think we’re feeling any change yet.”
Harris trails Trump but Republicans see warning signs
Underling the sometimes-conflicting impulses of the purple state, it appears likely that Arizonans will approve the measure to enshrine abortion rights into the state constitution, overturning the current 15-week ban. But Arizona are also predicted to vote for an anti-immigration ballot measure that would empower local and state officials to arrest and deport border-crossers.
Republicans believe Harris is especially vulnerable on immigration in Arizona, a border state that has grappled with the impact of record migration.
On a campaign swing in late September, Harris paced a scrubby stretch of border wall in an attempt to confront what Republicans believe is her biggest political vulnerability: immigration. At an event after the visit, in the border town of Douglas, she was introduced by a mother who lost her son to fentanyl and a Republican who touted her record of taking on transnational criminal gangs as the attorney general of California. When Harris spoke, she pledged to further restrict asylum and blamed Trump for derailing a bipartisan border deal earlier this year.
“I reject the false choice that suggests we must choose either between securing our border and creating a system that is orderly, safe and humane,” Harris said. “We can and we must do both.”
The border visit was aimed at winning the moderate-leaning Republicans who could defect from their party but rank immigration as a top consideration. It will only become clear next week whether Harris has managed to persuade them.
Meanwhile, Democrats here hope a ballot initiative to protect abortion rights will help drive out the very voters who have powered their wins in this desert battleground– young people, suburban women and independents.
Under pressure, and amid much drama, the Republican-controlled legislature voted earlier this year to repeal an 1864 ban on abortion that dated from before Arizona was even a state, opting for a prohibition on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
Polls suggest it is entirely possible that voters here will act to protect abortion rights and also elect Trump, the man who claims credit for overturning Roe.
The abortion rights initiative is “not a silver bullet for any one political party”, said Athena Salman, the director of Arizona campaigns for Reproductive Freedom for All and a former Democratic state legislator.
If Harris wins Arizona’s 11 electoral votes, it could renew questions about whether the Republican party is on the right course in Arizona. Voters there seem to be more comfortable with traditional Republicanism over Maga Republicanism, though Trump is the exception.
Trump seems to have some quality, some “rogue’s charm”, that those in his image can’t seem to replicate, said Kirk Adams, a Republican consultant for former Arizona House speaker who served as chief of staff to the last Republican governor, Doug Ducey.
The firebrand Lake, who lost her run for Arizona governor in 2022, differs little on policy from the former president, but can’t capture his appeal with voters.
“Sometimes I have actually questioned if winning is even their goal,” Adams said of candidates like Lake. “You can run a race and be successful, because now you become a social media star. You have lots of followers. You can monetize it. You don’t necessarily have to win elections to have a following.”
Trump’s team, at least, is taking nothing for granted.
“Here’s the scenario that I want you to consider, and I don’t mean to give you nightmare fuel here, but I’m going to do it,” Vance said at a recent rally in the state. “We wake up on November the sixth, and Kamala Harris is barely elected president of the United States by a 700-vote margin in the state of Arizona. Think about that. And ask yourself what you can do from now until then to make sure it doesn’t happen.”
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