US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris in Aston, Pennsylvania, on October 23, 2024 and US President Donald Trump in Tucson, Arizona on October 19, 2020.
Charly Triballeau | Mandel Ngan | AFP | Getty Photos
President-elect Donald Trump has received Arizona, NBC Information tasks, placing its 11 electoral votes in his column after he narrowly misplaced the state to President Joe Biden in 2020.
Trump’s projected victory over Vice President Kamala Harris comes after years of a shifting political panorama within the Solar Belt state, following Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton by 4 factors in 2016.
Since then, the as soon as firmly GOP-controlled state has put into workplace a Democratic governor, two Democratic senators and different statewide elected officers. A quick-growing Latino inhabitants and a revolt in opposition to Trump amongst some old-line Republicans put the once-red state into battleground territory. And Biden’s 2020 win in Arizona was simply the second time in 28 years that Arizona’s electoral votes went to the Democratic presidential nominee.
Nonetheless, lots of these Democratic victories have been by the slimmest of margins. Arizona was the second-closest state within the nation within the 2020 presidential race, with Biden beating Trump by simply 0.3 proportion factors (10,457 votes).
The state then turned an epicenter of Trump’s post-election unfold of unfounded conspiracy theories in regards to the election being stolen from him, with state Republicans eagerly embracing the claims — and a few of these Republicans failing statewide within the 2022 midterm elections.
But within the 2024 presidential race, polling over the previous a number of months had given Trump a slight edge in opposition to Harris in Arizona, although usually nonetheless inside the margin of error. However whereas Trump’s marketing campaign, for essentially the most half, was largely outspent and out-organized in Arizona by the Harris marketing campaign, Republicans did see a voter registration surge heading into the presidential election 12 months.
And the state was a very good match for the 2 points on the heart of Trump’s marketing campaign: the economic system and immigration.
This summer time, Arizona noticed a number of the highest gasoline costs within the nation, and each Harris and Trump made visits to the Arizona-Mexico border throughout visits to the state. Nonetheless, Arizona was among the many battlegrounds Trump visited least, being geographically separated from a lot of the remainder of the battlefield states.
